ABSTRACT

Over the past decade in particular, resilience has become a quasi-universal answer to problems of

governance, from climate change to children’s education, from indigenous history to disaster

response, and from development to terrorism. The proliferation of resilience is so extensive

that a critic has talked about the ‘gospel of resilience’ (Nadasdy, 2007). Given its rapid circulation

and uptake across many fields of governance, resilience has attracted intense analytical attention

and extensive criticisms. From the criticism of extending resilience to socio-ecological systems

(Berkes et al., 2003; Holling, 1973; Levin et al., 2001) to that of the absence of interest in

power relations and social transformation (Pelling, 2010) or inattention to inequalities, struc-

tures and conditions of possibility of transformation (Hornborg, 2009), resilience has been

critically dissected across many scholarly fields and disciplines. In International Relations and

security studies, the criticism of the ‘fit’ between resilience and neoliberalism has been par-

ticularly prominent.