Resilience in the Face of Dual Disasters: Adaptive Strategies of Acehnese Farming Household to Conflict and Tsunami

This study examines long-term resilience pathways among Acehnese farming households exposed to both the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, and the protracted internal armed conflict (1976–2005). Employing a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, it applied a capacity-based framework to assess resilience across coping, adaptive, and transformative dimensions. Data were collected through surveys of 461 farming households, 24 key informant interviews, and participatory observations across four disaster-affected districts in Aceh. Quantitative analysis of the Disaster Resilience Index (DRI), supported by Mann-Whitney U tests, revealed divergent resilience trajectories across the three post-disaster phases. This study investigates how Acehnese farming households adapted their livelihoods in the aftermath of two overlapping shocks over a twenty-year recovery period. The guiding research question is how resilience capacities evolve differently in conflict-and tsunami-affected communities. This study introduced a DRI constructed from locally grounded indicators using entropy-based weighting, offering a novel quantitative tool to capture long-term, hazard-specific resilience trajectories. Integrating this index with qualitative narratives provides one of the first systematic analyses of dual-disaster resilience in an agrarian context. The findings demonstrate that resilience is not uniform: conflict-affected households exhibit higher coping stability, whereas tsunami-affected households show declining transformative capacity. These insights highlight the need for hazard-specific resilience strategies in the future. Policy recommendations emphasize the integration of local wisdom in conflict-affected zones and community-based ecological restoration in tsunami-affected regions. This study contributes a multidimensional framework for resilience analysis in complex, multi-hazard environments, and provides more context-sensitive disaster recovery and rural development policies.