Resilience in the context of conflict-related sexual violence and beyond: a "sentient ecology" framework

In his research with Indigenous Evenki people living in Arctic Siberia, Anderson introduces the concept of ‘sentient ecology’, defined as ‘the mutual interrelation of person and place’. This interdisciplinary article starts from the basic premise that sentient ecology is relevant for research on resilience, and it aims to demonstrate this in two key ways. First, it uses sentient ecology as a novel framework for thinking about resilience, with a particular focus on conflict-related sexual violence (CSRV) – an area of scholarship that to date has given very little attention to the concept of resilience. The article locates resilience in the fluid and dynamic interactions between individuals and their social ecologies. What sentient ecology contributes in this regard is a different way of thinking about these interactions. In particular, it highlights some of the ways that female and male victims-/survivors of CRSV actively utilize and engage with the more-than-human living world around them in the process of rebuilding and moving on with their lives. Second, the article uses sentient ecology as a framework for thinking in new ‘sentient’ ways about social-ecological systems (SES) – and how the social and ecological parts of these systems communicate with each other. Taking this a step further, it argues that sentient ecology offers a potential basis for developing more posthumanist accounts of resilience as an extension of SES.