| Crynodeb: | <p>This thesis is about resilience, drylands, and pastoralism. It aims to enhance our understanding of the meanings of resilience from the perspective of pastoral communities in drylands and in the context of their everyday lives. It draws on the case of Turkana herders living in Kenyan’s northern drylands, a place of “resilience making” for the international community. Threatened by recurrent droughts, security issues, and precarious living, Turkana County is the perfect laboratory for international organisations interested in “building resilience” to shocks and disasters, and in turn also a compelling case for a thesis which hopes to bring a more grounded, nuanced, and rooted understanding of resilience in drylands.</p>
<p>There is a “paradox of representation” as scholars portray pastoralists as one of the most resilient groups while practitioners see them as the most vulnerable. In this thesis, I set out to explain how there could be such divergent viewpoints and to bridge the divide. I suggest that resilience is discussed in the international development regime as a cornerstone of “pastoral development” through three dimensions: landscape, lifescape, and bodyscape. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the local meanings of resilience across these dimensions and contrast them with outsiders’ interpretations emerging from policy documents, development interventions and scholarship.</p>
<p>The empirical analysis reveals the fundamental role of mobility in the lived experiences of Turkana herders. The most significant contribution of this thesis is the emergence of mobility as an integral part of everyday life, providing a new lens for the understanding of resilience which challenges dichotomous, linear, and “bouncing” views of resilience. Instead, I argue that mobility—in its many manifestations, as a quality of space, as something people do, as an aspect of identity—allows for more fluid, dynamic, and kaleidoscopic accounts of peoples’ lives. I thus propose mobility as the site where resilience takes root and where a richer grasp of resilience, drylands, and pastoralism can be found.</p>
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