Shinya Konaka & Peter Little 
Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism 
Towards a Relational and Contextual Approach

What does resilience mean? This is a question frequently asked and one that this book challenges and turns on its head. This book interrogates the increasingly overused concept of resilience by examining its application to a series of case studies focused on pastoralists in Africa. Through anthropological approaches, the book prioritises the localisation of resilience in context and practice; how to promote ‘ thinking resilience » in place of the typical ‘ resilience thinking » approach. Anthropology has the power to raise the vantage point of people and places, make them speak, breath, and live. And this gives to resilience more grounded and quotidian framings: local, relational, political and ever evolving.The authors ask whether development assistance and government intervention enhance the resilience of African pastoralists, while discussing critical topics, such as political power, land privatization, gender, human-animal identities, local networks, farmer-pastoralist relations, and norms and values. The epilogue, in turn, highlights important theoretical and empirical connections between the different case studies and shows how they provide a much more nuanced, culturally and politically meaningful approach to resilience than its common definition of ‘ bounce back. » By approaching resilience from relational and contextual perspectives, the book showcases a counter-narrative to guide more effective humanitarian and development framing and shed light on new avenues of understanding and practicing resilience in this uncertain world.