Understanding the VE challenge takes you through a process that examines factors of vulnerability and resilience to VE and plots them across a Venn diagram.

  • Vulnerability factors to VE describe the individual, social and structural or institutional dynamics that increase risks of individuals engaging in VE.

  • Resilience factors to VE describe the individual, social and structural or institutional dynamics that increase an individual’s or society’s resilience to VE.

Why use it? This helps to build a more complete picture of what you should be monitoring around your project intervention to identify the impact it is having on both strengthening resilience and addressing vulnerabilities.

This tool is most useful at the design stage, but can also be used during implementation. It can be used together with:

1.2 Identifying factors of vulnerability and resilience

1.3 Guiding questions for vulnerability and resilience

1.4 Prioritising of factors


VE involves a complex interplay of psychological, social, political, economic and ideological factors, as well as cultural and identity issues. These complexities require us to consider the totality of the individual, their social relationships and the organisations they belong to as well as their relationship with the state they belong to, and the international environment.

Consider the factors in this figure to uncovering the interplay between the individual and VE dynamics to understand a person’s individual response to the context and how these are influenced by different social factors and structural drivers.


Figure 5: Understanding the nexus between individual, social and structural VE factors