ABSTRACT
Our analysis is concerned with the multiplicity of resilience. We trace the concept across ecology
and security, through to surgery, management and psychology. In doing so we argue that resi-
lience can only be interrogated politically at its moments of articulation where the ontological
politics, norms, values and changes in practices envisaged are named and, often, obscured. Rather
than either take resilience to be a determinedly new shift in policy-making or simply an empty
signifier, our analysis focuses on the different ways resilience arguments are made to enable, justify
and legitimate changes in behaviours and practices that often invoke competing and contradictory
visions of the good life to be lived and the bad life or death to be avoided. Armed with an array of
diverse examples, the chapter makes resilience ‘strange’ in a Foucauldian sense and interrogates
the ontological politics of resiliences, exposing common points of tension that highlight embedded
political commitments.
