ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses the rise of 'resilience ethics' in terms of the shift in ethical approaches, away from the liberal interventionist projects of the 1990s and neoliberal constructions of 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' state-building in the 2000s, towards broader and more inclusive understandings of ethical responsibility for global problems. It discusses a series of claims with regard to the rise of the relational ethics of resilience, premised upon our ontological embeddedness in complex chains of global interconnection. The chapter argues that at the heart of resilience ethics is the rearticulation of power hierarchies and the reification of market relations and outcomes. The ethical and political duties emerging from these indirect responsibilities operate on a different register to the traditional liberal framing of law, sovereignty, rights and intervention as, for the sociologically embedded subject, there is no assumption of preexisting autonomy. In the international sphere, the articulation of political and ethical responsibilities has become transformed since the end of the Cold War.