Guiding questions for vulnerability and resilience provides a framework of questions you can adapt to identify vulnerability and resilience at structural, institutional, social and individual levels.
Why use it? To stimulate ideas around what you need to be looking for to identify vulnerability and resilience to VE.
This tool is most useful at the design stage, but can also be used during implementation. It can be used together with:
1.1 Understanding the VE challenge
1.3 Guiding questions for vulnerability and resilience
1.4 Prioritisation of factors
1.5 Guiding questions for PVE actor mapping
Table 3: Guiding questions for vulnerability and resilience
Vulnerability factors
Structural/Institutional
Resilience factors
Structural/institutional
How do these underlying causes and factors of VE influence vulnerability or resilience of different groups (men, women, boys, girls, those who identify as other, different nationalities, ethnic, religious …)?
What are the other institutional/structural factors related (such as governance issues) to the broader context that interact with the VE factors listed above?
- What social factors exacerbate vulnerability?
- What tensions/conflicts exist between groups?
- Are specific groups stigmatised?
- Do specific groups feel a sense of injustice?
- How is armed violence perceived within communities?
- What are attitudes towards gender-based violence?
- What are attitudes towards values such as diversity?
- What are the social factors that support resilience?
- What are communities’ capacities for resolving conflicts?
- How strong are networks across social divides? How inclusive are social networks?
- How strong is the rejection of violence (including armed violence and gender-based violence)?
- How strong are pro-peace attitudes?
- Do people have skills and/or mechanisms for resolving conflict without violence?
How do these factors differ amongst different groups (men, women, boys, girls, sexual and gender minorities, different nationalities…)?
- What are the individual risk factors
- What psychological factors are important in VE
- How do broader issues around marginalisation, stigmatisation, etc. play out at an individual level?
- What individual factors are important in prevention?
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How do individual perceptions vary based on gender, social/economic and other identity factors?
What are the other individual factors related (such as governance issues) to the broader context that interact with the VE factors listed above?
Background: Neighbourhoods like Ettadhamen on the outskirts of Tunis are marked by poverty and high youth unemployment and are often stigmatised as ‘hotbeds’ of radicalism.
Structural/institutional vulnerability factors
- High unemployment of young graduates (VE groups use financial incentives to recruit)
- Lack of political representation of the suburbs
- Lack of public and cultural spaces
- Abuses by security forces
- Lack of transparency in policy-making
Structural/institutional resilience factors
- Adaptation to Arab spring – reforms happening despite being slow
- Burgeoning civil society and active youth role in this dynamic
Social vulnerability factors
- Stigmatisation of specific groups (e.g. based on gender)
- Exclusion of groups in decision-making processes (formal and informal)
- Intergenerational tensions
Social resilience factors
- Solidarity amongst community - source of strength
- Equal and inclusive gender relations (e.g. between men and women, different generations
Individual resilience factors
- Solidarity amongst community - source of strength
- Equal and inclusive gender relations (e.g. between men and women, different generations
Individual vulnerability factors
- Stigmatisation of specific groups
- Exclusion of groups in decision making processes
- Intergenerational tension