Journal articles on the topic 'Immigrants, irregular, care systems, rights'

- The legislative and operational measures recently adopted by Italy in order to prevent and repress clandestine immigration raise the problem of their consistency with Italy's international obligations conncerning the protection of human rights. With a view to assessing the actual terms of such a problem, contents and extent of the protection to be afforded to irregular migrants, under the international law of human rights, must be preliminarily determined. Considering the specific legal situation of Italy, in the light of its participation both to the European Convention of Human Rights and to the International Covenants on Human Rights, as well as to many other conventions dealing with the protection of human rights, it clearly turns out that Italy is internationally bound to respect and protect a number of basic rights of irregular migrants. Such rights include, at the very least, the right to life, the right not to be subjected to torture (or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment), and the right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. Respect for such rights also implies an absolute non-refoulement obligation, that is an obligation not to expel or return an irregular migrant to another State where there is an actual risk that his or her rights would be violated. Moreover, basic rights of clandestine immigrants include the right to family unity, the right not to be subjected to collective expulsion, and (closely linked with this latter right) the right to a fair and transparent procedure of expulsion or repatriation, implying a reasonable and objective examination of the particular case of each individual. Turning to economic, social and cultural rights, an internationally lawful treatment of irregular migrants requires compliance with international obligations protecting the right to health and medical care, the right to primary education, and some core labour rights. The principle of non discrimination plays obviously a crucial role in view of correctly implementing all these international obligations with respect to the specific situation of irregulars migrants. Lastly, special and stronger human rights protection is required when the irregular migrants are children, or victims of trafficking in persons. In the light of the international human rights obligations which are applicable to the peculiar situation of irregular migrants, some of the legislative and operational measures adopted by Italy to struggle against clandestine immigration seem indeed to be inconsistent not only with such obligations (and with the increasing international trend towards the "non criminalization" of clandestine immigrants by reason of their irregular position), but also - at least in part - with the EU legal standards provided for by the recent 2008/115/EC Directive on common standards and procedures for returning illegally staying third-country nationals. This seems to be true, for example, with regard both to the new Article 10 bis inserted in the Legislative Decree n. 286 on immigration, introducing the crime of clandestine immigration, and to the new paragraph 11 bis of Art. 61 of the Criminal Code, introducing a general aggravating circumstance consisting in the irregular status of the immigrant author of a crime. But this seems particularly true and blameworthy with regard to the practice of intercepting crumbling boats full of migrants on the high seas and coercively driving them back to Libya.

Recent decades have seen a strong trend among democratic countries to extend voting rights at subnational levels to non-naturalized immigrants, creating substantial variation across countries in terms of voting eligibility rules for non-naturalized immigrants. Our knowledge of the consequences of these different systems for immigrant political integration is, however, limited. This article seeks to shed new light on this important issue by using Swedish data to study whether immigrants who face shorter residency requirements for voting eligibility in local elections are more likely to integrate politically. We find little compelling evidence that such is the case. The results suggest that immigrants who became eligible to vote after six to seven years were as likely to naturalize and vote in future elections in both the short and long run as those who received the right to vote after only three years of residency. Thus, although expanded franchise can be of symbolic, as well as practical, value, it is unlikely to be a panacea for immigrant political inclusion. The argument that early voting rights for non-naturalized immigrants is desirable since it helps speed up immigrant political integration should, therefore, be used with some care by those advocating for such reforms.

Migration policies in recent years have turned to growing restrictions and tighter controls in most countries, not only at national level but often also at local level. But several actors from civil society have tried to counteract this trend, protesting, organizing advocacy actions, providing services and promoting networks. Italy is a case in point: from the beginning of the arrival of immigration flows in the ’80, the reception of the newcomers and the defence of their rights has been provided mainly by non-public actors: trade unions, voluntary associations, social movements, catholic institutions. In the last decade, Italian immigration policies have hardened, above all in the period 2008-2011, with the advent of a securitarian discourse. Many civil society organizations struggled against these policies. The article will present two case studies: 1) the Association “Avvocati per niente”, that defends the immigrants against local policies of exclusion; 2) NAGA and OSF, two Associations engaged in health care for irregular immigrants in Milan. The articles explore motivations, discourses, strategies, alliances and outcomes of their action.

<p><strong>BACKGROUND: </strong>One of the consequences of migration is cultural diversity in various communities. This has created challenges for healthcare systems.</p><p><strong>OBJECTIVES: </strong>The aim of this study is to explore the health care staffs’ experience of caring for Immigrants in Mashhad- Iran.</p><p><strong>SETTING:</strong> This study is done in Tollab area (wherein most immigrants live) of Mashhad. Clinics and hospitals that immigrants had more referral were selected.</p><p><strong>PARTICIPANTS:</strong> Data were collected through in-depth interviews with medical and nursing staffs. 15 participants (7 Doctors and 8 Nurses) who worked in the more referred immigrants’ clinics and hospitals were entered to the study.<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>DESIGN: </strong>This is a qualitative study with content analysis approach. Sampling method was purposive. The accuracy and consistency of data were confirmed. Interviews were conducted until no new data were emerged. Data were analyzed by using latent qualitative content analysis.</p><p><strong>RESULTS:</strong> The data analysis consisted of four main categories; (1) communication barrier, (2) irregular follow- up, (3) lack of trust, (4) cultural- personal trait.</p><p><strong>CONCLUSION:</strong> Result revealed that health workers are confronting with some trans- cultural issues in caring of immigrants. Some of these issues are related to immigration status and some related to cultural difference between health workers and immigrants. These issues indicate that there is transcultural care challenges in care of immigrants among health workers. Due to the fact that Iran is the context of various cultures, it is necessary to consider the transcultural care in medical staffs. The study indicates that training and development in the area of cultural competence is necessary.</p>

Migratory flows have a specific influence in the European and Portuguese demographic context. Societies’ commitment to ensure fundamental rights of all citizens and migrants includes the promotion of health. This study aims to describe migrants’ health policies and access to the health system in Portugal within the European framework. We carried out a mixed methods approach, analyzing health policies in European Union countries and public health key indicators from statistical secondary data collected from Eurostat and Migrant Integration Policy Index. This data was complemented with a survey applied to immigrants living in Portugal. Portugal is a European country known for its favorable immigrant integration policies and has developed access to the health care system. However, our study has shown that greater investment is needed to overcome limitations or social inequalities which inhibit migrants’ access. Additionally, we sought to present a comparative analysis between Portugal and European Union countries, which can contribute to improve health systems within the current crisis.

AbstractThis paper explores the key features of the emerging welfare mix for Syrian refugees in Turkey and identifies the modes of interaction between humanitarian assistance programmes, domestic policy responses and the Turkish welfare system. The welfare mix for Syrian refugees is a joint product of humanitarian assistance programmes implemented by international and domestic non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and domestic social policy programmes. Three policy domains are considered: social assistance schemes, employment and health care services. The paper suggests that granting of temporary protection status to Syrian migrants in Turkey and the agreement between Turkey and the EU shaped the welfare mix by empowering the public sector mandate vis-à-vis the humanitarian actors. As a result, the role of the public sector increases at the expense of NGOs, especially in social assistance and health care, while NGOs are increasingly specialised in protection work (especially in mental health support), where the Turkish welfare system has been weak. Employment has been essentially disregarded, in both humanitarian and social policy programmes, which casts doubt on the prospect of successful economic integration. Finally, this paper argues that the convergence of the rights of immigrants and citizens may well occur in mature components of less comprehensive welfare systems.

Purpose As long as migration is recognized as a public health concern, policies exist to address migrants’ health, and provide comprehensive information on how public and private health care system operates, health rights and what their health care plan does or does not cover. Thereby, responding to patients’ expectations significantly affects overall satisfaction with health care services because this dimension is most strongly associated with patient satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to constitute the first quantitative large-scale study (n=1,512) in Cyprus and Greece exploring the level of satisfaction among third-country nationals (TCN) in relation to their health care needs. Design/methodology/approach The questionnaire used in this study has been developed and measured (Cronbach α =0.7) in a similar study in Greece (Galanis et al., 2013) and it has been used by other studies too (Vozikis, 2015). Findings The authors can conclude that participants’ knowledge of the health system is not good as 70.2 percent that they do not have a good knowledge. The findings suggest that nearly one in two TCN faced problems in accessing clinics or communicating due to various factors. Practical implications The findings of this study provide the context for further exploration of different means to improve cultural awareness amongst health and social care professionals, including multicultural training of health and social service providers and medical pluralist approaches that may be closer to migrants’ cultural and health background. Overall, types of interventions to improve cultural competency included training/workshops/programs for health practitioners (e.g. doctors, nurses and community health workers), culturally specific/tailored education or programs for patients/clients, interpreter services, peer education, patient navigators and exchange programs (Truong, 2014). To the above, practices can also be added as multicultural education to all health professionals in order to develop enthusiasm and be able to acknowledge immigrants’ difficulties. Adding to the above recommendation, interdisciplinary education with allied health professionals (psychologists, social workers and nurses) may lead to a more holistic approach of this group’s needs, especially in the forthcoming health system where primary care will play a vital role. Social implications Access to the health system may lead to social inclusion of TCN in the local society and improve their quality of life. It is also important for TCN to feel that the current health system is aware of issues related to their social and cultural background; thus, it will make the health system and those who work look more friendly and approachable. Originality/value In an era of crisis and of great debate around a forthcoming National Health System, these findings indicate that healthcare providers in Cyprus will need to address several challenges in managing care for migrants. In order for that to happen, assessing patient satisfaction is thereby important in the process of quality evaluation, especially when dealing with population subgroups at higher risk of inequalities such as immigrants or ethnic minorities. Such studies help systems to develop by measuring their weaknesses and enhancing their strengths. Voicing clients/patients feedback is always helpful to minimize risks.

Background and context: In Senegal, pediatric oncology patients arrive at the hospital at advanced stages of disease. Their large tumors, as well as the side effects of chemotherapy make children experience intense pain. In this low-resource setting, morphine supply was quite irregular. Doctors don´t prescribe morphine due to shortages; but few prescriptions also lead to limited orders. A vicious circle with only 1 victim: the patient. Hearing children in pain was agonizing for everyone: patients, caregivers and healthcare practitioners. Aim: This advocacy narrative illustrates how the fight for access to morphine in pediatric oncology has led to both positive and negative externalities. We will highlight ways in which this fight for morphine has provoked political tensions moving the issue forward, but has also affected the careers of health workers involved. Strategy/Tactics: Morphine is a cheap drug, yet it is extremely regulated by international laws. It takes political will to influence national morphine orders. This advocacy strategy was built on raising awareness and setting morphine shortage on the political agenda. Not providing morphine in oncology goes against international standards of care. But most importantly, letting patients suffer without “existing” relief is a breach of basic human right to live - and also die - in dignity. Program/Policy process: Conversations began within the pediatric oncology department. Focus groups highlighted caregivers' feelings of powerlessness before their suffering child. Interviews with key informants (doctor and nurses) were instrumental to a widely diffused Human Rights Watch report exploring the medical and political causes to morphine supply shortages, as well as its psychological repercussions on patient care. A BBC documentary was broadcasted soon after. Subsequently, meetings were held between the Ministry of Health, the National Supply Pharmacy and leading local oncologists. Outcomes: Morphine orders were multiplied by 10, leading to much improved pain management for patients. However, Senegal was portrayed negatively on the international scenes, much to the Health Minister´s dismay. The consequences were incurred by the health workers who contributed to the international publications/reports. What was learned: Health practices can inform policy just like policy can inform health practices. It is a cyclical process. Creating advocacy coalitions and rallying the help of the international community are effective strategies. However, in the political arena, health workers need more than commitment to human rights and quality care. Even in democratic republics, systems can penalise outspoken activists. We have learned that health care practitioners (especially working in public settings) who wish improvement for their patients must learn to be tactical and diplomatic. International partners will return to their home countries, but local actors will pay the high cost of advocacy.

The complex interactions and ruptures between contemporary settler colonialism, environmental ethics, and Indigenous rights and worldviews often emerge in projects of civil engineering. The continued capture, control and burial of natural water courses in Aotearoa-New Zealand is a case in point, and exemplifies a failure to stay abreast of evolving understandings and renewed relationships we seek with our waterways, our ancestors. Wai-Horotiu stream used to run down what is now Queen Street, the main road in Auckland, Aotearoa-New Zealand’s largest city. Treasured by Māori as a source of wai (water) and mahinga kai (food), it is also the home of Horotiu, a taniwha or ancestral guardian—a literal ‘freshwater body’. However, as Tāmaki-Makaurau transitioned into Auckland city, Wai-Horotiu became denigrated; used as an open sewer by early settlers before being buried alive in the colonial process. How, now, can we know this buried waterway? Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 that affords the Whanganui River juristic personality and moral considerability offers one possible solution. It acknowledges that waterways, incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements, exist in existential interlinks with Māori as part of their whakapapa (genealogical networks). This paper asks, can a corresponding and appropriate ethics of association and care be fostered in and expressed by the political descendants of British settlers (Pākehā) and later immigrants who live here under the auspices established by Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840? Here is a conversation between a Māori earth systems scientist and a Pākehā interdisciplinary scholar. Where Hikuroa speaks from and to direct whakapapa connections, beginning with pepeha, Lythberg’s narrative springboards from public art projects that facilitate more ways of knowing Wai-Horotiu. Together, we contend that a regard for Indigenous relationships with water can guide best practice for us all, and propose that creative practices can play a role in attaching people to place, and to waterways.

Over the past two decades, the creation of the European border regime has increasingly sparked acts of protest and resistance by immigrants and led to the creation of initiatives to defend immigrant rights. This activism has provoked many European states to formalize what is known in the literature as ‘crimes of solidarity’ in their legal systems. Taking the Spanish case as an example, the objective of this article is to analyse the ‘crimmigration’ of protest and activism defending the rights of irregular immigrants at Europe’s southern border. This analysis describes the development and implementation of the repressive tactics employed by the state against activists, including forms of police control of protests, informal and formal dissuasion techniques, and the use of administrative and criminal sanctions. This work provides valuable insight into the practical impact of these crimmigration processes, particularly how they have affected activists, social organizations and immigrants, as well as how they have extended beyond the territory of the state (externalizing punishment).

The number of immigrants seeking entry into the U.S. through asylum requests or through irregular means is increasing, and most come from the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Immigrants come fleeing extreme poverty, violence, health and social inequities, and drastic climate changes. Most had limited access to healthcare at home, and even more limited care along the journey. Those that are allowed entry into the U.S., are confronted with feeling unwelcome in many communities, having to navigate an array of local, state, and federal laws that regulate access to healthcare. We need immigration policies that preserve the health, dignity with a multinational policy for provision of healthcare through a human rights lens from point of origin to point of destination.

Abstract In this commentary to the paper “Ensuring HIV care to undocumented migrants in Israel: a public-private partnership case study” by Chemtob et al. we discuss the role of public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a mechanism for integrating previously excluded groups in public healthcare provision. Drawing on PPP case-studies as well as on Israel’s pandemic preparedness policies during the Covid-19 outbreak, we examine potential implications for the populations in question and for health systems. In our view, Chemtob et al. describe an exceptional achievement, where a PPP served as a stepping stone for the subsequent integration of irregular migrants’ in publicly funded HIV care. However, we argue that in many other cases PPPs are liable to undermine public healthcare and inclusionary claims. This view is informed by the fundamentally different concepts of healthcare that underlie PPPs and public healthcare provision (namely, health care as a commodity vs. access to healthcare as a right) and existing evidence on PPPs’ role in facilitating welfare retrenchment. In contexts that are dominated by an exclusionary stance toward irregular migrants, such as contemporary Israel, we believe that PPPs will become stopgaps that undermine health rights, rather than a first foot in the door that leads toward equitable provision of healthcare for all.

Background: Traditional patterns relating to how to handle the provision of culturally competent care for refugees are often challenging. Addressing the unique religious and cultural beliefs and norms of refugee parents during the childbirth process will alleviate their anxiety and feelings of alienation with respect to healthcare systems. Objectives: This paper aims to understand the meaning of Jordanian women’s beliefs and practices related to their foetuses and newborns and to facilitate the recognition by Western healthcare providers of these practices among immigrants and refugees. Methods: An interpretive phenomenological study was used to conduct an individual in-depth semi-structured interview with nine women. Results: Eight superordinate themes were identified: couple in legitimate relationship before conception, rejection of abortion, accepting the gender of the baby, guaranteeing that ‘Allah’ is the first word heard, rubbing the newborn’s palate with a date, choosing a meaningful name, ensuring circumcision for boys and showing gratitude to Allah. Conclusion: The attitudes of Jordanian women towards newborns’ rights and care are greatly influenced by their cultural and religious backgrounds. Capturing these attitudes and needs can inform the development of health education strategies and information resources. To enhance Muslim women’s engagement in maternal newborn health services, maternity staff should endeavour to create a trusting relationship with the childbearing women, which values their social, cultural and spiritual needs.

Abstract Children's health status varies within and between European countries. To what extent this is associated with access barriers to timely and effective care children may face is not yet fully understood. Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) guarantees a fundamental right to healthcare for all children, regardless of their legal status in terms of citizenship, residence, or insurance. Using information contained in the Health Systems in Transition reports produced by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, additional relevant literature, and responses to a structured questionnaire filled out by key informants from all 27 EU MS and the United Kingdom, we evaluated whether European countries comply with the specific obligations that can be drawn from the UNCRC. While all countries considered have ratified the UNCRC, only four countries have included a specific disposition in their legislation that establishes an unconditional, universal right to health services for all children living in their territory. In other countries, the fragmented way of defining children's access rights can create gaps in legislation which can leave certain groups of children without coverage. Children with irregular residence are the most vulnerable group when it comes to eligibility problems, but other groups of children may also fall between the cracks or be only entitled to restrict-ed or conditional access to health care. These insights show that international treaties, such as the UNCRC, can help monitor health coverage and ensure that basic human rights to health services are guaranteed in times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine Displacement, but may be insufficient without concrete transposition into national legislative frameworks.

Abstract Issue With increasing of numbers of people moving in Europe and around the world, the health of migrants has become a key global public-health issue. Migrants in an irregular situation (MIS) represent an important part of the migration phenomenon, whether they have become irregular by entering a country without authorisation or by overstaying a visa, including whose applied unsuccessfully for asylum. Description of the problem Overstaying of visas is not unusual in EU countries and during 2015 and 2016 in particular, many countries experienced a large number of unauthorised entrants. Health policies for MIS are increasingly a matter of concern. Using the 2015 Migrant Integration Policy Index Health strand (MIPEX HS) it is possible to conduct an analysis of health policies, focusing on access to health services by MIS. Results Among the 34 European countries covered by the MIPEX HS, Italy’s overall score of 65 is exceeded only by Switzerland (70) and Norway (67). Averaging the indicators of access for MIS, Italy obtains the highest score (83), followed by Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland with 67. Its score for legal entitlements to health care is 75 (the same as Sweden), while reporting of MIS to the immigration authorities is prohibited and there are no sanctions against helping them. However, legislation introduced by the new government in 2018 has restricted some of their rights. Lessons Current migration to Europe requires dealing with short-term health needs as well as strengthening public health and health systems in the long term. This presentation will discuss the lessons that can be learned from the comparative analysis of health policies for MIS using the MIPEX HS. Key messages Affordable health care is a human right, which should not be denied to any migrant. Policy analysis plays a key role in identifying interventions for promoting health equity.

Pat Buchanan’s infamous speech to the 1992 Republican convention (Buchanan), has often been understood as a defining moment in the US culture wars (Hartman). The speech’s central claim that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” oriented around the idea that the US was a nation divided between two opposing values systems. On one side were Democrat defenders of “abortion on demand” and “homosexual rights” and on the other those who, like then Republican presidential candidate George Bush, stood by the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.”Buchanan’s speech helped popularise the idea that the US was riven by fundamental cultural divides, an idea that became a media staple but was hotly contested by scholars.The year before Buchanan’s speech, James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America advanced a “culture wars thesis” based in claims of a growing “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding” (Hunter 42). Hunter cited increasing polarisation in debates on “abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism” (Hunter 42) and claimed that the defining religious divides in the US were no longer between religions but within them. In the intense scholarly debate that followed its publication, as Irene Taviss Thomson has summarised, little empirical evidence emerged of any real divide.Yet this lack of empirical evidence does not mean that talk of culture wars can be easily dismissed. The culture wars, as I have argued elsewhere (Davis), were and are a media product designed to sharpen social divides for electoral gain. No doubt because of the usefulness of this product, culture wars discourse remains a persistent feature of public debate across the west. The symbolic discourse that positions the culture wars and its supposedly intractable differences as real, I argue, deserves consideration in its own right.In what follows, I analyse the use of culture wars discourse in two defining documents. The first, Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture wars” speech, reputedly put the culture wars front and centre of US politics. The second, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s 2016 article in Breitbart News, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos), sought to define its moment by affirming the arrival of a new political movement, the “alt-right”, as a force in US politics. With its homage to Buchanan and written in the belief that “politics is downstream from culture” the article sought to position the alt-right as an inheritor of Buchanan’s legacy and to mark a new defining moment in an ongoing culture war.This self-referential framing, I argue, belies deep differences between Buchanan’s rhetoric and that of Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. Buchanan’s defence of American values, while spectacularly adversarial, is at base democratic, whereas, despite its culturalist posturing, one project of “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” is to reinstate biological notions of race and gender difference in the political agenda.Culture Wars ThenBuchanan’s speech came after decades of sniping. The emergence of the “counterculture” of the 1960s helped create a basis for the idea that US politics was defined by an irreducible clash of values (Thomson). Buchanan played a direct role in fostering such divides. As he famously wrote in a 1971 memo to then President Richard Nixon in which he suggested exploiting racial divides, if we “cut … the country in half, my view is that we would have far the larger half.” But the language of Buchanan’s 1992 speech, while incendiary, is nevertheless democratic in its emphasis on delineating rival political platforms. Much culture wars discourse focuses on the embodied politics of gender, sexuality and race. A principal target of Buchanan’s speech was abortion, which since the Roe versus Wade judgement of 1973 that legalised part-term abortion in the US has been a defining culture wars issue. At the “top” of Democrat candidate Bill Clinton’s agenda, Buchanan claimed, is “unrestricted abortion on demand.” Buchanan singled out Hillary Clinton for special attack:friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand … homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat … is not the kind of change America wants.Buchanan then pledges to support George Bush, who had beaten him for the Republican nomination, and Bush’s stance “against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” He also supports Bush on “right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools.” Buchanan’s language here references essentialist ideas of morality and contrasts them against the supposed immorality of his opponents but is ultimately predicated in the democratic languages of law-making and rights and the adversarial language of electoral politics. Through these contrasts the speech builds to its famous centrepiece:my friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.Buchanan, here, sharpens and maps the contrasts he has been working with onto differences in identity. Politics, here, is not about the distribution of resources but is about identity, values and a commensurate difference in belief systems. On one side are righteous Americans, on the other a culture of immorality that threatens the proper religious basis of the nation. Notably, the speech makes no direct mention of race. It instead uses code. Evoking the LA riots that took place earlier that year, Buchanan sides with the troopers who broke up the riots.they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage … and as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.Unsaid here is that the “mob” were black and reacting against the injustice of the beating of a black man, Rodney King, by police. The implication is that to “take back our culture … take back our country” is to vanquish the restive black enemy within. By using code Buchanan is able to avoid possible charges of racism, positioning the rioters not as racially different but as culturally different; their deficit is not genetic but patriotic.Culture Wars NowSince the 1990s culture wars discourse has become entrenched as a media staple. Supposedly intractable values divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” play out incessantly across a conservative media sphere that spans outlets (Fox News), platforms (Breitbart News), broadcasters (Rush Limbaugh), and commentators such as Ann Coulter, in debate over issues ranging from gun control, LGBTQI rights, American history and sex education and prayer in schools. This discourse, crystalised in divisive terms such as “cultural Marxist,” “social justice warrior” and “snowflake”, is increasingly generated by online bulletin boards such as the 4chan/pol/(politically incorrect) and /b/-Random boards, which function as a crucible for trolling and meme-making (Phillips) that routinely targets minorities, women and especially feminists. As Angela Nagle has said (24), Gamergate, the 2014 episode in which female game reviewers and designers critical of sexism in the gaming industry were targeted with organised trolling, played a pivotal role in “uniting different online groups and spreading the tactics of chan culture to the broad online right.” Other conduits for extremist discourse to the mainstream include sites such as the white supremacist Daily Stormer, alt-right sites, and “men’s rights” sites such as Return of Kings. The self-described aim of this discourse, as the white nationalist Jared Swift has said, has been to move the “Overton window” of what constitutes acceptable public discourse far to the right (in Daniels).The emergence of this diverse conservative media sphere provided opportunities for new celebrities willing to parse older forms of culture wars discourse with new forms of online extremism and to announce themselves as ringmasters of whatever circus might result. One such person is Milo Yiannopoulos. Quick to read the opportunities in Gamergate, he announced himself a sudden convert to the gaming cause (which he had previously dismissed) and helped turn the controversy into a rallying point for a nascent alt-right (Yiannopoulos). In 2014 Yiannopoulos was recruited by Breitbart News as a senior editor. Breitbart’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, is perhaps most famous for his dictum that “politics is downstream from culture”, an apt motto for a culture war.In 2016 Yiannopoulos, working with Bokhari, another Breitbart staffer, published, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right”, which, written with Andrew Breitbart’s dictum in mind, sought to announce the radicalism of a new antiestablishment conservative political force and yet to make it palatable for a mainstream audience. The article claims the “paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan” as one of the origins of the alt-right. Donald Trump is praised as “perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan.” The rest, they argue, is little more than harmless online mischief. The alt-right, they claim, is a fun-loving “movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet,” made up of people who are “dangerously bright.” Similarly, the “manosphere” of “men’s rights” sites, infamous for misogyny, are praised as “one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies” and positioned as harmless alongside an endorsement of masculinist author Jack Donovan’s “wistful” laments for “the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.” Mass trolling and the harassment of opponents by “the alt-right’s meme team” is characterised as “undeniably hysterical” and justifiable in pursuit of lulz.The sexism and racism found on bulletin boards such as 4 chan, for Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, is no less harmless. Young people, they claim, are drawn to the alt right not because of ideology but because “it seems fresh, daring and funny” contrasted against the “authoritarian instincts of the progressive left. With no personal memories or experience of racism, they “have trouble believing it’s actually real … they don’t believe that the memes they post on/pol/ are actually racist. In fact, they know they’re not—they do it because it gets a reaction.”For all these efforts to style the alt-right as mere carnivalesque paleoconservatism, though, there is a fundamental difference between Buchanan’s speech and “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the Alt-Right.” Certainly, Bokhari and Yiannopoulos hit the same culture wars touchstones as Buchanan: race, sexuality and gender issues. But whereas Buchanan’s speech instances the “new racism” (Ansell) in its use of code to avoid charges of biological racism, Yiannopoulos and Bokhari are more direct. The article presents as an exemplary instance of how to fight a culture war but epitomises a new turn in the culture wars from culture to biologism. The alt-right is positioned as unashamedly Eurocentric and having little to do with racism. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also seek to distance the alt-right from the “Stormfront set” and “1488ers” (“1488” is code for neo-Nazi). Yet even as they do so, they embrace “human biodiversity” ideology (biological racism), ethnic separatism and the building of walls to keep different racial groups apart. “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the alt-right” was written in secret consultation with leading white supremacist figures (Bernstein) and namechecks the openly white supremacist Richard Spencer who is given credit for helping found “the media empire of the modern-day alternative right.”Spencer has argued that “Race is something between a breed and an actual species” and a process of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” should take place by which non-white Americans leave (Nagle 59). He is an admirer of the Italian ‘superfascist’ and notorious racist Julius Evola, who Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also namecheck. They also excuse race hate sites such as VDARE and American Renaissance as home to “an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” It is mere happenstance, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, that the “natural conservatives” drawn to the alt-right are “mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.” Yet as they also say,while eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration. Border walls are a much safer option. The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.“Demographic displacement” here is code for “white genocide” a meme assiduously promoted over many years by the US white supremacist Bob Whitaker, now deceased, who believed that immigration, interracial marriage, and multiculturalism dilute white influence and will drive the white population to extinction (Daniels). The idea that “culture is inseparable from race” and that “some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” echo white supremacist calls for a white “ethno-state.”“An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” also namechecks so-called “neoreactionaries” such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari regard egalitarianism as an affront to “every piece of research on hereditary intelligence” and see liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism as having “no better a historical track record than monarchy.” Land and Yarvin, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, offer a welcome vision of the conservative future:asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology … these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology—one that many were waiting for.Culture Wars FuturesAs the culture wars have turned biological so they have become entrenched ever more firmly in mainstream politics. The “new conservative ideology” Yiannopoulos and Bokhari mention reeks of much older forms of conservative ideology currently being taken up in the US and elsewhere, based in naturalised gender hierarchies and racialised difference. This return to the past is fast becoming institutionalised. One of the stakes in the bitter 2018 dispute over the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was the prospect that Kavanaugh’s vote will create a conservative majority in the court that will enable the revisiting of a talismanic moment in the culture wars by overturning the Roe versus Wade judgement. Alt-right calls for a white ethno-state find an analogue in political attacks on asylum seekers, the reinforcement of racialised differential citizenship regimes around the globe, the building of walls to keep out criminalised Others, and anti-Islamic immigration measures. The mainstreaming of hate can be seen in the willingness of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and as president to retweet the white supremacist tweets of @WhiteGenocideTM, his hesitation to repudiate a campaign endorsement by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, his retweeting of bogus black crime statistics, his accusations that illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers and rapists, and his anti-Islamic immigration stance. It can be seen, too, in the recent electoral successes of white nationalist parties across Europe.For all their embrace of Eurocentrism and “the preservation of western culture” the alt-right revisiting of issues of race and gender in terms that seek to reinstate biological hierarchy undermines the Enlightenment ethics of equality and universalism that underpin western human rights conventions and democratic processes. The “Overton window” of acceptable public debate has moved far to the right and long taboo forms of race and gender-based hate have returned to the public agenda. Buchanan’s 1992 Republican convention speech, by contrast, for all its incendiary rhetoric, toxic homophobia, sneering anti-feminism, and coded racism, somehow manages to look like a relic from a kinder, gentler age.ReferencesAnsell, Amy Elizabeth. New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.Bernstein, Joseph. “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas into the Mainstream.” BuzzFeed News, 10 May 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism>.Bokhari, Allum, and Milo Yiannopoulos. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” Breitbart, 29 Mar. 2016. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/>.Buchanan, Pat. “1992 Republican National Convention Speech.” Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website, 17 Aug. 1992. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148>.Daniels, Jessie. “Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story.” Dame Magazine, 19 Oct. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/10/19/twitter-and-white-supremacy-love-story/>.Davis, Mark. “Neoliberalism, the Culture Wars and Public Policy.” Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendency. Eds. Chris Miller and Lionel Orchard. Policy Press, 2014. 27–42.Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press, 2015.Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America. Basic Books, 1991.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. MIT Press, 2015.Thomson, Irene Taviss. Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas. University of Michigan Press, 2010.Yiannopoulos, Milo. “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Breitbart, 1 Sep. 2014. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/01/lying-greedy-promiscuous-feminist-bullies-are-tearing-the-video-game-industry-apart/>.

Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. 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NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).