ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of ideas in the construction of government rationalities, focusing particularly on the changing politics of citizenship and subjectivity. It argues that since the 1970s, liberal democracies have also been informed by another set of ideas that are rooted in complex systems theory whose influence has grown considerably through the concept of resilience. The chapter describes the genealogy of resilience and its multiple meanings. It focuses on the selective interpretations of resilience in public policy discourse and their over-emphasis on self-reliance and return to normality. The former is reflected in the promotion of self-reliance as a key measure of resilient self, and the latter is manifested in the emphasis on bouncing back to normal orders and negating the transformative opportunities that emerge from complexity, uncertainty and contingency. Resilience has a unique genealogy with multiple roots in systems theory, engineering, ecology, psychology and disaster studies.
