Abstract

Background: Disaster medicine studies the capacity of societies to absorb, adapt to, and recover from health or humanitarian crises. From this perspective, collective trust, institutional legibility, and adherence to expected behaviours constitute major determinants of resilience. By analogy with the genetic and genealogical congruence developed by READ, we propose here the concept of symbolic congruence to analyse the role of socially recognized figures in crisis contexts.

Objective: To explore how royal, customary, or institutional figures — Queen Alphonsine Kande, King Felipe VI, the Rex Sacrorum, and Charles X — may contribute to societal resilience when they render several registers of legitimacy socially coherent and facilitate trust, cooperation, or the acceptability of response measures.

Approach: A narrative review of the literature (2000–2026) combining medical, legal, historical, and institutional sources, organized around four contrasting case studies and analysed using a theoretical framework centred on symbolic congruence.

Results: The cases studied show that symbolic congruence does not rest on a simple duality between symbolic legitimacy and legal legitimacy, but on the convergence of several registers of legitimacy perceived as coherent by populations. Depending on context, this convergence contributes to preserving ritual continuity, reducing political uncertainty, strengthening cohesion, fostering cooperation, or improving the acceptability of health measures, with indirect but significant effects on response effectiveness and resilience. The results also suggest that symbolic congruence may act as a regulatory mechanism for collective cognition. By fostering the construction of shared representations of risk, of institutions, and of expected responses, it would indirectly contribute to strengthening collective trust, cooperation, and societal resilience.

Conclusion: Symbolic congruence provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding how socially recognized figures can act as mediators between legitimacy, trust, acceptability, and societal resilience during crises. It thus offers a relevant interpretive lens for disaster medicine, in Africa as in Europe.