ABSTRACT
In recent years, a great deal has been written in the scholarly literature about the role of resilience
in our social world. This scholarship has sparked vivid theoretical debates in psychology,
criminology, social work and political geography about the nature of resilience and how scholars
should go about studying it. Resilience is increasingly making its entries into international studies
literature, shaped by these discussions. Several factors have contributed to the specificity of these
debates in the international field: the infancy of the resilience research programme; the mistaken
belief that some international studies scholars have ‘invented’ a new concept; the relative scarcity
of empirical research applied specifically to the international sphere; and the perennial question
of what resilience is actually about. This chapter provides a brief introduction to how the
concept of resilience has been defined and deployed within social sciences, suggests a particular
definition of resilience and outlines a terrain of debate and research agendas.
