ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces readers to the concept of ‘resilience’ as a much used and widely contested concept, idea and buzzword. How do we know ‘resilience’ when we see it? How do we go about researching it? What does this contemporary precedent of ‘resilience’ thinking reveal about everyday politics and, more specifically, about the everyday politics of trauma and memory? In short, what do we know about the reality of ‘resilience’? This book takes resilience as its point of departure and return as a ubiquitous, much used concept that is nonetheless poorly understood and which remains less often subject to critical, empirical scrutiny by advocates and critics who more frequently tend to present it as a fait accompli. As well as setting out the book’s specific focus on the ‘resilience’ of political violence and terrorism survivors, the chapter introduces readers to the work of philosopher Ian Hacking, whose work on ‘making up people’ lends its name to the subtitle of the book. This introduction also provides an important note on theory and method, before mapping out the three-part structure of the book.
