Rising from the Ashes, Once Again?

Abstract

Resilience is nowadays one of the building blocks of the paradigm that guides our efforts to manage disaster situations. Taken from the engineering sector, where it refers to the ability of some materials to be subject to an external stress agent, cope with the strain and react to it by absorbing it or by changing with a minimum disruption, in other fields it remains a rather mysterious concept. Erwig and Simoncini have recently highlighted that resilience poses a set of challenges for (international) law, including that law must understand what resilience to disasters requires and under which circumstances it must be limited.1 A sad occasion to test the drawbacks of the narrative of resilience was recently offered by the explosion that devastated Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, on 4 August 2020. Along with the cedar, the symbol of eternal life, Lebanon is indeed known and celebrated for its capacity to recover quickly from the difficulties faced. The resilience of the Lebanese is often compared to that of the mythical Phoenician Bird otherwise known as a Phoenix, which never dies and instead emerges from the ashes to survive another day. According to the legend, Beirut is an urban phoenix as it was rebuilt from the ashes seven times. In the aftermath of the Beirut explosion, however, many Lebanese scholars and activists fervently rejected resilience as a concept that is contributing to perpetuating their condition in a context where radical change is instead desperately needed; they all claimed that resilience has already costed too much to their country.2