ABSTRACT
Resilience typically is accepted uncritically as an essentially desirable quality in as much as it suggests some inherent capacity to recover or rebound from any failure, injury or setback. In too many of its more recent social and political deployments, then, resilience increasingly seems to be understood as some implicit property for attaining the restoration of economic, political or social institutions and practices. Therefore, like the idea of sustainability, resilience is becoming a ‘restoration engine’, which has at its roots a doggedly conservative, if not reactionary, impulse that appears to serve uncritically the agendas of stability for simply the sake of stability at all costs. To the extent that resilience tacitly is a conceptual, ethical and operational apparatus for restoration, this chapter contests how this idea has been developed and deployed to use various notions, like rebounding, recovering or restoring, to identify how individuals and groups should confront disruptive changes or systemic challenges to their existence by restoring themselves to some illusive status quo ante. Disruption and destruction are not necessarily negative developments. The ideologies of resilience, however, can function like restoration engines to prevent progressive or positive changes. Exploring these dynamics in contemporary corporate and government discourses is essential for understanding the instrumentalist uses of resilience as a machine for managing or mitigating change to the point of preventing it.
