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.