What makes communities resilient in times of complexity and change?

Abstract This introduction to the Special Issue problematises the necessity to rethink governance through the lens of resilience and suggests a novel conceptualisation of resilience. Building the argument on complexity-thinking, this issue contends that in the context of change and complex life, challenges are most efficiently dealt with, at the source, ‘locally’, to make ‘the global’ more sustainable. Accordingly, the concept of resilience as self-governance is advanced in the introduction as an overriding framework to explore its constitutive elements—identity, ‘good life’, local coping strategies and support infrastructures—which, when mobilised, can turn community into ‘peoplehood’ in the face of adversity. This conceptualisation, we argue, explains what makes communities adapt and transform, and how they should be governed today. Central Eurasia, spanning from Belarus in the west, to Azerbaijan in the south and Tajikistan in the east, provides fertile grounds for exploring how resilience works in practice in times of complex change. By immersing into centuries-long traditions and philosophy, local experiences of survival, and visions for change, this introduction—along with the Special Issue—shows that governability at any level requires a substantive ‘local’ input to make ‘the global’ more enduring and resilient in a complex adaptive world.


Introduction
The last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have been widely characterised by a 'post'-prefix-for example, we live in a post-modern context, when liberal international order is evolving into post-liberalism, when post-colonialism and international development are challenged by post-development, and anthropocentrism is called into question by post-humanism. The 'post'-prefix typically draws on a cumulative knowledge system to deal with change and gaps in learning; but it is also a sign of ongoing transformation, to retrospectively rectify the insufficiencies of this knowledge system, while filling those gaps. Indeed, at the turn of the century a range of trends explicitly manifested themselves, leading to a clear understanding that the world is entering a new historical phase: the rise of the post-industrial economy and society, increasing levels of globalisation coupled with regionalisation and evolving notions of sovereignty, unprecedented interconnectedness and transnationalisation, emergence of a new world order and global challenges of a planetary scale. Reinforcing each other, these developments arguably signified the arrival of an 'entirely new historical period … [in which] many ideas and assumptions dominant for decades are rapidly becoming obsolete' (Mishra 2020; see also Macy 2007).
In contrast to the 'post'-terms, more practicable definitions of the new realities today, tackling head on the inherent insufficiency of knowledge, refer to 'the VUCA-world' (Burrows and Gnad 2018) and a 'complex world' (Kavalski 2007). These terms tease out key features of today's environment such as volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of societal development (VUCA). International life is getting more complex in many respects-a multiplicity of global and local actors, interactions of various networks ('multiplexity'), non-linear developments and emergence processes, often through self-organisation, in the context of deep interconnectedness, result in a dynamic entanglement, associated with increasing levels of unpredictability and a lack of control (Bousquet and Curtis 2011;Bousquet and Geyer 2011). In fact, the world as we see it today has become far beyond 'post-knowing'-that is, radically shifting our understanding of it from 'knowing the knowns' with a solution for everything, through 'knowing the unknowns' with few templates to tackle uncertainty; to finally recognising that full 'knowing' of a complex world is impossible, including a human effort at long-term forecasting and control (Dooley 1997;Vogelsang 2002).
In this context, traditional modes of top-down governance become less relevant or effective for that matter. Indeed, key international programmesincluding international development, democratisation, and the fight against global warming, poverty, famine and a ravaging health pandemic-have yielded limited and highly controversial results (Edkins 2019). As a solution to increasing complexity, the discourse of resilience entered the narrative and practice of the major international institutions (UN, World Bank, OECD, EU) about three decades ago. The resulting approach focused on building institutions and structures facilitating resilience, understood as an ability of a system to bounce back after crises (Bourbeau 2018). This implied that a problem can be solved locally, yet through 'outside-in' international cooperation premised on the local appropriation of Western templates and resources. Essentially, since resilience as a governance narrative initially emerged in the language of international institutions, its practice as well as its academic reflection have been largely Western-centric (Rouet and Pascariu 2019;Cusumano and Hofmaier 2020). Resilience, therefore, has been amply conceptualised in the literature as a neoliberal practice of governmentality (Walker and Cooper 2011;Zebrowski 2013;Joseph 2013Joseph , 2018 targeted at the identification of potential vulnerabilities to be preventively addressed through 'capacity-building', 'empowerment' and the construction of a 'neoliberal subject' (Chandler and Reid 2016).
A more recent line of thinking, attempting to go beyond neoliberalism, defines resilience as 'a new art of governing complexity' (Chandler 2014(Chandler , 2020Korosteleva and Flockhart 2020), which shifts the focus from vulnerabilities, adaptation and intervention to transformation and self-governance of 'the local' and the 'problem at source'. This line of thinking argues that communities have capacities and coping strategies that are more attuned to resolving the problems on the ground, with external support as necessary-thus constituting an 'inside-out' perspective (Juncos 2017;Korosteleva 2020). This means that resilience is more about understanding and facilitating these local self-reliant and self-organising practices, and indeed closer to the 'right to opacity' (Chandler in this volume), rather than about adopting 'modernising' topdown techniques through international intervention (Finkenbusch 2021). This is not to argue that 'the local' is ideal, and existing practices need to be conserved as they are. Rather, it is argued that a better understanding of resilience as vested in local communities enables more sustainable orders and responsive governance on all levels. These bottom-up and horizontal engagements would make global governance potentially more responsive to change, and indeed 'fit-for-purpose' (see Flockhart in this special issue).
In line with this approach, we have defined and explored resilience elsewhere (Korosteleva and Flockhart 2020) as both a quality of a complex adaptive system 1 and a new analytic of governance for an increasingly complex world. We also argued that 'the global' in a complex and unpredictable world cannot be understood and managed without 'the local' and 'the person', because it is precisely the intra-and inter-relations of the latter, in their diversity, that come to define the configurations and prospects for sustainability of the global system (Korosteleva and Petrova 2021). In this introduction, and the Special Issue more broadly, and as a next step of our inquiry into resilience, 2 we aim to unpack it further as 'the local', this time, however, through the lens of its core constitutive elements-for example, identity shaped and driven by a sense of a 'good life'; infrastructures of communal support; philosophy and traditions of neighbourliness; solidarity and convocation of the peoplehood (Korosteleva and Petrova 2021)-as a process that makes communities endure and transform in the face of adversity. Understanding how resilience as self-governance works in practice may give us a better sense of what kind of multi-level governance is needed to make an entangled, complex and perceivably more hostile world-ridden with global challenges and crises-more responsive and adaptive to change.
This Special Issue develops synergies between different ways of thinking and practices (including their geographical and epistemological variations), and substantially reshapes our understanding of resilience, community, change, and governance-key concepts of International Relations (IR). Most notably, by unpacking the workings of resilience through the lens of local communities, this Special Issue contributes to a better understanding of change and complexity, and our response to it, in a search for more sustainable models of governance on all levels. We place our discussions into a particular geographical focus, which, following Scott Levi (2020, xiv; Korosteleva and Paikin 2021), we call wider Eurasia, or Central Eurasia, by which we mean 'the full Eurasian interior' (Levi 2020, viv), embracing Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. This denomination seeks to specifically avoid treating it as a homogenous region, and instead conceive of it as an expansive locality, covering a wide area of diverse cultures, traditions and thinking, that is nonetheless unified by a sense of common 'lived' history, and its inter-generational legacies. Building on these dispersed and yet embedded practices and 'memories' of 'living', 'surviving' and 'transforming together', we are hoping to capture strategies of resilience, both historically defined and contemporary manifested, drawing on local aspirations, practices, and philosophies. Most notably, these include a sense of solidarity and good neighbourliness reflected in the enduring notions of 'hamsoya' (sharing a shadow); 'baghdad al wujad' (unity of beings); 'hamdardi' and 'ham-dili' (compassionateness, kindness and forgiveness); and much more. These form an important mesh and poetics of relations (Glissant 1997), order and organisation, which enable people to strive together for a life worth living, and to stand tall as a community in the face of adversity. This volume was born out of a series of conferences and workshops, held across Eurasia, assembling scholars of a pluri-disciplinary background-IR, politics, sociology, anthropology, history, physics, and culture-who focus on resilience both theoretically and empirically, being both 'international' and 'local', but invariably part of the UK Global Challenges research network COMPASS. 3 The introduction will proceed by first contouring complexity as a new reality of post-knowing and a framework for understanding the VUCA-world, introducing resilience as a new analytic of governance for managing complexity, bottomup and inside-out. It will then unpack 'resilience' as a complex assemblage 'where relations [being exterior to their terms] are the understanding of the contingent emergent effects of interaction' (Chandler 2018, 63, with reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) of constitutive elements, as well as a process of becoming with, to understand their meaning and relationality, before they are explored empirically in the Special Issue through the manifold locality of Central Eurasia as a rich and heterogeneous space. The introduction will also explain the relevance and poignancy of Eurasia as a focal geography for this discussion; and premise the volume's contributions by threading them together into a complexity-framed argument positing resilient communities as a gateway to a more cooperative and sustainable multi-governance and multi-order world (Flockhart 2016).

Complexity, and resilience in the VUCA world
In addition to the transformational change making the world more pluriversal, unstable and unpredictable than ever before, another important ongoing transformation is of an epistemological nature. The way we think about the world has changed drastically in the course of the 20th century. The principles of uncertainty and unpredictability of the quantum world (Gell-Mann 1995), the theory of relativity, the challenges to the Darwinian worldview which commingles both self-organisation and selection (Kauffman 1995) overturned the deeply-entrenched Newtonian/positivist thinking in natural sciences, conceiving of the world and the universe as based on universal laws waiting to be discovered, and pushed us, in the words of Latour, to face Gaia, 'the grand inhibitor of circular thinking, and a great impetus to thinking outside the box' (2017,6). Mesh 4 understandings of the universe (Kurki 2020) humbled us and highlighted the limitations of our possibility of knowing and understanding; and yet, it is precisely through the realisation of these limitations that we slowly begin to feel 'at home in the universe' while searching for and internalising the principles of complexity (Kauffman 1995). Over the past few decades, complexity-thinking has been proliferating in social sciences and became embedded in a number of theories, as will be discussed below. This double change-of the world we live in and the way we understand it, by facing Gaia-requires a profound rethinking of International Relations.
In this context, complexity-thinking offers a more optimal conceptual lens to analyse society and international affairs. In what follows, we discuss the main assumptions of complexity-thinking and its implications for governance studies and International Relations. We argue that resilience as a quality of a complex system and an analytic of governance (and self-governance) is emerging as a response to complex life and the inability to govern in a habitual topdown way. Drawing on these insights, we advance the argument further by unpacking what makes communities more resilient and re-connecting this local perspective back to 'the global' for more sustainable international orders and more responsive governance on all levels, as argued, for example, by Kalra and Flockhart in this volume.

The logic of complexity-thinking
Complexity-thinking lies at the heart of conceptualising resilience both as a quality of a complex (adaptive) system and as an analytic of governance. Hence, before unpacking the elements that constitute resilient communities, it is essential to summarise the main tenets of the underlying theoretical framework. Complexity-thinking originates in the challenge posed by the 'uncertainty principle' developed in quantum mechanics of the Cartesian scientific paradigm dominant since Enlightenment (Jørgensen 1990). Heisenberg's 'uncertainty principle' proved that 'at the quantum level of tiny particles it was impossible to measure both mass and momentum simultaneously, making access to full information impossible' (Chandler 2014, 48, and in this volume). This discovery marked a breakaway with the belief that natural and social laws can ultimately be uncovered. Instead, it advanced a new epistemology based on the premises of complexity postulating limitations of scientific knowledge.
Complexity is akin to systems-thinking in that it differentiates between simple/closed and complex/open systems. In contrast to simple systems, where the outcome is causally determined by a set of inputs, complex systems cannot be meaningfully understood based on the analysis of their parts. This is because complex systems consist of a vast constellation of different types of actors connected into (often heterogeneous) networks, which are, in turn, related to one another. Furthermore, complex systems are characterised by non-linearity, that is, processes in which change in inputs is not proportional to the change of the output. Relational links among the elements of a system therefore become essential, as a tiny change through a chain of interconnections and adaptations may result in substantial output variation, commonly known as a 'butterfly effect' (Eoyang and Berkas 1998, 7). For that reason, complexity-thinking implies thorough relational and processual analysis, adding value to the existing debates already raised on the pages of this journal 5 and elsewhere. Many processes in complex systems are emergent, aiming for a system equilibrium through a series of iterative adaptations. Emergence is therefore defined as 'the fact that the individual interaction level produces social effects at the macro level, which are not reducible to the aggregate alone' (Schneider 2012, 138; see also Holland 1995). Hence, the central idea is that collective and cooperative orders develop from below and horizontally as a result of self-organisation, requiring no central control (Kauffman 1995). 6 The meaning of resilience Complexity-thinking is best suited to 'semi-turbulent and turbulent environments where change is imminent and frequent' (Dooley 1997, 92), where the realities of the VUCA-world we are facing today urgently demand such an epistemology. Complexity-thinking accounts for self-reliance, and collective selforganisation in the face of adversity, which in turn draw on 'a shared vision' of becoming with (Berenskoetter 2011;Chandler in this volume) and 'individual's readiness for change' (Berenskoetter 2011, 91), as well as inherent communal resources, processes and capacities, because all fundamental forces and structures 'arise from local processes and not by means of action at a distance' (Gell-Mann 1995, 177).
All these core tenets of complexity-thinking ensure a most optimal response to emergence and change, and as we argue elsewhere (Korosteleva and Flockhart 2020), are quintessentially reflected in the concept and practice of resilience. In the official discourse of the European Commission, resilience is defined as 'the inherent strength of an entity-an individual, a household, a community or a larger structure-to better resist stress and shock, and the capacity of this entity to bounce back rapidly from the impact' (2012,5). This SI, however, proposes that resilience is not just a quality of a complex (adaptive) system that enables entities to respond more adequately to change in search of an equilibrium (Luhmann 1990;Korosteleva 2020). In the context of complex life, resilience 'is always more' (Bargu es-Pedreny 2020) and should also serve as an analytic of governance both in terms of thinking and the practice of governing. In this sense, resilience becomes a reliable operational tool for complex governance to function effectively, because it allows for more responsive and sustainable govern-ability-bottom-up and relational (Manson 2001;Kurki 2020)-and futuring. In a complex world 'there may not be a predictable future but there is still a need to engage in futuring' (Vogelsang 2002, 10) by continually constructing the future bottom-up and horizontally. Moreover, given the 'mesh' or dynamic entanglement ontology that we adopt, following the footsteps of Morton (2010Morton ( , 2013 and Kurki (2020), adaptation is not enough for resilience. To be genuinely resilient, communities must be able to transform with change, for the system is in constant flux.
In a complex world where 'random local rules of behaviour can result in emergent order at a global level' and where 'whether there is order or not depends upon the degree of connectedness between the elements of the network' (Stacey 1995, 488), resilience emerges as a useful framework to explore the role of 'the local' in shaping 'the global' through connectedness and ensuring its adaptability to change. By 'the local' we here refer to the person, the community or the society, which we loosely term here as 'community of relations'. By analysing the local and its importance for responding to global challenges, this volume contributes to the burgeoning literature emerging at the intersection of political philosophy (Chandler et al. , 2021Clark and Szerszynski 2021), IR (Kavalski 2007 (Swyngedouw 2004;Roudometof 2015). Our contribution is three-fold: first, we refine the definition of resilience in International Relations; second, we scrutinise what elements facilitate resilience as transformation rather than simply adaptation; third, we zoom in on the local level of community and society, to bridge the research gap in IR studies between 'the global' and 'the local'. This Special Issue therefore connects and focuses on 'the local' to understand how resilience works in practice in times of complexity. The next section unpacks it through its constitutive elements.
What makes communities resilient: unpacking the fundamentals Community resilience has been studied in different strands of literature, including disaster management (Imperiale and Frank 2016), ecology (Berkes and Ross 2013;Quinlan et al. 2016), psychology (Norris et al. 2008), anthropology (Barrios 2014(Barrios , 2016Tucker and Nelson 2017) and area studies (Anholt and Sinatti 2020;Petrova and Delcour 2020). Yet, to date the issue has remained a glaring blind spot in International Relations. By shifting the attention from the global to the local, resilience puts 'community' at the centre of analysis and engenders curiosity as to why some communities stay more resilient than others, even if they may have fewer resources and be less prosperous comparatively in material wealth. Drawing on the existing studies in community resilience, this section engages in an interdisciplinary conversation about the components of resilience to fill the knowledge gap about 'the local' in International Relations by offering a framework for analysis and understanding of community resilience, and its implications for different-level governance. However, before unpacking the fundamentals, two brief clarifications are in order: what is a community, and what does it mean to be resilient?
The Special Issue refers to 'community' in a broad sense, as a group of individuals having a certain characteristic in common, including being bound, to a degree, by a specific locality, culture, behaviour, norms, institutions, and a 'shared vision'. 'Community' thus can refer to a family, neighbourhood area, districts, or civil society. Resilience, as discussed above, is understood both as a quality of a complex adaptive system with a range of components that make it enduring and responsive to change, and as an analytic of governance, a way of thinking and governing, that draws on self-reliance and self-organisation, mobilising communities' inner strengths and capacities in the face of adversity, with external assistance as necessary. What follows below is an exploration and explanation of how resilience as a quality of a system may work in practice, through its multiple components, and what kind of governance-thinking it requires.
Identity and the meaning of a 'good life' As Dooley notes, 'the desired state [of a complex adaptive system] is driven by and feedbacks to a "shared vision" ' (1997, 91), critical to its survivability. In this subsection we will explore the role and the meaning of this vision for communal resilience-building as premised on the two important elements-identity and a sense of a 'good life'-that glue communities together to make them resilient in the face of adversity. It is worth noting here that we treat 'identity' not as a stand-alone contributor to resilience, but as a process of making sense of, becoming with, and seeking a 'good life', which defines the human need for adaptation and change.
Much has already been said about identity, both temporally and across disciplines (Wendt 1994;Katzenstein 1996;Hall 1999;Neumann 1999;Ohad and Bar-Tal 2009). As Brubaker and Cooper (2000) note, identity has become an everyday idiom, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time, so much so that its vernacular overuse has led to an 'identity' crisis in social sciences. Without engaging with the vocabular utility of identity, in this Introduction we propose to link its epistemological meaning(s) to a new concept of a 'good life' (Sadiki 2016;Flockhart 2020;Aristotle 7 ). This concept is-akin to what Berenskoetter refers to as a 'future vision' (2011)-that stems from the uncertainty of the VUCA-world and individuals' desire for a more meaningful future and provides them with possibilities of being and becoming with, as a community, in the world.
In simple terms, identity is a human attempt, individual or collective, to 'establish a sense of Self in time' (Berenskoetter 2011, 648). Conventionally, it is understood as a social construct shaped by the past-that is, a shared understanding of history whereby 'actors see the future only through the strong filters of past socialisation' (Copeland 2000, 206), and embedded in the present-a shared culture, traditions, and norms 'as makers of (in)appropriate behaviour which are inscribed in routine practices and [upheld by] institutions located on the domestic or the international level' (Berenskoetter 2011, 650). However, what is often overlooked is the role of the future and shared purpose, in the human pursuit of survival and adaptation in a complex world.
Berenskoetter argues that, in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world, uncertainty plays a crucial role in identity formation: in particular, he notes that 'identity is [only] manifested through the future' where the latter is a 'source of anxiety'. Identity 'renders being incomplete' (Berenskoetter 2011, 652). He draws his insights from Heidegger's work, who insists that 'until it is dead there is always something the Self is not yet, and hence, "being" is always incomplete ' (1953' ( , in Berenskoetter 2011. In the context of anxiety about the unknowable future, the identity of Self (singular or collective) is to a significant degree future-oriented, shaped by 'a desire to understand or give meaning' to the future. Identity therefore 'renders the future the most significant parameter of being/becoming' (Berenskoetter 2011, 653). This meaningful future equates to a conception of a 'good life' defined predominantly in ideational rather than material terms-'a sense of where we are going' (Anderson 2006), as an aspiration for 'a Significant We' (Flockhart 2006) to make 'the future Self "knowable"' (Berenskoetter 2011, 653), rational and worth living. This is a powerful drive not only for 'coping' with stress and adversity today, but also for seeking change and a better tomorrow, which lies at the heart of communal resilience-building. Heidegger refers to this driving force as 'Entwurf', which 'renders the future a "pull factor", providing the Self with an opportunity to move on, or ahead, on a certain [purposeful] course' (Berenskoetter 2011, 653). This sense of 'good life' lends the Self orientation and also the resolve and determination to realise a vision of becoming: 'one can argue that understanding and pursuing these possibilities, the Self already is these possibilities' (Berenskoetter 2011, 653, emphasis original). So, identity driven by a sense of 'good life' is a process of becoming with, which mobilises individuals with a shared purpose, to survive, adapt and transform together. This process, however, has two inherent dualities, the dynamics of which are contextually causal and important for understanding how local resilience comes about.
First, 'becoming' is always intersubjective in nature: it emerges as an intraand inter-active mesh of Self and Other (Kurki 2020), in the process of their struggle and adaptation to internal and external environments. This duality of Self and Other is viewed differently in different traditions of thought and geographies of the world. If, for example, in liberal traditions the Self is seen as individual and central to defining relations, and is often situated either in opposition or juxtaposition to the (presumably inferior) Other (Diez 2005;Nicolaïdis et al. 2015), in several local traditions of Central Asia the concept of barzak indicates that the Self is always part of something bigger, more meaningful than its singular experience, something that even transcends death: 'You are everything, inside everything, and part of everything' (Ibn Arabi cited in Nurulla-Khodzhaeva 2017, 119; see also Green 2012;Qin 2018). A reference to a 'mirror effect' is commonly used in Central Asia to transcribe this sense of collective being or becoming with, which Chandler develops further in this issue: when one looks in the mirror, they do not see themselves but a world around them as together-ness. Hence, the importance of 'hamsoya' (sharing a shadow with your neighbour) and 'suzami' (a symbol of unity) that come to represent the primacy of a collective Other in a Self's becoming with the community of beings, informing a recurrent philosophy of resilience across Central Eurasia that makes a sense of community highly tangible.
Second, 'becoming' is a balance between stability and change. Identity is both affirmation of one's belonging to give some situational certainty (as part of the anxiety-controlling mechanisms) and it is a process of change.
Identification is an assemblage of (i) the assumed desire for stability (what am I?) and (ii) the conception of the Self as evolutionary (always in the making), aiming to adapt and transform. As a process, Hopf (2002) argues, identity is about making the unfamiliar familiar (stabilisation) and future visions more tangible (change). Therefore, 'becoming' is a continuing process of identification and transformation, in search for a 'good life', and equilibrium. Finally, identity of the Self and its 'future vision' of the 'good life' are two sides of the same coin-of the process of becoming when turning irrational reactions to change (our identity) into rational visions of the future, the construction of which is based on memories, experience, group socialisation, resources, desires and dreams (Berenskoetter 2011).
The 'good life' thus is a possible utopia (or a vision of the future): a source of energy which motivates, mobilises and moves the Self forward; it is perhaps the only rational thing in the arsenal of Self. Berenskoetter distinguishes between robust (certain/predetermined) and creative (able to open political spaces) visions. Based on Berenskoetter's analysis, and the empirical contributions to this volume, we suggest that Central Eurasia provide more fertile ground for creative visions to emerge. Such visions are driven by an idea(l) that connects past philosophies of life with future aspirations, and creates a sense of becoming with, which promises to transform the established order of things. For a vision to be attractive for sharing/following, it must resonate with shared cultures, philosophies, and traditions, while also offering an alluring 'promised land' of hope and goodness. When faced with adversity, these visions of a better tomorrow would stimulate the mobilisation of inherent resources, communal support infrastructures and the resolve (grit/tenacity/strength) needed to cope with crisis. 8 A sense of the 'good life' needs to function as a creative (ideational) space and accommodate various forms of evolving multiple interpretations (through dialogue 9 ), the blueprint of which is always typically local, indigenous.

Inherent resources and community support infrastructures
Identity and the pluriversal vision of a 'good life' are the driving force for communal adaptation and transformation in search of a better tomorrow. Yet, in an everyday life riddled with uncertainties and irrationalities, communities also require some more tangible forms of support-as defined by their networks of relations (communal infrastructures) and resources-to help them survive and adapt. Once again, Central Eurasia, like some other 'developing' localities, often presents communal support infrastructures that distinctively rely on significantly informal and dense relations of responsibilities (from moral to financial) as well as a stronger collective safety net for supporting the vulnerable and the needy (see for example Badescu and Uslaner 2003;Hutchinson and Korosteleva 2006 and empirical contributions to this issue). In this subsection we will explore what tangibly makes communities more than just a gathering of persons by zooming in on the formal and informal community structures and resources.
Complexity-and resilience-thinking is based on the notion of emergence, also referred to as self-organisation. Emergence can be defined as the interaction of individual units, without governance or coordination from above, that results in an outcome qualitatively different from the aggregate of individual inputs. Passing through feedback loops, these outcomes may evolve into orders, facilitating resilience of a system/community. An order, as defined by Lebow (2018, 8), is 'a hierarchical arrangement, supported by most of its members, that fosters security, self-esteem, and social contract, encourages solidarity, and results in legible, predictable behaviour'. Given the non-linearity and processual nature of emergence, orders and their constituent elements are deeply embedded in spatio-temporal contexts (see Flockhart in this issue). This implies that ultimately there are no universal solutions. Emerging structures for coping that may come to constitute orders are highly context-specific, which explains the exuberant mosaic (or 'pluriverse') of community resilience strategies (Kothari et al. 2019).
Some common elements of self-organisation identified in community resilience literature include economic elements (equity of resource distribution, diversity of economic resources), information and communication (narratives, trusted sources of information), social capital (social ties and networks, citizen participation, leadership, trust, reciprocity, attachment to place, et cetera) and community competences (community action, empowerment, sense of community) (Norris et al. 2008;Berkes and Ross 2013). Recent literature showcases prominent examples of self-organisation reflecting the importance of these elements. For instance, agaciro (dignity, self-worth), a philosophy and policy originating from Rwanda, aims to move away from dependence and international aid, and replace them with self-reliance and solidarity (Rutazibwa 2014). It puts forward the vision of relationality and self-help, emphasising local structures as more attuned to people's aspirations as compared to global development discourses. Agaciro is echoed in the Andean concept of buen vivir (good living), explained in a nutshell as 'collective well-being according to culturally appropriate conceptions' (Escobar 2018, 148). Buen vivir is an empowering vision acknowledging multiple development paths, plurality of local knowledges, and relational understanding of life. The emphasis on relationality and functioning community networks is emerging as the key to community resilience, as demonstrated by multiple empirical studies, including the contributions to this issue.
A more tangible fabric to help structure local communities and their order is embodied in a range of formal and informal support infrastructures. Formal or institutionalised forms of bringing order into communal living take multiple variations in Central Eurasia, for example, mahalla, community of elders in Central Asia, tovarischestva in Russia or supol'nast' in Belarus. While not initiated by the state, these societal forms of self-organisation are defined as relatively formal due to their institutionalisation, manifested via assigned roles, inherent hierarchies (stareishyna or aksakal in Central Asia), possession of community funds, legitimacy and authority. Instead, informal community infrastructures are more fluid. They include family, kinship, friends and neighbour networks, as well as occasional traditional gatherings (festivals, weddings, funerals et cetera) and dedicated community support groups in case of an emergency or specific event/need. For instance, the Slavic, and particularly Belarusian, term talaka (self-help) historically referred to a gathering of a neighbourhood to complete some labour-intensive work together, such as harvestgathering or house-building. With the development of digital technologies, informal infrastructures have gained traction in the forms of neighbourhood chats and online communities, boosting societal ties and facilitating local cooperation among community members. This was strongly evidenced by communal crowdfunding, and various support measures for the vulnerable during the Covid-19 pandemic. This variety of community networks provides community services, but also essentially serves as a source of ontological security, necessary for resilient adaptation to a changing environment, which will be exemplified further by the empirical part of this volume.

Peoplehood as mobilisation of resilient communities
In the previous two subsections, we briefly unpacked the notions of identity ('what we are') linked to a 'good life' ('what we want to be') in the process of becoming with. We also illustrated how local formal and informal support infrastructures could help communities stay stronger together through self-organisation and emerging order, when facing the challenges of uncertain future, and threats to their internal and external environment. Drawing on the empirical analysis of our case studies, as well as theoretical discussions of philosophy, locality, poetics and the opacity of human relations presented in this volume, we believe these are encompassing but not necessarily exhaustive components of building and maintaining resilience, which help communities survive adversity and transform under the pressure of change.
In this subsection we introduce one more component of resilience-the peoplehood-which is not commonplace, but which signifies the moment of becoming with, when all resources, capacities and future 'visions' that give a community of relations a more consolidated quality align with each other to take it to a new level of being together. The peoplehood is often mobilised at the moment of existential threat and severe violation of a community's fledgling foundations. This mobilisation was famously captured, for example, by the Arab Spring, described as 'al-harak', that is, 'the essence of the political, social, cultural, and religious people-driven ferment' (Sadiki 2016, 339); or, by the moment of 'the revolution of Dignity' turning ancient monasteries into battlefield hospitals in Kyiv (from 2014 onwards); or by the defiant and pervasive resistance in Belarus post-presidential election in 2020, not submitting to the oppression of the regime. In these instances, people reached the moment of becoming with, a qualitatively different political entity, with a sense of dignity (agaciro) and self-worth to fight for and protect their future.
'Peoplehood' as becoming and being with is deeply transformative and vehemently powerful (Korosteleva and Petrova 2021). It is also political-seeking to transform the environment, rather than adapt to survive. This is a relatively new concept in social sciences, which is yet to develop a unified and clear meaning. It has emerged with the intensifying levels of people's engagement in politics, driven by a strong desire to make their lives more equitable, fair and sustainable. Smith (2015, 3), for example, contends that peoplehood is more than just becoming 'political people': it is about 'conveying senses of meaning and value, defining political goals, prescribing institutions and policies, and sustaining or failing to sustain support for political communities and their leaders, institutions and policies in difficult times'. According to Lie (2004), peoplehood offers an inclusionary and even involuntary group identity with a putatively shared history and distinct way of life. He clarifies further: 'It is inclusionary because everyone in the group, regardless of status, gender, or moral worth, belongs. It is involuntary because one is born into an ascriptive category of peoplehood … It is not merely a population, but rather a people-a group, an internal conviction, a self-reflective identity ' (2004, 1). Peoplehood, as a moment of becoming, acquires its own distinct discourse and a special identity of 'being together, not merely in similar ways' (Brown and Kuling 1997, 43) challenging the status-quo, reinforced through the symbols of otherness (for example, the white-red-white flag in Belarus), or an acute sense of injustice that may threaten survival (for example, the 'Black Lives Matter' movement). Peoplehood becomes more than society (Dominquez 1989): it turns into a transformative political entity, which comes to encapsulate fragile social relations and an urgent need to 'interact in ways other than through force or imposition' (Anderson 2006, 19). Sadiki (2016, 339) notes that the rise of peoplehood is an 'important watershed' in the life of society: 'it partakes of both civil and uncivil manifestations of thought and practice across boundaries of rich diversity and complexity', potentially even 'morphing into a transnational phenomenon' (Sadiki 2016, 339).
In conclusion, resilience as a quality of a complex adaptive system and a way of thinking begins at the local level, and is manifested via an assemblage of its constitutive elements, including (but not limited to) identity driven by a sense of a 'good life' and its inherent duality, an awoken sense of self-worth and dignity (agaciro), and formal and informal communal support infrastructures, which could turn existing capacities into true capabilities of peoplehood to fight for a better future when faced with an existential threat. This non-exhaustive list of resilience components underscores the primacy of 'the local' and its potential to make global governance in a more complex and uncontrollable VUCA-world more sustainable and effective through self-organisation and self-governance.

Why Central Eurasia: exploring its internal and external dimensions
Having unpacked the fundamentals of resilience as a quality of a complex system, and as a process of self-governance, we shall now briefly explain why Central Eurasia was singled out for understanding the workings of resilience in a complex world. As Scott Levi stated, 'what we are dealing with are not separate and comparable, but connected histories … [These networks] were the avenues through which knowledge of the outside world reached Central Asia, and they were extraordinarily resilient ' (2020, 170; emphasis added). In other words, while we see Central Eurasia as a particularly illustrative locality for the purpose of this research, it should not be understood monolithically in isolation from its global environment. Rather, it preserves transnational networks that are historically rooted and make its experience significant in rethinking resilience on a global scale. We therefore see Central Eurasia as a powerful locus for a new study of resilience in IR, both historically and in contemporary world politics.
There are three essential reasons to justify our choice of locality. First, Central Eurasia is considered a rich unfolding universe shaped by a centurieslong history of global connectedness, remarkable fluidity as an inherently nomadic space (Hansen 2012;Frankopan 2015;Levi 2020), and endurance as a way to adapt and transform, thus underscoring its inherent resilience. It has been defined as a 'crossroads of civilisations' (Foltz 1999) whose mission-Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali believed-was 'to connect and resolve the controversy between the worlds and the human' via the ideas of dahleez (a door between the worlds) and barzak (Nurulla-Khodzhaeva 2017, 122). Several ancient and modern scholars point to Central Eurasia as a mesmerising cradle of 'lost' wisdom and newly-found enlightenment, the homeland of thinkers who 'affected science and civilisation' globally, connecting 'antiquity and the modern world' (Starr 2013, 4, 21), as well as a locus of extraordinary skills, knowledge and cultural diplomacy, epitomised by the Sogdian merchants who populated Central Eurasia from the VI century BC to the XVI AC (Nurulla-Khodzhaeva 2017). Remarkably, the philosophy of Sufism, which has permeated Central Eurasia for centuries through artistic and poetic production (Green 2012), still arguably remains a strong 'pull factor' 10 for survival and transformation to this day (see for example, the work of Nasritdinov and O'Connor 2009;Peyrouse and Nasritdinov 2021). This extraordinary space has also been the focus of the COMPASS research project, embracing Belarus in the west, Azerbaijan in the south and Tajikistan in the east, which made this pioneering research into the resilience of Central Eurasia possible.
The second reason relates to the very nature of the communities that characterise Central Eurasia as a locality, making it insightful for both historical and contemporary study of resilience (see for example Neumann and Wigan 2018; Reynolds 2020; White 2020). Central Eurasia is home to peoples who lived through centuries-long hardship and depravity, and yet saw beauty and poetics in everything and learned to adapt, share and transform in their processes of becoming and reaching toward their visions of happiness, good life, and good neighbourliness. And yet, Central Eurasia is extraordinarily understudied compared to the body of scholarship exploring societies in Latin America and Africa, their efforts at decolonisation and post-development, as well as indigenous ideologies for progression and visions of the future, as shown by Kalra in this issue. Central Eurasia is fraught with massive challenges, including ongoing transitions, limited resources, rampaging poverty, lasting conflicts, health and environmental crises, as vividly demonstrated by Babayev and Abushov as well as Markovich et al. (2021) in this issue. Yet, its peoples still survive and prosper, thus providing a remarkable case-study for understanding what makes communities so resilient there, and what their governance-thinking could teach us, especially in these troubling days of health emergencies, environmental calamities, and economic and political crises.
Finally, Central Eurasia is also remarkable in terms of its geo-strategic location: it spans two continents, and is at the epicentre of interest and investment from at least three major global powers-the European Union (EU), Russia and China-each projecting their own visions and governing strategies to engender, as they claim, growth, prosperity and stability there. 11 And yet, all three powers often assume too much knowledge and understanding of this diverse and polyphonic locality, this way lessening its own agency, sustainability and self-governing opportunities (Kavalski 2012;Korosteleva and Petrova 2020;Kalra in this volume). Understood heuristically as a locality which is distinctive but diverse, Central Eurasia thus troubles familiar conceptions of the international and world politics in IR, too often understood from the totalising perspectives of great powers or seemingly uniform geopolitical wholes (for example, "the West" and "the non-West"). We hope this study of resilience, order and governance of the local will alter and unsettle these trajectories of learning by placing Central Eurasia as a driving force of resilient development firmly on the study map of International Relations.

The special issue's structure and contributions
This special issue makes a substantive contribution, in theory and practice, to the study of International Relations, by focusing on resilience's constitutive elements to understand (1) what helps communities survive, adapt and transform; (2) how orders form; and (3) what kind of governance is needed to make 'the global' more sustainable through 'the local' in times of growing complexity and change.
The volume offers theoretical, conceptual and empirical perspectives on the study of societal resilience and its core components. After an introduction that outlines the overarching framework of its relational elements, the discussion first moves to consider alternative framings of resilience as poetics of relations to be decolonised from 'Western' (neoliberal) narratives (David Chandler), and theorise the role of a 'good life' in shaping a resilient order in a multi-order world (Trine Flockhart). Most notably, Chandler argues that understanding resilience means allowing the opacity of processual becoming with others in relation to take its course through improvisation and feedback loops, which in turn would push communities to experiment, to be creative, and to draw on their inherent capacities and visions of the future to change as a collective. Crucial here, Chandler asserts, is the conception of relation, as explored by Glissant (1997) when postulating 'the right to opacity' and further developed into new resilience approaches by Kara Keeling (2019) and An Yountae (2017). The notion of relation and its opacity, as Chandler contends, 'keep communities open to changes which cannot be predicted beforehand', and in this way allows them to 'grow and develop as they "world themselves" in an open set of responsivities', rather than via closed choices, enforced solutions or fixed identities. Being open in and to the world always places one 'in the middle of processes of inter-relation', thus not only engendering diversity, but also encouraging curiosity for 'alternative futural imaginaries' while continually constructing a community of relations.
A community of relations is bound together by a sense of a 'good life', as Trine Flockhart argues in her piece. In particular, while 'order is a fundamental condition for social life', she further contends that what keeps social life together is a shared vision and values that constitute the aspirational notion of a 'good life'. This in turn raises some crucial questions of whose vision for a "good life", and whose order will count, which are fundamental for the resilience of international order(s). Flockhart insightfully examines a crisis of the international liberal order, as a 'local process' invariably connected to and in turn impacting the global architecture. She questions how global international society can become more sustainable and how competing visions for a 'good life' can co-exist. Ultimately, she concludes, what matters for making 'the global' more responsive in a complex multi-order world is a diversity of being, which propels the need for dialogue with 'the local'.
These theoretical discussions are followed by empirical explorations of Central Eurasia, to show how 'the local' always stays connected with its past and the future, and how resilience of communities, while opaque and hidden, makes every person an intrinsic part of the global world. Hence, it is of critical importance to study communal relations and their resilience, especially, as Chandler concedes, through poetics, which render immense energy of becoming into the world. The articles explore what communal resilience means in practice by looking at communities across Central Eurasia. Belarus in particular, as examined by Anna Markovich et al., presents an insightful case of community, of becoming with others in relation, whereby a centuries-long endurance and a sense of a 'good life' have been momentarily transformed into peoplehood in response to injustice and lack of Covid-related state care. It is incredibly powerful to observe a palpable mushrooming of hitherto fragmented communal gatherings (supol'nast'), which emerge as self-organisation to support, care for and protect each other. A similar wave of transformation, as analysed by Azar Babayev and Kavus Abushov, is noticeable in Azerbaijan, recently hit by a Karabakh war, exposing the process of peoplehood-in-the-making through affective solidarity and a surge of communal support infrastructures through kinship and neighbourhood ties.
The final contribution by Prajakti Kalra offers an exciting account of historical developments in Central Eurasia across the centuries of trade, culture and nomadic mobility of what has long been known as the Silk Roads, inextricably linked with human resilience. As Kalra argues, it is this inherent resilience, 'hybridity, transand multi-culturalism', along with its abiding history and local polyphony, that make Central Eurasia so enchanting and important to give heed to if one wishes to develop a better understanding of complexity and relationality in the world we live in today, and to learn to make governance more sustainable.