Societal Resilience: From Theory to Policy and Practice

Societal resilience is defined in this essay as the capacity of communities to flexibly contain major disruptions and to rapidly bounce back and forward following the unavoidable decline of their core functionalities. The article examines the ways to translate the theory to a clear and determined policy and hence implementation in the field, before the disruption occurs and henceforth. While the theory is necessarily universal in nature, its practical ramifications are presented within the Israeli context. It is suggested that the Israeli scene, being challenged for decades by protracted terror, as a man made recurrent hazard, can be perceived as a national laboratory for practicing societal resilience.