Victims of Political Violence and Terrorism

Front matter

P RESILIENT |

VANE A A

“While victims of political violence and terrorism are frequently centred in politicians’ speeches and media headlines, Will McGowan provides us with the first book-length and empirically rich study of survivors’ experiences. By building relationships of longstanding trust with his interviewees, the author has brought their stories of political violence and its aftermath to light, in this sensitive and nuanced inquiry. This methodologically rigorous and theoretically informed book fills a notable gap in Political Science, Criminology and Sociology — acquainting us, for the first time, with the making of “resilient” survivors, as well as the loss that pervades their recovery’. Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Professor of International Security, University of Warwick

Contents

Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 PART | Resilience as Discourse and Practice 17

1 Setting the Scene of the “Terror—-Trauma—Resilience’

Nexus in the 21st Century 19 2 To Survivors Themselves: Why, Where, and How to Study

Introduction

‘Resilience’ has become something of a 21st-century buzzword in social and environmental policy fields as diverse as ecology, urban planning, economics, and security, also featuring prominently in clinical psychology, counselling therapies, and popular self-help discourse. It has attracted widespread usage and sparked considerable controversy within social science and beyond. It is now a commonly used epithet within many political institutions, reflecting the seemingly universal appeal and purchase it has had within social policy and among the political class. Globally mediated phenomena, from terror attacks to controversial political events to public health pandemics, have seen discursive appeals for resilience across this diverse and vast qualitative terrain, yet all are implicitly said to exist: resilient systems, resilient communities, resilient subjects. Yet, how do we know ‘resilience’ when we see it? How do we go about researching it? What does this contemporary precedent of ‘resilience’ thinking reveal about everyday politics and, more specifically, about the everyday politics of trauma and memory? In short, what do we know about the reality of ‘resilience’?

This book takes resilience as its point of departure and return as a ubiquitous, much used concept that is nonetheless poorly understood and which remains less often subject to critical, empirical scrutiny by advocates and critics alike who more frequently tend to present it as a fait accompli. Its discursive deployment in relation to counterterrorism, radicalisation, and security as a more ‘positive’ development to the negative and defensive category of risk superficially encourages the building of robust community structures, preparedness amongst emergency responders, and the capacity to ‘bounce back’ in the event of security emergencies and terrorist attacks. This drive to “build resilience’ is manifest in policy responses that operate at micro, meso, and macro levels, ranging from exhortations for citizen policing to community-based projects to challenge extremism, and national appeals to ‘pull together’ to combat terrorism. Setting these apparent shifts in framing to one side momentarily, might we ask a deceptively simple question instead: how have people who have survived political violence and terrorism (PVT) coped, or not, with the harm such critical incidents produce? What are the factors influencing this?

I focus on terror attacks and their aftermaths here because they are quintessential examples of individual and personal traumas which are often invoked to garner and mould particular kinds of collective action (McGowan, 2016). Declarations of ‘our’ ability (whoever this ‘we’ is) to ‘bounce back’, or of ‘keeping calm and carrying on’, have become almost stock responses from mainstream media and policymakers. But what is the relationship between the lived experiences at the heart of such tragedies and these wider sentiments? Drawing on fieldwork at an NGO in the UK offering support to survivors of PVT, subsequent in-depth interviews with some of these survivors and staff, and recent responses to terror attacks in the UK by government, media and communities, this book explores this political and conceptual controversy by drawing out some of the specificities at play when victims of traumatic violence share their testimonies.

This research began in 2014 at The Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace (FfP), an organisation that works for peace and non-violent conflict resolution and provides needs assessments and support to survivors of PVT in the form of their Survivors Assistance Network. The incidents bringing survivors to this NGO span a diverse time and place range, including both institutional violence committed ‘from above’ (e.g. the shooting of innocent protestors by the British military in Northern Ireland in 1972), as well as anti-institutional violence ‘from below’ (e.g. the 2005 London bombings) (Ruggiero, 2006: 1). While the spectacle of ‘terrorism’ feeds into a whole host of public fears and anxieties, often harnessed by media and state actors to justify the ceaseless ‘war on terror’, survivors with first-hand experience of violence perpetrated by both state and non-state actors have a regrettably intimate vantage point from which to reflect on such issues. Through a close reading of participant’s narratives, the work maps a range of impacts of PVT, details the ‘resilience resources’ (Overland, 2013: 204) survivors have drawn on in traversing this suffering and loss, and highlights a temporal complexity to survivors’ narratives typically rendered over within counterterrorism and security policy discourses espousing notions of citizen resilience and empowerment.

Focusing on how individuals have coped in the face of personal injury and devastating loss, this book not only explores ‘resilience’ as an organising metaphor for pre-emptive action and preparation against future shocks (as it is typically framed within social and security policy), but also as a human response to the short- and long-term aftermaths of past harm and trauma. Recognising that our responses to adversity are enacted in the present, within various touching distances and reference points to the past, and with shifting emphases placed on the future, a much messier, complex and interesting portrait appears of ‘the resilient survivor’.

Rather than confirming or challenging the veracity of existing resilience policies or theories, this book simply attempts to show that there are many different ways of being a person. We live in an era obsessed with entrepreneurial soul searching, self-optimisation and demonstrable strength in the face of adversity, which both encourages and warns against the power of disclosure. Yet given the fact that every single voice represented within these pages could be said to have responded to harm and injustice ‘resiliently’ at some point, even while their experiences, histories, and responses differ so markedly, how are we to make sense of this pervasive and catch-all concept? If, as Aristotle once declared, ‘a friend to all is a friend to none’, with resilience offering so broad an umbrella that it is rendered meaningless, then the story will have to stop here. But, of course, we are not passive objects who remain indifferent to the ways our experiences are packaged and classified. In this case, harm and suffering is silenced at times, reified and magnified at others, with varying accents placed on survivors’ strength and agency. How, then, are we to approach such unstable phenomena?

Making Up Resilience

‘Resilience’ divides opinion. Many compelling critiques discard it out of hand for its supposed nihilism, vacuity, or for the depoliticising powers it is said to possess. Many more sing its praises for its restorative, regenerative, or empowering potential. A frustrated few of us, keen to explore the reality in between, take this controversy itself to be an interesting manifestation of a much broader set of methodological and political contentions. As Humbert and Joseph (2019) rightly highlight, research to date has left much space to explore the practical manifestations of resilience, including its relationship with neoliberalism, indigeneity and, of course, competing definitions. Not everyone is interested in conceptual conflict. An emergent, but disparate, number of books and articles similarly interested in exploring ‘practices of resilience’ (Cavelty, Kaufmann and Kristensen, 2015: 3) often begin by acknowledging its sprawling, messy and contested nature, precisely in order to quickly move on to the ‘real task at hand’ of working with specific data and away from what they see as abstract or polemic generalisations. This book takes a slightly different approach insofar as both contested but abstract struggles over discursive meaning and observable insights derived from situated local practice are deemed equally important, with each finding their way into my analysis.

While resilience continues to enjoy an intriguing, contested, and often irritating adulation through self-help ‘mediums’ (a homonym readers will have to negotiate for themselves!), it has become equally pervasive because of its deployment in policymaking language. Commenting on this ‘rise of resilience’, Chandler (2014: 3) states: ‘the key aspects that define resilience approaches to policy-making are methodological assumptions about the nature of the world, the complex problem of governance, and the policy processes suitable to governing this complexity’.The original impetus for setting out on this research journey was to investigate how closely this burgeoning policy concept seemed to adhere to lived experience using empirical insights drawn from survivors of PVT. Surely, abstract sounding descriptions about ‘complexity governance’

would prove irrelevant? As time wore on, however, I became more interested in the extent to which these somewhat abstract generalisations and the lived experiences of people going about their lives might be mutually altered over time rather than unconnected. Later chapters show how the data collected illuminate a range of broader issues than those associated with resilience, but it is nonetheless this ‘stretchy’ and ‘pervasive’ concept (Walklate, McGarry and Mythen, 2014: 410) which provides a point of departure and return throughout the book.

On the one hand, then, we have a somewhat esoteric, though undoubtedly significant, shift in policy thinking. ‘Resilience research’ typically begins by acknowledging its omnipresence and diversity, often pointing to a confusing and abstract conceptualisation of a broader set of governing rationalities (Chandler, 2014: 203). Until we flesh these out with examples of more tangible, specific practices, we can say little about the form ‘resilience’ is said to be taking. Purely theoretical work focusing on resilience often appears anxious to iron out its conceptual ambiguity, exemplifying simultaneously the promise and futility claimed by its proponents and critics alike.

On the other hand, the word resilience remains an ordinary member of the English language with relevant everyday use value in all sorts of contexts. If readers bring to bear familiar connotations of the word, they are likely to arrive at fairly ordinary ideas, certainly more mundane than theoretical problems in ‘the governance of complexity’ (Chandler, 2014). Often, the use of the word ‘resilience’ within psychological studies of coping, healing, and positive adaptation sound much more akin to this ordinary and familiar everyday use than studies of political governance and even carry a ring of linguistic convenience. Clinical psychologist George Bonanno, one of the pioneers in bringing about a focus on ‘resilience’ to studies of trauma, loss and bereavement, places a striking lack of importance on clarifying ‘resilience’ or even insisting on its use at all, suggesting that its use is merely coincidental with a range of familiar, positive attributes or outcomes. Describing positive outcomes to trauma, as opposed to ‘chronicity’, by which he means ‘long-lasting mental health problems after highly aversive events’, Bonanno (2012;emphasis added) goes on to explain:‘[...] but you'll notice that the most common response is down there in that spot [signalling to a section on his graph showing a majority (36-65%) of people classified as exhibiting “mild disruptions in normal functioning” after these highly aversive events] that we [clinical psychology] weren’t sure about — that’s what I’m calling here resilience, you can call this anything, call this a stable trajectory, healthy functioning — the word resilience is not really necessary, “cos this is really an empirical finding” . Self-evident, perhaps even objective. Out there in the world, just waiting to be discovered, collected, and measured. Unlike the anxious search for clarity emanating from theoretical debates about resilience, here we see a positive nonchalance toward its very use in a context that we might readily ascribe it some importance and conceptual purchase.

This book is neither anxious to arrive at a position of theoretical clarity nor disinterested in whether resilience has a specific form. Contra Bonanno, empirical findings cannot be divorced or isolated from the ways in which we gather or describe them, and there certainly are valid reasons for wanting to think carefully through why we choose these words over others. This, in fact, is crucial if we are to arrive at a more holistic picture of what resilience might mean or whether it resonates in practice. Eponymous ‘resilience’ research, discourse, policy, and popular and clinical literatures, in addition to the viewpoints of survivors themselves, all need to be taken into account.

There is an inevitability and even a weariness surrounding resilience, including the rifts alluded to above, leaving some ‘exhausted by its ubiquitous weight and the chains it places around all our necks’ (Evans and Reid, 2015: 154). But when phenomena in the human sciences seem inevitable, they also make for fascinating cases of what philosopher Ian Hacking (1995, 2002) refers to as ‘interactive’ or ‘human kinds’ (this will be explained more fully in Chapter 2). Distinguishing ‘human kinds’ from ‘natural kinds’ has been integral to Hacking’s notion of ‘making up people’, which he has used to make sense of various changing phenomena including mental health classifications, child abuse, suicide, autism, obesity, and many more besides (Hacking, 2007). Rather than some inherent fascination with any one of these topics’ specific qualities, they all provide interesting case studies ‘in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications’ (Hacking, 2007: 285). This ‘looping effect and the dynamics between classified people and their actions allow us to think about how people are constituted as certain kinds of people, at certain points in time — in short, what ‘makes them up’? If we were to separate them purely for heuristic purposes, this is an approach that places equal and iterative importance on discourse and practice (notwithstanding the problems such a reduction invites) (Hacking, 2004).

Approaching the problem of resilience in this way requires that we take it seriously. Hacking’s work provides as much mileage for making sense of ‘the resilient terrorism survivor’ idea (sketched out in Chapter 1) as it does the direct accounts of survivors of terrorism explored later. This book focuses predominantly on the latter, or what Hacking (1997) deems the ‘object’ under study, but as something surely connected to the ‘idea’ (Hacking, 1997) of ‘the resilient terrorism survivor’ which, as Chapter 1 argues, pervades the present conjuncture. This tapestry of work has repeatedly opened up fruitful lines of inquiry within the data and resonated strongly with the twin problem posed by making sense of tangible, empirical social action against an emergent and shifting discourse of resilience. It does not and cannot, however, make good all of the project’s methodological shortcomings (see, for example, McGowan, 2019, 2020; McGowan and Cook, 2020). The following note on theory and method, along with Chapter 2’s more detailed explanation, will have to suffice in guiding readers through subsequent data analysis chapters before these methodological shortcomings are picked up again more decisively at the end of the book.

Though finding value in Hacking’s work on ‘making up people’ and other associated ideas, this book cannot claim to offer anywhere near as thoroughgoing account of ‘the resilient survivor’ as Hacking’s own genealogies do, but it is hoped that this book can at least introduce new readers to his body of work and act as an invitation for them to explore some of his ideas for themselves.

A Note on Theory and Method

This is a book about resilience that draws on the experiences of a small group of survivors to explore this idea. As stated above, it maintains that ideas such as ‘resilience’ oscillate between more or less discursive, practical, structural and subjective terrains, picking up new meanings as they go and producing shifting manifestations over time and space. The book does not offer a ‘theory of resilience’, but a discussion and analysis of resilience as an incredibly popular and contested term and concept, and a survey of where these different meanings of resilience resonate or jar with survivors’ experiences. It is not written in order for its findings to be applied to larger groups of people or survivors recovering from events elsewhere around the world. It is, however, written as an invitation for like-minded scholars or practitioners who are working with or researching survivors (of PVT, in particular, but not exclusively) to compare and contrast their findings with those described here. Chapter 7, in particular, presents an ideal-typical constellation of resilience and one way we might group the kinds of resilience found within the preceding analysis, but this represents just one possible arrangement of my findings and, as ever, this arrangement must be approached critically by readers who are encouraged to scrutinise its curation.

As with most qualitative projects, the primary data and empirical findings discussed here form only part of the broader argument being made. As well as not developing a new theory of resilience, the work should also not be viewed as a substantive case study example of a particular phenomenon being used to champion a specific method over all others. In fact, the reverse is almost true in that the methods used to attain and present survivors’ experiences are woefully inadequate for representing anything like their reality. The methods used to attain the primary data at the heart of the book emerged out of a combination of practicability, convenience, opportunism and, above all, ethical considerations. While I remain agnostic in hindsight about the place of interview data and the narratives we might extract from them (see McGowan and Cook, 2020), there are two points I would like to make about this agnosticism. Firstly, I believe research findings such as those which involved people who gave their time so freely, generously and openly should at the very least (and this is a relatively low bar but nonetheless an important starting point for researchers) be shared directly with those same people at the earliest opportunity and that this should take priority over compiling what are often predominantly academic outputs (such as the book you are reading). The primary data in this book was collected mostly between 2014 and 2017 and, I am pleased to say, the findings were presented at a participatory workshop entitled ‘Making Sense of the Past in the Present’ at the Foundation for Peace in Warrington in November 2019. This event and many related communications with its participants were key in affirming earlier interpretations of the data and in shaping the arguments put forward in this book.

Secondly, misgivings one may have at times about relatively grandiose ideals of representing ‘reality’ as best we can may easily, though inappropriately, seem dismissive of survivors. Put another way, survivors’ experiences and the academic task of describing survivors’ experiences in our research outputs are often sadly far from one and the same. This is not to acknowledge that many academics are survivors who also write about their experiences, including through participatory action research where original experiences and their dissemination ARE more mutually inclusive, nor is it to argue that we actually attempt to separate who we are as people from our participants. A compassionate politics requires the contrary. But my concern in these introductory remarks is simply to emphasise that our findings should be methodologically ‘scrutinizable’, regardless of their sensitivity. This links to the first point — a set of findings that have been first presented back to participants as soon as is practicable after their collection, prior to publication, seems more open, ethically speaking, to free critique. This sense of ‘doing right’ by participants is not without its issues but it does make a case that early dissemination of our interpretations to our participants, in turn, adds methodological rigour by allowing us to treat such data as accurate, transparent and relatively comprehensive (though see McGowan and Cook, 2020) as far as its collection is concerned which renders any subsequent critique surely more robust.

Finally, and more fundamentally, is a concern over how reliant we are becoming, particularly through ostensibly critical spaces within disciplines and sub-disciplines such as politics, sociology, criminology, victimology, human geography, international relations, among many others, on the seemingly unbridled sense of epistemic virtue often problematically attributed to the panacea of ‘lived experiences’. This inexorable rise has not been helped, arguably, by social science’s mass turn in recent decades to what is typically termed ‘narrative analysis’ (Riessman, 1993, 2008; Elliott, 2005).As a book both motivated and supported in large part by narrative, by stories, it might seem odd to begin with such a cautionary and even scornful comment. But there is sometimes confusion here. ‘Narrative analysis’ implies a thoroughgoing method of investigation (‘the analysis’ part), but often reveals itself to be an empirical object of interest (‘the narrative’) for the analyst. Certainly this book, in the main, tends heavily towards the latter, providing only ideal typical themes (Psathas, 2005, see also Methodological Appendix) from broader transcribed interview narratives, rather than a sustained analysis of the narrative form such interviews took (as might be found in conversation analysis, linguistics, or some critical discourse analysis, for example). Nevertheless, the following sentiments of philosopher Rick Roderick (1993) in his now-classic The Self Under Siege lecture series provide a useful description of what is deemed interesting and significant about narratives for my purposes here:

Td like to argue in a strong sense that every one of us has some kind of theory of what we are as a person. Now by that I don’t mean a really highly developed theory like one in quantum mechanics or anything like that. I may only mean a narrative story, something that connects, or attempts to connect, the various, disconnected episodes in our lives, something that gives us a reason to think we are the same person today that we were yesterday in some important sense, even if that sense only means that you’ve still got the same driving license. In some way we want to have a narrative about our lives, about ourselves. We want them to mean something, in short.

This presents quite a broad, but coherent, sketch of what we might mean when we talk about narratives. Note, however, that Roderick says nothing of ‘lived experience’, or of the relationship between the narratives we use to navigate life events and the facticity of those events. Nor does he say that we can use narratives to grasp some sense of ontological reality in others. I use narratives and imply certain ‘lived experiences’ from them with these omissions firmly in mind.

I also urge readers working with ‘narratives’ and who elevate ‘lived experience’ to an almost sacrosanct epistemic status to bear two related problems in mind. Firstly, there is often a close alignment made between ‘lived experience’ and discourses of self-help, including ‘resilience’, which do not automatically disempower but which often rely on negative freedoms and individualised approaches to empowerment. Secondly, methodologically, I do not think that we can use this kind of data in order to make ontological claims equivalent to, or even reliably representative of, survivors’ firsthand experiences (McGowan, 2019; McGowan and Cook, 2020).To claim we can is an epistemological fallacy but one which nevertheless goes unchallenged in much social research drawing on narratives or their analysis. Rather, these survivors’ perspectives are presented in relation to particular projections of what can or cannot, or rather what do and do not, appear to constitute ‘resilience’ in popular and political imaginaries contemporarily.

Structure of the Book

Part I Resilience as Discourse and Practice

In pursuing the lines of enquiry alluded to above, Part I of the book, ‘Resilience as Discourse and Practice’, lays the foundations for such an analysis. Chapter 1 sets the scene of the ‘terror—trauma-resilience’ nexus in the 21st century. Taking an already ample and valuable genealogical literature on resilience as a point of departure (see, inter alia, Walker and Cooper, 2011; Joseph, 2013; Evans and Reid, 2014; Zebrowski, 2016; Michelsen, 2017; Bourbeau, 2018), it focuses attention more specifically on the ubiquity of resilience in relation to PVT in what we might dub the ‘Civil Contingencies era’ (particularly since the early 2000s). While ‘resilience’ is frequently paired, implicitly and explicitly, with various antonyms across different areas of social policy, ‘trauma’ is frequently invoked — clinically and culturally — in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Whether ‘resilience’ and ‘trauma’ represent true binary opposites remains a moot point and is not the focus of the chapter. Rather, it is argued that contemporary discourses of resilience have attempted to foster some sort of collective identity at communal and national levels (qua Bean, Keränen and Durfy, 2011) against the backdrop of collective trauma (qua Alexander, 2012) — both real and imagined. In addition to this declared stoicism, which as the chapter shows has also been written into critical incident recovery and counterterror preparedness legislation, a large and diverse corpus of work has studied the propensity of individuals who have been exposed to critical incidents such as terror attacks to recover and respond ‘resiliently’. Taking these heterogeneous approaches seriously, it is argued that psychology’s relative monopoly on empirical studies of such victimisation — coupled with an abundance of theoretical and polemic exchanges about resilience discourse, which fail to observe practical specificity — leave a noticeable lacuna for sociologically informed narrative research to fill.

Before subjecting questions of resilience to this closer empirical scrutiny, Chapter 2 asks how, why, and where we might study survivors of PVT. Addressing these issues, respectively, the chapter provides a way of traversing the vast and complex definitional terrain of PVT. It then argues that victims and survivors of such violence represent important actors with regrettably intimate vantage points from which to reflect directly on the experience of feeling, witnessing or suffering PVT and its aftermath. Despite this, they are often selectively overlooked in both mainstream political discourse and ‘critical’ studies of PVT where their views or narratives may be unpalatable to the prevailing or aspirational worldviews of relevant actors, including political elites. Connecting this chapter with the first, it is argued that the philosophical ideas of Ian Hacking (2002, 2004) concerning language, action and historically dynamic ontology offer valuable provocations for thinking about resilience from a number of simultaneous angles.

Part I! Turning Points and Processes of Resilience

Part II of the book, “Turning Points and Processes of Resilience’, leaves the world of theorising, policy mantras and methodology momentarily behind in order to focus on the voices of survivors themselves. Of course, staying true to the principles outlined above, none of these things truly can be left behind. They shape and mould the very context in which such voices were solicited. Those voices, after all, were solicited by me. But the chapters that sit there speak far less ambiguously about the matter at hand than I ever could. Chapter 3 is the first of these chapters, predominantly driven by qualitative in-depth interview data, which are written and structured in a way that aims to give maximum voice and space to the narratives of participants from the original study. This chapter specifically maps out some of the major impacts of PVT as articulated by survivors themselves. This includes a range of direct impacts on individual survivors, including physical injuries and their manifestation over time, short-term emotional responses such as anger, and the bereavement and grief experienced by those who have lost loved ones. The chapter also documents the indirect impacts experienced by survivors and their families, such as the longer-term emotional responses of fear, anxiety and hypervigilance, lasting consequences for personal relationships, and the challenge of unwanted media attention. While this reads as a standalone chapter, it also ‘sets up’ the question of how survivors have negotiated these harms and challenges.

Exploring the supposed character of resilience mooted in Chapter 1, yet here supported with more practical and empirical specificity, Chapter 4 presents the main sources of support, strength and coping mechanisms — in short, the major ‘resilience resources’ (Overland, 2013: 204) — harnessed by survivors as they have traversed the impacts highlighted in the previous chapter. This includes a heterogeneous mix of individual character and outlook, economic factors such as victim compensation, communal support systems such as religion and solidarity with fellow survivors, and practice-oriented support strategies including therapy and counselling, peace and reconciliation activities, and indeed engagement with the Foundation for Peace charity. This chapter makes good a significant gap in the existing literature by contributing its findings against a surprising dearth of empirical studies focused on practices of resilience among survivors of PVT.

Recurring attention is drawn to the issue of temporality within both social policy discourses around resilience and critical social science literatures deconstructing them. As Chapter 1 explained, the former tends to project and foster an imagined preparedness to catastrophic future adversity, which the latter often point to for examples of responsibilisation and the reaffirmation of liberal self-sufficiency in the face of dwindling State welfare and social solidarity. Valuable as these critiques are, they tend to focus rather narrowly on resilience as a discourse of futurity. Widening this focus from imagined future catastrophe to include actual harms rooted in the past and permeating the present is a central and recurring aim of the book. As such, Chapter 5 explores some of the temporal differences evident between participants, how and why certain survivors seem to articulate their experiences in more or less retrospective or prospective ways, and some of the drivers underpinning these differences. This includes whether violence was perpetrated ‘from above’ (as in the case of Bloody Sunday in Derry, for example) or ‘from below’ (as in the case of 7/7, for example) in terms of State involvement, whether these events were afforded

Introduction Il clear and transparent inquests, the role of justice and peace campaigning, and how injuries and memories of events from the past intermingle with everyday activities in the present to produce different temporal ‘shapes’ to survivors’ outlooks.

Recognising the difficulty and potential reductionism of bringing all individual narratives to the fore thematically, this chapter considers the issue of temporality — an area both underexplored empirically in existing studies of resilience and of great significance within the data — by presenting two comparably in-depth, ideal-typical case studies from the interview sample. This affords the reader a deeper insight into the lives of Anne and Kevin, a couple whose daughter Lauren was killed by a suicide bomber on the London underground on 7 July 2005, and Chandani, who survived a car bomb explosion outside a London department store in December 1983. Ostensibly, while Anne and Kevin have reached a point in their journey since losing Lauren where they now refuse to dwell on the past, Chandani has had to confront, and been confronted by, the past as an inevitable consequence of changes to her practical, everyday lifestyle — changes often beyond her immediate control.