A critique of ‘communicative resilience’ as a framework for media development

Critical approaches to resilience in the field of development

The literature on the politicisation of development language reveals that many of the buzzwords and trending terms used to promote global development priorities tend to strip grass-roots social justice imperatives of their political significance (Cornwall, 2007). Cornwall’s critique, for example, demonstrates how development language becomes emptied of its radical potential and how terms such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ have been co-opted by the development industry to fit technocratic and managerial agendas rather than advance transformative politics (Cornwall, 2007, 2008). This sanitised, depoliticised discourse around welfare and social justice has been widely documented, particularly in relation to women’s rights and gender equality (Kabeer, 2002; Murray, 2007; Sharma, 2008). Resilience discourses are not immune to this phenomenon (Reid, 2012).

The resilience discourse has been extensively critiqued for its depoliticising tendencies, particularly in the context of development policy. Far from offering a radical departure from entrenched inequalities, resilience talk often serves to reinforce existing power structures by placing the burden of adaptation on the very communities that are marginalised by these systems (Anderson, 2015; Derickson, 2016; Reid, 2012: 69). As Hutcheon and Lashewicz (2014) argue, resilience as a concept is deeply problematic because it individualises responsibility for survival and adaptation, rendering invisible the broader structural forces that shape vulnerabilities in the first place. This framing is particularly concerning in the context of neoliberal governance, where the emphasis on personal resilience masks the role of the state and global capital in generating the very crises to which communities are expected to respond (Reid, 2012). Reid (2012) formulates such a critique by pointing out that resilience is not merely a neutral or technical concept, but a politically debased one. It serves the interests of neoliberal governance by creating subjects who are conditioned to cope with and manage crises rather than challenge the conditions that produce them. Resilience, in Reid’s analysis, normalises the expectation that individuals and communities must perpetually adapt to adverse conditions, thus ensuring the maintenance of the status quo. This critique is grounded in an understanding of resilience as a mechanism that perpetuates neoliberal ideals of self-management and individual responsibility.

In a similar vein, Derickson (2016) critiques resilience for its conservatism, arguing that it fails to offer an inspiring or transformative political vision. Instead, it fetishises survival in its most basic form, offering no pathway towards collective liberation or systemic change. By analysing the application of this framework in the field of urban governance, she demonstrates that ‘resilience’ implies an acceptance of the status quo. The semantic of resilience calls for a logic of ‘self-reliance’ (Duffield, 2008; Reid, 2012), which expects marginalised communities to ‘withstand’ rather than ‘transform’ the conditions of their exploitation. As an alternative, Derickson proposes a shift from resilience to ‘resourcefulness’, a framework that emphasises self-determination and collective capacity-building as a more empowering approach to addressing socio-economic and environmental challenges.

Ben Anderson’s work (2015) complements these critiques by exploring how resilience has been appropriated as a neoliberal strategy that transcends individual policy domains. Anderson notes that resilience operates as an ideological framework that permeates governance, urban planning, and even security policies, where it often serves to entrench neoliberal logics. For Anderson, resilience is not a unified concept but rather a fractured, multiple field that often obscures the underlying political and economic structures that drive instability and crisis. Taken together, these critiques highlight the need to challenge the normative assumptions underpinning resilience discourse and show how they may stigmatise communities viewed as vulnerable, while shifting the focus away from systemic reform and onto individual adaptation.

In spite of its disputed conceptual relevance, resilience has been recurrently applied in the international development sector to address uncertainties ranging from food security to conflicts and disasters (Longstaff and Yang, 2008). In the mid-2010s, development policies around resilience were invoked in response to public concerns about unregulated media markets affected by a climate of political polarisation.

The field of media development began to tackle global uncertainties about the role of media in contexts of political instability. These involved security imperatives around the regulation and prevention of hate speech, disinformation or ‘extremist’ content deemed inciteful to violence. This critique of international development invites us to consider whether these concerns are typically framed through a Global North perspective, where security priorities often take precedence over locally-driven empowerment. Within the field of international development, these debates shape expectations around what makes independent media and civil society more ‘resilient’. Drawing on earlier critiques of resilience, it is crucial to examine whether this discourse seeks to re-legitimise the status quo of media landscapes, particularly in a climate of increased polarisation and public distrust. In response to European donors pushing towards increased securitisation of the digital sphere, development practitioners occasionally promoted a model of ‘communicative resilience’. Beyond international donors’ priorities, this iteration of the concept however raises important questions about the issue of public trust and the challenged credibility of the media. As I will argue, these attempts at conceptualising communicative resilience should involve a structural critique of the media and its political economy in a given context.

Communicative resilience in communication and psychology

In physics, the resilience of a material is the ability to adapt, absorbing energy by adjusting to a different shape and releasing that energy by returning to its original shape. On that basis, the concept of resilience should evoke flexibility, inventiveness and resourcefulness. Research in social psychology applies a similar definition to describe the role that communication and social interactions play in community resilience (Afifi, 2018; Bean, 2018). In recent communication and resilience studies, ‘communicative resilience’ has gained traction as a framework for understanding how communities, families and individuals navigate crises through communication processes (Dorrance Hall, 2018; Houston, 2018). Buzzanell (2010) defines communicative resilience as the dynamic process by which individuals and groups use communication to construct meaning and respond to adversities. It is not merely about overcoming challenges but also reimagining one’s identity and social roles through storytelling, reframing narratives and fostering connections with others. According to Houston et al. (2015), communication becomes central to resilience as it facilitates connections across various systems, supports adaptation, and enables communities to ‘bounce forward’ after disruptions by establishing new realities (Houston et al., 2015).

In this framework, resilience is not about a simple return to a pre-crisis state, but an adaptive process in which individuals and groups reassess their environments and social structures, engaging in a continuous cycle of adaptation. Houston (2018) emphasises that community resilience involves not just individual strength but collective engagement through the dynamic interplay of communication at various levels—individual, family, organisational and governmental. Communicative processes in resilience, therefore, highlight both top-down communication (such as governmental emergency responses) and bottom-up efforts (such as neighbourhood interactions), as communities engage in storytelling and strategic communication to navigate crises.

In extending the discussion of communicative resilience, it is fruitful to explore the related concept of self-narration within communication theory. Theories of self-narration often stress the role of storytelling in overcoming trauma and oppression, and this aligns with the broader frameworks of resilience. Borg (2019) highlights how self-narration serves as an essential tool in navigating personal and political struggles, especially for subaltern communities who use narrative agency to reclaim their identities in the face of oppressive regimes. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Borg (2019) argues that self-narration allows individuals to construct meaning out of their experiences, reframing past traumas as stories of survival, agency and self-determination.

This process is mirrored in the broader literature on communicative resilience, where storytelling becomes a critical means of adapting to crises (Buzzanell, 2010; Dorrance Hall, 2018; Houston, 2018). The scholarship on peripheral communication indeed suggests that self-narration is an act of communicative resistance. For example, Matar’s work (2019) shows how Palestinian experiences of self-narration and self-representation in film, documentary, photography and digital media help subaltern voices reclaim authorship. Such practices of storytelling ultimately challenge narratives imposed by colonial or occupying forces. In these cases, self-narration and communicative resilience converge, as both involve reasserting agency through the telling of one’s story in the face of structural inequalities and historical trauma. Both concepts recognise that resilience is not simply about surviving adversity but about transforming it into something new. Buzzanell (2010) argues that resilience through communication often involves imagining new possibilities and constructing new normalcies, a process that closely aligns with the transformative power of self-narration. Matar’s examination of Palestinian narratives reinforces this idea by showing how oppressed groups use storytelling not only to survive but to reclaim space and power in political struggles (Matar, 2019).

Yet this perspective on communicative resilience appears to be at odds with the broader framework of resilience, as it pertains to the fields of development and disaster management. As mentioned earlier, the critique of resilience suggests that this concept has increasingly become a ‘dispositif of government’, employed by state and development actors to justify enduring hardship without addressing the systemic issues that produce vulnerability in the first place (Derickson, 2016). The term often shifts responsibility from the state and institutions to individuals and communities, urging them to ‘bounce back’ from crises while leaving the root causes of their precarity unchallenged.

By contrast, psychological and communication research on ‘communicative resilience’, such as that by Buzzanell (2010), Houston and Buzzanell (2018) and Houston et al. (2015), offers a more nuanced understanding of resilience as a dynamic and collective process. This body of research highlights the importance of communication in fostering adaptive strategies (Cottle, 2024b), focussing on how individuals and communities use narrative, dialogue and social support to rebuild their identities and environments after disruptions (Kirmayer et al., 2009). Empirical studies on communicative resilience resonate strongly with experiences of ‘self-narration’, which involves individuals reconstructing their personal and collective stories in the aftermath of trauma or conflict. Both frameworks—communicative resilience and self-narration—emphasise the agency of those affected by crises, suggesting that resilience is more than just a return to normalcy; it is a form of ‘communicative resistance’ to adversity.

This perspective challenges the policy-oriented discourse on resilience. While policy frameworks often co-opt the language of resilience to promote adaptive behaviours without addressing systemic inequities, psychological research defines resilience as an emergent, bottom-up process, wherein individuals reclaim control over their narratives. This brings us to a crucial research question: Which organic communicative processes are concealed by the terminology of resilience?

The conventional application of resilience in development, particularly in its top-down formulation, often obscures the spontaneous and relational aspects of resilience-building within communities. For instance, as Derickson (2016) notes, the development discourse frequently imposes a predefined notion of resilience onto communities, without engaging with how these communities organically communicate, organise and adapt to crises on their own terms. This imposed framework often prioritises external benchmarks of success—such as economic recovery or infrastructure stability—over the lived experiences and self-defined goals of the communities themselves. By doing so, the development agenda risks marginalising the very voices and processes that communicative resilience research seeks to foreground.

Furthermore, the question of how the development agenda of resilience affects these organic processes becomes critical. The institutionalisation of resilience as a development goal can inadvertently suppress grass-roots efforts that do not align with predefined frameworks of resilience. Development agencies may inadvertently disrupt local communicative processes by imposing external communication infrastructures, media frameworks, and strategic narratives that align with global development objectives rather than local needs and perspectives. These top-down interventions often reframe resilience as a technical challenge to be solved, rather than as a complex, culturally embedded process of storytelling, mutual support, and resistance to structural inequalities.

In this context, it becomes vital to reconsider how organic communicative processes contribute to resilience in ways that are not captured by policy discourse. Houston et al. (2015) indeed argue that communicative resilience is fundamentally about the relationships and dialogues that emerge in the wake of crises, which may be at odds with the institutionalised narratives of resilience promoted by development actors.

Thus, the critique of policy discourse on resilience lies in its tendency to mask or undermine the rich, organic processes of communicative resistance that exist within communities. By framing resilience as a measurable, technical outcome, the policy discourse risks reducing this notion to a passive condition of endurance. In contrast, rethinking communicative resilience as a social practice and a psychological process offers a more dynamic and transformative understanding. One is left to wonder how resilience can be reconceptualised to better align with the lived experiences of those it claims to help. This paper contributes to this reflection by assessing to what extent the development agenda of resilience affects the organic communicative processes that communities use to navigate crises. This involves evaluating how resilience is framed and operationalised in development contexts, while paying close attention to the communicative processes that foster genuine adaptation and resistance at the grass-roots level. By foregrounding these organic processes, we can begin to challenge the top-down imposition of resilience frameworks and develop a more inclusive, context-sensitive understanding of what it means to be resilient.

First empirical strand: Towards a critique of the security agenda of communicative resilience

The programme under study involved a range of media capacity-building and communication activities aimed at ‘strengthening’ communicative resilience within communities facing limited opportunities for political representation, public engagement and media expression. In this context, the notion of ‘resilience’ responds to security imperatives, revealing neo-colonial expectations of political stability in the MENA region.

In light of this case study, the first empirical strand provides us with some critical insight into the political agenda of ‘communication resilience’. It shows how this terminology is applied by international donors, revealing how it conditions the role of civil society in the realm of grass-root communication and independent journalism. This research strand draws from 12 in-depth interviews conducted with British Council staff, consultants and professionals involved in local media capacity initiatives. In addition to the interviews, the researcher documented panel discussions at relevant policy events and practitioners’ workshops. A regional experts’ workshop was also organised, bringing together academics from media studies, British Council representatives, civil society organisation (CSO) practitioners from Tunisia and Lebanon, and international donors supporting media capacity-building and resilience programmes. This comprehensive dataset offers rich insights into the intersection of media capacity and resilience within these specific socio-political contexts. Through this empirical strand, we aim to challenge the concept of communication resilience and the mechanisms through which it is operationalised by international donors.

The first empirical strand also demonstrates how the agenda of communicative resilience frames grass-roots audiences as inherently vulnerable to potentially harmful online content, such as extremism or misinformation. The challenge of public trust is thus problematised from the vantage point of the communities targeted by these programmes as beneficiaries. However, as highlighted by local civil society partners interviewed for this study, the marginalisation of these audiences reveals more systemic issues tied to the political economy of media in Tunisia and Lebanon. Ethnographic evidence complicates the assumption of vulnerability, pointing instead to the structural barriers that limit access to reliable, independent information. This raises a critical question regarding the terms of resilience: resilience to what?

To answer this question, this research strand identifies how the concept of collective and communicative resilience was questioned and redefined by the participants, cross-referencing this theme across in-depth interviews, panel discussions and field notes. Mentions of resilience are categorised within a unified coding framework to narrow the dataset and examine more precisely how this development frame is applied, challenged and negotiated in practice.

As I will argue, the framing of local communities as vulnerable often overlooks deeper issues of media ownership, state control and the disconnect between mainstream outlets and local realities—factors that are crucial to understanding the actual conditions of resilience. Through interviews, panel discussions and a regional experts’ workshop, this research strand explores how the concept of communicative resilience was appropriated to serve external priorities. Rather than empowering local media actors to address their communities’ needs, these initiatives frequently reflected concerns about European security and political stability in the MENA region (European Parliament, 2016: 2). This raises critical questions about whether such externally driven frameworks risk reinforcing existing power structures, rather than supporting bottom-up resilience through independent media.

Second empirical strand: Redefining communicative resilience

The second empirical strand of this study examines grass-roots communication efforts, particularly as observed during the pivotal moments of Tunisia’s 2019 election and Lebanon’s 2019–2020 uprisings. This strand draws on a broader set of 35 in-depth interviews with activists, CSO practitioners, journalists, media professionals, representatives of youth organisations and human rights advocates.

The majority of these interviews were conducted over four periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Tunisia and Lebanon. The study employed a snowball sampling method to include participants with expertise in media, journalism, human rights advocacy and youth activism. These interviews provide critical insights into how local media professionals, independent consultants and civil society actors have attempted to move beyond strategic communication imperatives to foster genuine grass-roots resilience. In contrast to the first empirical strand, this section adopts a more interpretative lens, examining how participants experience community resilience both within and outside the scope of donor-funded development programmes. It focuses on a wider range of social practices described by participants as communicative tools—such as self-narration, artistic expression and cultural production—which may contribute to overcoming trauma, building trust and coping with the uncertainty of prolonged or recurrent crises.

This additional sample of interviews reveals examples of grass-roots communication efforts that offer a more organic application of communicative resilience. In Tunisia, fieldwork took place amid a political scandal involving the leading candidate, Nabil Karoui, who was sent to prison during the campaign on charges of money laundering and tax evasion (Foroudi, 2019a). Karoui was known as a prominent media mogul and founder of the influential TV channel, Nessma TV, who was long involved in national politics and had previously supported Nidaa Tunis, the secular coalition led by the former president, Baji Caid Essebsi. The charges brought against him in the middle of the presidential race threw into focus the systemic issues of corruption and clientelism between political elites and media outlets. This period coincided with the mobilisation of a young electorate disillusioned with the political establishment. The appeal of President Kais Saied’s campaign, particularly among younger voters, highlighted the emergence of communication strategies that contrasted sharply with traditional partisan media.

In Lebanon, the revolutionary uprisings of 2019 required a grass-root dismantling of the traditional networks through which sectarian segregation was engineered after the civil war. Independent, non-partisan journalism gained momentum thanks to news platforms like Daraj or Megaphone. Before the parliamentary elections of 2023, street protests also contributed to breaking through geographical sectarian divides thanks to the mobilisation of young protesters from Tripoli and Nabatiyeh – cities typically associated with the ruling sectarian parties.

This strand further explores the organic communication practices emerging from the grass roots, contrasting them with the top-down strategic communication agendas often imposed by international donors. The findings align with the conceptual framework proposed by scholars like Houston et al. (2015), Houston (2018) and Buzzanell (2010), who highlight the potential for a decentralised media to foster more inclusive public engagement. In this context, resilience is viewed not as a top-down construct but as an organic process shaped by the communication practices of local communities.

Overall, this study underlines the importance of understanding resilience as something that emerges from informal networks and community-driven media initiatives, particularly in contexts where mainstream outlets are seen as disconnected from the realities of local populations. This grass-roots driven approach provides an important counterpoint to the strategic communication frameworks imposed by external actors, suggesting a more authentic path towards community resilience.

First empirical section: Critique of top-down strategic communication practices

From a postcolonial perspective, the concept of resilience fails to address the underlying causes of the crises to which local communities are expected to adapt and ‘bounce back’ from. As one Lebanese media consultant put it, ‘The focus on resilience is really about making us adapt to the instability here, but they’re not fixing the causes of the problem, like corruption or economic hardship’. This sentiment resonates with Reid’s (2012) argument, which suggests that resilience often operates as a form of neoliberal governance, which demands that communities cope with prolonged or repeated crises without challenging the systemic issues that give rise to them.

Interviews with local consultants and civil society actors engaged in the programme under study indicated that the promotion of short-term online campaigns intended to target a relevant audience often revolved around problematic marketing logics. These strategic communication practices did not appropriately respond to the need for decentralised, community-owned media. A Tunisian media professional articulated this discontent, saying, ‘Strategic communication should be about empowering people, but here it’s mainly about controlling narratives that serve someone else’s agenda. The focus is on reducing extremism, but what about giving people the means to tell their own stories?’ Similarly, a civil society activist in Lebanon highlighted the mismatch between donor priorities and local realities: ‘The resilience projects we are part of are all framed around “countering extremism”, but what we actually need is economic empowerment and real media platforms that reflect the complexity of our society, especially the sectarian divide’. These insights demonstrate a clear disconnect between donor-driven security frameworks and spontaneous civil society initiatives intended to reclaim ownership over the media and public space.

The security lens driving resilience frameworks is also likely to reaffirm existing stereotypes about communities said to be ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk of extremism’. As such, it implicitly validates negative representations of the youths that dominate the national media sphere. A Tunisian civil society actor observed, ‘It’s not about preventing extremism – it’s about who controls the media and who has the resources to shape public opinion. The real challenge is political’. This highlights a fundamental oversight in resilience frameworks, which tend to overlook deeper systemic issues such as media ownership and political control. The findings resonate with broader critiques of the political economy of communication, suggesting that resilience frameworks should expand their focus beyond a narrow security lens to address the structural power dynamics that shape media environments. As one Lebanese media professional stated, “Most young people don’t rely on mainstream media anymore because they don’t feel represented. We’ve been building alternative platforms, but these are often ignored by donors.’

In contrast to the top-down strategies of international donors, grass-roots communication efforts are often rooted in local contexts, emphasising dialogue, trust-building and solidarity. These localised efforts stand in stark contrast to the strategic communication programmes that tend to prioritise external security concerns over the everyday realities of community life. The events of 2019 precisely illustrate the gap between the donor-led frameworks of resilience and the grass-roots experiences of local actors in Tunisia and Lebanon. In Tunisia, the success of Kais Saied’s campaign – however controversial – showed that the young electorate was receptive to offline, decentralised campaigning practices.

At the time, candidate Nabil Karoui, who was Saied’s opponent in the second round of the election, was also under investigation by the Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) for having allegedly benefitted from the exposure he gained from his own media outlet, Nessma TV. This introduced a national debate on mainstream media’s ability to hold political actors accountable and act as credible sources of information (Chaabane, 2019). In this context, the High Authority for Independent Audiovisual Communication (HAICA), which was in charge of monitoring media coverage of the campaign, reported that other official media outlets (including TV channels El Hiwar Ettounsi, Attessia TV, Zitouna TV, Hannibal TV and the radio channel Al Quran Al-Karim) had also transgressed the rules and regulations set to ensure media independence (Directinfo, 2019; Kapitalis, 2019).

A number of international observers insisted on the anti-establishment rhetoric of the two candidates, which they interpreted as the electorate’s decline in interest for partisan politics (Tidey, 2020). Many did not expect Saied to have such a wide reach amongst the Tunisian youth because he held conservative views on the topics of the death penalty, inheritance law and homosexuality. Yet, beyond the question of his ideological position, the result of the last election can also be interpreted as a vote in favour of a decentralised approach to political communication.

The 2019 victory of Kais Saied may be seen as a sign of the growing enthusiasm for informal and bottom-up campaigning practices, designed to facilitate the inclusion of youths in public debate (Foroudi, 2019b). Interviewees reported that young voters had been particularly receptive to Saied’s communication strategy, which contrasted with the ‘one-to-many’ conventional approach to political campaigning:

Having coffee at the local café is part of the Tunisian culture. It is the only leisure available to young people in Tunisian society. . . .As you know, usually, an election campaign requires a lot of money, but in the case of President Kais Saied. . .well, he almost did not spend anything. Because he invested time and kept meeting people in local cafés across the country. He spent four years visiting different cities and meeting with members of the youths.

In the days following the announcement of Saied’s election, supporters inspired by the unexpected outcome of the campaign reclaimed ownership of the public space, working collaboratively to refurbish and customise the streets that had been neglected or poorly maintained. In October 2019, the regional news platform Al-Monitor reported that ‘cleaning campaigns and painting initiatives organised via Facebook had been popping up around the country, since the run-off presidential election had elevated the outsider Kais Saied to Tunisia’s presidency’ (Foroudi, 2019b). The events suggest that, for many young Tunisians, legitimate forms of public and political engagement operate in the peripheries of the public sphere. To illustrate this phenomenon, a Tunisian journalist remarked, ‘We don’t need foreign campaigns telling us how to think. Real resilience comes from our own communities – from how we organise ourselves and communicate with each other’.

Resilience to what? Systemic issues in the political economy of the media in Tunisia and Lebanon

In both Tunisia and Lebanon, participants refer to the political economy of the national media as a determining factor to explain the climate of public distrust. By outlining systemic issues in the mainstream media, they insist on the need for structural reforms. Most important, they comment on the reasons behind the declining legitimacy of partisan media and public institutions. The disengagement of the younger audience is often attributed to outdated journalistic practices and political clientelism. These issues appear to be particularly frustrating in Tunisia, where the 2011 uprisings brought democratic constitutional reforms and raised hopes for structural change. As a civil society actor described it, ‘Even after the revolution, journalists are reluctant to challenge power. You can see it in how they cover elections – always favouring certain politicians who finance their networks’. This dynamic shows a persistent partisan bias and financial dependence of media outlets on political elites, which severely undermines editorial independence. In this context, younger audiences are described as misrepresented, stereotyped and often absent from the national news. As one media professional noted, ‘The media doesn’t speak for us. It’s always the same voices, the same people in power. We’ve moved on to other platforms because they ignore what really matters’.

In Lebanon, the media operates under similarly restrictive conditions, largely due to the fragmentation of the national media market, which has long reflected the country’s sectarian political divisions in the years leading up to the revolution. In the early stages of the Lebanese uprising, a young research participant expressed frustration at the public broadcaster’s failure to report on the initial wave of revolutionary protests, noting in particular its disconnect from the lived realities of the youth. Ethnographic observation at the time suggested that alternative channels such as the independent station MTV and the secular, pro-opposition outlet Al Jadeed had taken a more active role in covering the unfolding events.

You watch media for knowledge and information but also because you need to relate to something. . . .In the last couple of years there was a very strong disconnection between young people and the national media stations in Lebanon. . . .National shows are either politicised or irrelevant. Now people have started to watch TV again, just to catch up with recent events and the revolution. Before the revolution a lot of people had lost interest. Because it is not representative of the population, especially the youths. [Young media activist, Beirut, 2019]

By shifting their focus to the street and the emerging independent media sphere, Lebanon’s pro-revolutionary youth frame the traditionally sectarian fragmentation of national media as deeply detrimental to public deliberation and the cultivation of social capital:

You don’t really find any proper debate that is voiced on TV. In politics, no one wants a debate, everyone caters just to a very limited target audience, they are not trying to convince someone else’s. . . .Why would you confront others’ voices, when they might challenge your authority?

A key aspect of this media crisis is the economic pressure facing independent outlets, which struggle to compete with established, elite-controlled media houses. In Tunisia, efforts by media collective platforms such as Nawaat, Inkyfada or I Watch to promote independent journalism are systematically constrained by the economic and political dominance of legacy media, whose coverage often reinforces harmful narratives about marginalised neighbourhoods portrayed as breeding grounds for extremism. As one cultural organiser in Tunis recalled:

After the 2015 attack on Mohammed Khamis Avenue, I remember how problematic the national media coverage was. They portrayed the attacker as some kind of alien, completely avoiding the deeper, structural causes. But for us, the youth, we knew exactly what the problem was – it was precarity. There’s a minimum level of responsibility the media should have to reflect on the social roots of terrorism. But throughout that whole period, none of the mainstream outlets took the time to investigate the reasons why a young person would resort to such an act.

In Lebanon, the economic challenges are even more pronounced due to the country’s financial collapse. A media consultant said, ‘Foreign money keeps us alive, but we’re also tied to their agenda. We have to shape our stories to meet their expectations, not always what our communities need’. This highlights the tension between maintaining financial viability and preserving editorial independence in a highly polarised media environment.

As participants argued, resilience in the media sector cannot be achieved by reinforcing outdated structures. Real resilience requires addressing the ownership structures that perpetuate political clientelism and recognising the value of alternative media that provide a voice to marginalised communities. As one Lebanese participant concluded, ‘Resilience isn’t about protecting the old media – it’s about creating space for new voices, for real stories, the ones that matter to our people’.

Grass-roots communication and organic resilience in Tunisia and Lebanon

The second empirical strand of this study examines the organic experiences of resilience emerging from grass-roots communication efforts in Tunisia and Lebanon. In contrast with the resilience model advanced by international donors in the media development sector, these organic practices of self-expression demonstrate a different experience of communicative resilience, one that leverages social capital, resourcefulness and inventiveness.

Rather than relying on externally imposed strategic communication models, grass-roots initiatives have emerged organically, responding to local challenges with context-specific strategies. A Tunisian activist captured this sentiment thus: ‘Real resilience doesn’t come from external actors. It is cultivated within the community – through the ways we work together, through the networks we build to sustain ourselves’. This perspective highlights the extent to which resilience, when rooted in local realities, becomes an emancipatory force, challenging the top-down interventions typically associated with international development frameworks.

In Tunisia, a producer collaborating on a civil society initiative shared his insight on communicative resilience, which he associated with street-based art forms as alternative modes of expression:

As content manager for the project, I had the chance to spend a lot of time with young people from neighbourhoods that are rarely represented in the mainstream media. That’s when I realized how important the street is as an alternative space for communication. Street culture – whether through drawing, poetry, slam, music or graffiti – plays a vital role, not just because many young people from disenfranchised backgrounds don’t have the privilege to study formal arts like theatre or painting, but also because the arts are often socially frowned upon.

To define and conceptualise such an alternative approach to resilient communication, local consultants commissioned by their foreign offices also contributed to challenge donors’ expectations around resilience. In both Tunisia and Lebanon, these local stakeholders suggested that genuine experience of community resilience involved a particular communication skill set as well as a kind of street savviness. Tunisia’s local consultant indeed stated:

Communication happens on the field, and you need to improvise. I immersed myself in sensitive and dangerous neighbourhoods, where you usually need to know people and have your own network. But this is how I could create content that would be relevant to this audience. This is not like embedded journalism; it has to be envisioned like a mutually rewarding relationship and a social experience. This involves spending time with people, experimenting in a playful way and using humour to address sensitive topics.

Similarly, one of the local consultants in Lebanon emphasised the significance of a long-term and small-scale engagement involving interpersonal communication when developing community-owned initiatives around media and communication:

Lebanon is full of stereotypes, especially on the religious level. For example, there are Lebanese, who, until now, did not travel through the different regions of the country because of stereotypes. Once you start communicating you can break this ice, and once you break this ice, the community will be unified. These stereotypes can only be overcome through interpersonal communication but also with a critical awareness of the way they are originally framed in traditional media.

Such a bottom-up approach reflects the irrelevance of the usual framework of resilience commonly applied in media development. Further, it demonstrates a desire to rethink the role of arts, self-narration and interpersonal relationships in community resilience, beyond the scope of strategic communication.

In Lebanon, the uprisings of 2019 exemplified this grass-roots approach to communication, with youth-led movements and independent media challenging the country’s sectarian political structures. A media scholar and pro-revolutionary activist campaigning as an independent candidate in the 2022 parliamentary election stated:

Any long-term engagement allows for the function of trust-building, which creates a space for debate. For example, when we were doing our parliamentary elections as [a youth public engagement initiative] in Lebanon, the only place where we could find people to sit and engage and debate was in funerals. Everywhere else you cannot really debate, it was Facebook live and meeting people face-to-face at funerals. That’s where you found enough time to sit and discuss and hear opinions.

This example illustrates that meaningful experiences of communicative resilience and community trust rely on decentralised forms of engagement and the mobilisation of existing social capital.

In Tunisia, participants commented on the relative success of independent news platforms that benefitted from international funding to develop quality investigative journalism in the years following the 2011 revolution. Such platforms remained actively engaged in denouncing corruption on the eve of the controversial 2019 election. As one Tunisian media professional remarked, ‘Platforms like Nawaat show us a different kind of resilience – one that isn’t about simply adapting to crises, but about actively challenging the corruption and political clientelism that perpetuate them’. Other independent platforms like Meshkal also relayed the sentiment of Saied’s young electorate (Aliriza, 2019), commenting on public frustrations about the campaigning strategies of leading parties well represented in the mainstream media landscape. In doing so, they engaged with a more conservative demographic, whose views did not always reflect the progressive ideals of the 2011 revolution. Tunisia’s independent media sphere, in other words, worked towards challenging stereotypical media representations of the youths. Such attempts were made despite popular criticisms about its economic model and reliance on international funding.

Beyond independent journalism, further examples of genuinely grass-roots communicative resilience emerged within Tunisia’s independent art sector and alternative cultural scene. Notably, the archiving project of the Café Culturel Liberté, Murmures à Tunis, documented a wide range of live musical performances by diverse artists collaborating in the years following the 2011 uprisings, thereby preserving aspects of Tunisia’s cultural heritage often overlooked by mainstream national media and public institutions. In the field of local independent cinema, participants also recalled the powerful impact of Subutex, an award-winning documentary by Nasreddin Shili released in 2018 at the height of debates on the rise of terrorism. In contrast to most mainstream coverage of the crisis, the film portrayed the lives of two young gay men addicted to the drug Subutex, revealing the precarity and social taboos surrounding youth disenfranchisement.

Another key theme that emerges from the interviews is the importance of interpersonal communication, social capital and solidarity as a form of resilience. This perspective contrasts with a strategic and security-driven approach to communicative resilience as a standardised framework for media development. As a Tunisian activist pointed out, ‘Resilience for us is not about surviving in isolation – it’s about how we come together as a community, how we support each other, and how we resist the forces that seek to divide us’. This interpretation of the term invites us to rethink communicative resilience as an act of resistance and creative expression. It also gestures towards the ways in which grass-roots communication – particularly during the Lebanese uprisings – enabled a reappropriation of public space by unsettling long-held notions of sectarian division and fostering collective gatherings around a shared agenda in cities such as Tripoli and Nabatieh.

Such experiences of organic communicative resilience stand out from interviews collected during the 2019 Lebanese protests, when local independent news platforms reached a broader audience by reporting on grass-root mobilisations from a non-partisan angle. As one Lebanese journalist noted, ‘Megaphone wasn’t just a news outlet during the protests – it was a platform that allowed us to share our stories, organise, and build connections across communities’. By acting as community-owned media, these news platforms contributed to demystifying the idea of depoliticised, disengaged and vulnerable youths deprived of agency. They also demonstrated that journalism could overcome the crisis of legitimacy resulting from the sectarian fragmentation of the media market in the years following the civil war.

This sense of shared ownership over grass-roots media reveal that resilience when cultivated from within can serve as a powerful tool for challenging entrenched systems of power. By fostering a sense of solidarity and mutual support, these efforts offer a more authentic and sustainable form of resilience – one that is not constrained by the narrow priorities of international donors, but responsive to the lived realities of the people.