Abstract
This paper examines individual and organizational resilience processes among members of The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, (RAWA), an Afghan women’s underground resistance organization located in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since 1977, RAWA has used humanitarian and political means to educate, serve, and motivate women and to advocate for peace, secular democracy, and human rights. The authors analyzed 110 qualitative interviews, collected in Pakistan and Afghanistan between December 2001 and July 2002. An iterative coding framework identified processes of resilience and domain specific stressors (risks) and resources (protective factors) at the individual and organizational level. Further analysis found that these process codes clustered by function into components of an operational model of individual and organizational resilience. While individual and organizational resilience are described by the same model, these two levels of resilience were found to operate in synergy as well as in conflict. Although this paper explores a unique setting, we argue that a better understanding of resilience processes in general will come from increased attention to context.
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A number of literatures in community psychology (e.g., Zimmerman 2000; Maton 2008) differentiate between the level of the organization and the community. Within the context of war-torn Afghanistan, where many natural communities have been disrupted (Brodsky 2003), RAWA is an organization that also creates community for its members, supporters, and the people it serves. For this reason, we refer to it herein as an organizational community as well as, where appropriate, the organization or the community.
The line between member, supporter, student, family member, and other can often be blurred. For this reason some women who were very involved with RAWA, and whose actions were resilient, but who were technically not members, are included in the data set.
All names used are pseudonyms.
Many quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity. Further, to save on space and for ease of reading, unless needed to combine two thoughts, ellipses were not added when words were removed or sentences combined. None of these edits, however, resulted in change to the content or meaning of the quotes.
RAWA uses the term join to refer only to members who join the organization. We use it here also to refer to individuals who “join” the community as supporters, students, family members, etc.
Perhaps the best known example of this is Sima Samar, a former RAWA member, who remained active in Afghan humanitarian efforts and is now the head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
It would be incorrect to believe that secrets and even lies are somehow absent from the rest of our research. While the secrecy of RAWA placed this fact front and center, this knowledge may lead to a better understanding than if we mistakenly assume that our participants are telling us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
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Acknowledgments
Data collection was supported by grants from Open Society Institute Network Women’s Program, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), and the UMBC Gender and Women’s Studies Program and Department of Psychology. The authors wish to thank Melissa Book & David Chen for their contributions to this paper. A draft of this paper was presented at the 12th Biennial SCRA Conference in Montclair, NJ, in June 2009. The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of any of the named organizations, including RAWA.
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Brodsky, A.E., Welsh, E., Carrillo, A. et al. Between Synergy and Conflict: Balancing the Processes of Organizational and Individual Resilience in an Afghan Women’s Community. Am J Community Psychol 47, 217–235 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9399-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9399-5