Introduction

Resilience has become increasingly central to international and domestic policy-making over the last decade. In fact, it has been argued that resilience is the ‘guiding principle’ of policy governance and ‘one of the key political categories of our time’. ¹ Resilience is now the top priority for the sustainable development and international development aid agenda, ² key to international security concerns, from cyber conflict to the war on terror, ³ and vital for disaster risk reduction, ⁴ conflict prevention, ⁵ climate change ⁶ and social, economic and institutional development. ⁷ Over the last few years, resilience appears to have become the policy buzzword of choice. ⁸ This is so much the case that it is not unusual to find commentators querying whether resilience can really be the solution to such a diverse range of governance questions and, if so, how this might work. This book is concerned with precisely these questions of resilience as part of a governance agenda and how resilience-thinking impacts on how politics (both domestically and internationally) is understood to work and how problems are perceived and addressed. In the following chapters, a range of issues and questions will be analysed in terms of resilience frameworks, from educational training in schools to global ethics and from responses to shock events and natural disasters to how resilience has been discussed in the context of international policies to promote peace and development.