Reconciliation in Zimbabwe: Building Resilient Communities or Unsafe Conditions?

Reconciliation and resilience are intimately connected concepts. They emphasise the agency involved in influencing and enhancing bottom-up social change, and the self-help mechanisms that persist despite the disturbances following intrastate conflicts. This article uses a qualitative methodology to examine the absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities of communities as they seek to deal with intrastate conflict. It also assesses the extent to which the government-led reconciliation approach used in Zimbabwe since 2008 has facilitated community resilience. This research suggests that local communities have adapted to the conflict in order to go about their daily lives, but that neither community actions, nor the government-sponsored reconciliation process, have led to the transformation of the status quo that caused the intrastate conflict in the first place. Absorptive and adaptive capacities should not be seen as ends in themselves. Instead, they should provide the basis for facilitating sustainable peace and social change.