ABSTRACT

This book offers the first critical, multi-disciplinary study of how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene have combined to shape contemporary thought and governmental practice.

Faced with the climate catastrophe of the Anthropocene, theorists and policymakers are increasingly turning to ‘sustainable’, ‘creative’ and ‘bottom-up’ imaginaries of governance. The book brings together cutting-edge insights from leading geographers, international relations scholars and philosophers to explore how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene challenge and transform prevailing understandings of Earth, space, time and knowledge, and how these transformations reshape governance, ethics and critique today. This book examines how the Anthropocene calls into question established categories through which modern societies have tended to make sense of the world and engage in critical reflection and analysis. It also considers how resilience approaches attempt to re-stabilize these categories – and the ethical and political effects that result from these resilience-based efforts.

Offering innovative insights into the problem of how environmental change is known and governed in the Anthropocene, this book will be of interest to students in fields such as geography, international relations, anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology, and the environmental humanities.

chapter 1|21 pages

Introduction

The power of life

chapter 2|15 pages

Resilient Earth

Gaia, geopolitics and the Anthropocene

chapter 3|13 pages

Security for a fragmented world

Ecology and the challenge of the Anthropocene

chapter 4|18 pages

The end of resilience?

Rethinking adaptation in the Anthropocene

chapter 5|16 pages

Colliding times

Urgency, resilience and the politics of living with volcanic gas emissions in the Anthropocene

chapter 6|19 pages

Resilient arts of government

The birth of a ‘systems-cybernetic governmentality’

chapter 7|21 pages

Destituting resilience

Contextualizing and contesting science for the Anthropocene

chapter 8|23 pages

Ironies of the Anthropocene

chapter 9|15 pages

‘Primordial wounds’

Resilience, trauma and the rifted body of the Earth

chapter 10|17 pages

More of the same?

Life beyond the liberal one world world