ABSTRACT
It is by now widely acknowledged that resilience, the capacity of absorbing or adapting to change
and disturbances, has forcefully arisen to provide the semantics of a ‘pervasive idiom of global
governance’ (Walker and Cooper 2011, p. 144). Since resilience has established itself as a field of
research for the social sciences in general but also for international relations (IR) in particular, the
respective literature has taken an interesting trajectory. Initially, resilience seemed to pose few
questions. Critical scholars, often concerned with the transfigurations of security, agreed upon its
neoliberal nature. From this perspective, resilience seemed neither particularly new nor par-
ticularly surprising. The interpellations of resilient subjects and societies ‘debased’ the political
subject which no longer could claim any right to security by way of naturalizing uncertainty and
risk (Reid 2012). Resilience undermined the liberal artifice and reduced individuals to neoliberal,
responsibilized subjects by leaving them exposed to their bare existence (Lentzos and Rose 2009;
Joseph 2013; Evans and Reid 2013; Welsh 2014). It was even argued that resilience was a veiled
form of Social Darwinism (Walker and Cooper 2011). The rise of resilience hence did not seem
to require more differentiated reflections into whether we were observing something that we did
not know (Neocleous 2013; see Chandler 2013). The answers were obvious and the issue seemed
settled before the questions even arose.
