ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the discourse of financial resilience and how it is performed and what forms of agency it might inculcate. It argues that the drive towards economic and financial resilience must be situated within wider patterns of resilience thinking in other areas of policymaking, where the ability to 'bounce back' and 'adaptability' in relation to 'extreme events' are also emphasised. The section on The rise of financial resilience recounts how the general shift to resilience discourse in global finance has emerged across the major institutions of global governance in recent years. The section on Financial resilience: conservative and radical, looks at the everyday politics of financial resilience in the United Kingdom (UK). A section on The romance of resilience? picks up on the theme of political contest to identify the potential for a resistant form of agency to reflect and promote financial resilience in critical terms.
