Resilience or tolerance? Contextualising youth resilience under economic and political adversity

Abstract

Drawing on the lives of youth living in precarious conditions, we analyse in this paperthe ways in which the youth in Zimbabwe respond to varied shocks that they face intheir everyday lives. We note that for many years the political and economic challengeshave eroded the capacities of many Zimbabweans, but the impact on the youth hasbeen discernibly high. Yet the youth have remarkably survived the tenacity of political,social and economic challenges. Many people have described this response asresilience. As such we seek to test this aspect of bouncing back in view of social,economic and political developments in Zimbabwe since 2000 and determine if this canbe an aspect of resilience or its just sheer luck. We want to know why this phenomenonis uniquely Zimbabwean? Why did the Zimbabwean youth fail to get to the tippingpoint? What can be learnt from this? We use meta-analysis and direct interviews of thekey informant and individual youth to test our hypotheses that Zimbabwean youthhave an outstanding way of responding to shocks and are able to re-bounce backwithout necessarily being recruited into forces of violence, crime or anarchy.  Key words: Zimbabwe, Resilience, Youth, Crisis, Violence, CrimeLloyd Pswarayi, Researcher, Research and Advocacy Unit, Email: lmpswarayi@gmail.com