Connections

The emerging challenges for the resilience of nations and socie­ties, as well as for communities and individuals, are numerous and diverse. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of definitions existing in the literature for re­silience, as well as the discrepancies between them, make it difficult to evaluate, operationalize, or to compare resilience research findings across studies. The purpose of the current article is to provide a coherent and general definition for the term resilience and other sub-types of this general concept. This will be achieved through presenting a two-dimen­sional matrix, divided into four content categories (social, economic, polit­ical, and military) and three level categories (individual, community, and State). The recent COVID-19 pandemic may advocate Global as a fourth level, yet its full implication is too premature to be assessed. The proposed matrix generates twelve cells, which present twelve different sub-types of resilience. Subsequently, this matrix can be used for a comprehensive def­inition of resilience and its sub-types, as well as for possible assessments of resilience at its various faces.