Bourbeau, Philippe, “A Genealogy of Resilience”, International Political Sociology,
forthcoming
Introduction
The use of the concept of resilience in social sciences is far from new. Several disciplines and
fields of research, including psychology, child development, criminology, biology, ecology
and social work, have laid out the components and strengths of a resilience approach in the
past sixty years, if not beyond. Along the way, different definitions and viewpoints of
resilience have been proposed. In strands of psychology, resilience refers to the capacity of
an individual to adapt positively after a traumatic event. Criminologists define resilience as a
process of positive adaptation. While ecologists use resilience to describe how an ecosystem
can return to a state of equilibrium and maintain its function after a disturbance.
While these disciplines have consolidated and expanded these viewpoints, resilience has
emerged as an important and much-discussed theme in the public policy realm and in various
sub-fields of world politics, including security studies, international interventions, urban
studies, state-society relationship in neoliberal era, environmental regimes, terrorism and
counter-terrorism studies, international human rights to name just a few (Ancelovici 2013,
Bourbeau 2013, 2015a, Chandler 2012, Corry 2014, Jenson and Levi 2013, Ryan 2015,
Wagner and Anholt 2016, Young 2010).
At the same time as resilience is gaining popularity in world politics, a particular genealogy
of resilience is structuring much of the critical literature. In an often-quoted article, Jeremy
Walker and Melissa Cooper argue that resilience was born in “system ecology in the 1970’s”,
that it has since “infiltrated” and “colonised” other disciplines and fields of study, and that
they traced “the genealogy of resilience from its formulation in ecosystems science to its
recent proliferation across disciplines and policy arenas” (Walker and Cooper 2011, 144).
Most, if not all, critical scholarship on resilience relies exclusively on Walker and Cooper’s
peculiar genealogy of resilience and accepted its main argument about the origin of
resilience: for Julian Reid (2012, 71), “it is no accident that the concept of resilience derives
directly from ecology”, and for Jonathan Joseph (2013, 40) resilience “has been plucked from
the ecology literature” to justify particular forms of governance.
I propose a different genealogy of resilience. Whereas Walker and Cooper seek to establish
the genealogy of resilience in a finite and deterministic way, my aim is to highlight a
genealogy of resilience, which I believe to be more inclusive than the restricted and partial
one that has been so far proposed. Because it allows for the possibility of multiple
genealogies, the approach presented in this article offers a more productive basis for dialogue
than Walker and Cooper’s definitive and absolute judgment.
This article argues that understanding the multiple and multidisciplinary paths through which
resilience has percolated into world politics is an essential first step to conducting an analysis
1
of the application of resilience in international politics. By tracing the diverse expressions of
resilience to various markers within the history of resilience, this article contends that this is
an opportune moment (a) to move scattered scholarships on resilience a step further, (b) to
better theorise the relationship between resilience and world politics, and (c) to foster a
multidisciplinary dialogue on resilience.
The body of this article is organised as follows. In the first section, I analyse the dominant
genealogy of resilience that forms the basis of much of the literature lamenting the “arrival”
of resilience in world politics. This analysis constitutes the springboard for the second
section, where I develop an alternative genealogy of resilience.
Genealogies and the flaws of linearity
A genealogy uncovers how a present situation has become logically possible.1 It is not a
history of the past, but rather a history of the present, which seeks to understand and
underline how the present is deeply connected with critical junctures and pathways of the
past. As such, one of the central questions asked by genealogical analysis is, “What past
paths made the present possible?” In this sense, a genealogy is a history of knowledge;
understanding how a particular facet of knowledge has percolated into the present helps
constitute and solidifies our understanding of present issues. A genealogy studies the
historical conditions of a phenomenon’s emergence. Historicising the present, one could say,
is the main purpose of a genealogy (Bartelson 1995, Price 1995).
Rather than aiming at a full description of the past at a given point in time or attempting a
complete historical explanation of an issue, a genealogy underscores past markers that help
us understand the present. It is often said that a genealogy is episodical: it emphasises certain
practices belonging to the past that make sense of expressions of an issue in the present
(Bartelson 1995). Equally important to genealogical analysis are the examples, which form
episodes when juxtaposed with each other. Examples embody dominant practices.
Genealogy rejects linear historical analyses that conceive the past, present, and future as fixed
points on a timeline; the objective is not to connect dots between the past and the present to
form a linear, temporally continuous line, nor to trace the emergence of an issue as a series of
practices converging towards a singular, definitive end. Genealogy shies away from accounts
that underscore continuities and historical successions (Nietzsche [1887] 2007). Rather, a
genealogical analysis focuses on past tipping points, critical junctures, or accidents that
permits the present to exist as is; yet, genealogy emphasises that, once a path has been chosen
following these crucial markers, it is difficult to dislodge it. Following Foucault ([1971]
1984, 81), a genealogy seeks to “identify the accidents, the minute deviations […], the errors,
the false appraisals.” Rarely, if ever, do genealogists understand expressions of an issue as
components of a long and unidirectional narrative.
1
Undoubtedly, there are methodological, theoretical, and normative issues about genealogy on which
there is substantial disagreement among scholars that this article cannot fully engage with (Nietzsche
[1887] 2007, Foucault [1971] 1984, Deleuze 1988, Dreyfus and Rabinow 2014).
2
The image often employed to portray a genealogy is one of a tree with numerous branches,
each of which has its own splits as well, creating a fractal, multi-leaved structure.
Conceptually, this “tree” metaphor highlights the genealogical notion that most issues have a
rich, dense cluster of historical antecedents and contemporary outcomes, non-linear and nondirect in nature. By shying away from the singular and embracing the plural, genealogy
allows us to uncover multiple strands (or branches) of simultaneous happenings. In short, it
strives to document “the history of interpretations” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 2014, 108).
For a genealogist, the origins of an issue are characterised by a disparity and diversity of
meanings; some interpretations get forgotten, set aside, or defeated, while others become
integrated into the construction of a dominant narrative. This narrative can be broad: two
positions at the top of the genealogical “tree” might be quite distant from each other. In
mapping out the tree’s branches, the relevant pathways are not just presented and described;
rather, a genealogy emphasises points of contention and contestation in the interpretation of
the issue at hand. Instead of searching for a single, sequential, overarching path in the
evolution of a concept, a genealogy accepts, highlights, and builds on multiple conjunctures,
branches, and non-linear paths. A genealogy reveals tension and embraces conflict.
Because of the fluid nature of genealogical analysis, conclusions reached through a
genealogy are not held as representing the reality. Methodologically speaking, a genealogical
analysis cannot produce the universal truth about an issue. Knowledge remains contextual
and particular. Genealogical scholars heavily emphasise that their conclusions (and, indeed,
all conclusions) remain within the realm of interpretation. At the same time, genealogists do
not accept that all interpretations are equally valid, that “anything goes,” or that everything is
always possible. A genealogy embraces historical continuities and contingencies, but rejects
historical linearity and determinism (Price 1997).
Despite these general genealogical premises, some scholars have employed a genealogical
analysis to argue that resilience has entered the realm of world politics through a single,
unique path. In an influential article, Walker and Cooper contend that resilience was born in
ecology in the 1970s and has since “infiltrated” other disciplines and fields of study,
including psychology and global governance. The authors posit not only that the term
“originated in the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling”, but also that “the success of
this ecological concept in colonizing multiple arenas of governance is due to its intuitive
ideological fit with a neoliberal philosophy of complex adaptive systems” (Walker and
Cooper 2011, 144, my emphasis). In and of itself, this is a strong argument. Yet Walker and
Cooper raise the stakes further, contending that there is “a strong selective dimension to the
emerging consensus on resilient growth, one that both reiterates and modifies the Darwinian
law of natural selection” and that “the resilience perspective is no less rigorous in its selective
function than Darwinian evolution” (Walker and Cooper 2011, 156).
Walker and Cooper’s peculiar analysis has informed most if not all critical scholarship on
resilience. For Mark Neocleous (2013, 3) resilience is “stemming from the idea of a system
and originating in ecological thought”, for Reid (2012, 71), “it is no accident that the concept
of resilience derives directly from ecology”, for Joseph (2013, 40) resilience “has been
3
plucked from the ecology literature” to justify particular forms of governance, and for Chris
Methmann and Angela Oels (2015, 51), “the concept of resilience was born and grew up in
the environmental sciences during the 1970s.” These statements are not argumentative; these
authors are not arguing that ecologists and C.S. Holling initially developed the concept in the
1970s and that other disciplines recently jumped on the resilience bandwagon. Rather, the
“ecological” origin of resilience is presented as a fact, as an undebatable truth, as
“demonstrated” by Walker and Cooper’s genealogy.
I take issue with Walker and Cooper’s particular genealogy of resilience for several reasons.
First, they present a deterministic point of view. There is a disconnect between the putative
role of genealogy and the analysis these authors present. Despite titling their contribution
“Genealogies of resilience”, the reader is told that the authors are providing “the genealogy of
resilience” (Walker and Cooper 2011, 144, my emphasis). However, it is largely accepted
that a genealogy cannot (nor should) attempt to uncover the proper origin of a problematic: to
attempt such an endeavour would be to wrongly presume that both the present and the past
have fixed meaning. The fact remains that our knowledge of social worlds is rarely fixed or
finite in the way Walker and Cooper envision. Such definitive and authoritative statements
are particularly surprising coming from critical-theory-attuned scholars, who typically shy
away from such foundational claims. Even if it were possible to isolate “the” genealogy of
resilience as applied to international politics, the version provided by Walker and Cooper
fails to include large fields of research in world politics. Indeed, their account of resilience
considers almost exclusively the field of critical infrastructures — an important research
theme in world politics, but neither the most important one nor one that can claim to
represent world politics in its entirety. Consider, for instance, the pains that Walker and
Cooper take to demonstrate that their argument has validity outside the study of US
Homeland Security documents. To drive home the point that we are witnessing a totalising
enterprise of permanent crisis, one of the vignettes they introduce is the case of the
Stockholm Resilience Alliance; an alliance of academic (mainly ecologists) and policy
makers totalling about 50 members. Yet surely, the actions of a 50-member alliance scarcely
prove the idea that we are witnessing a totalising neoliberal project. In short, Walker and
Cooper’s title is right, but their article falls wide of the mark.
Second, Walker and Cooper present a unidirectional narrative of resilience. Their account
does not sit well with the general understanding that a genealogy rejects linear historical
analyses that conceive the past, present, and future as fixed points on a timeline. A genealogy
tends to reject analyses that highlight continuities and historical succession; rather, it
embraces and pays attention to discontinuities and multi-directionalities. By shying away
from the singular and embracing the plural, genealogy allows us to uncover multiple strands
of simultaneous happenings.
In their efforts to close the debate—in other words, to depoliticise the origin of resilience—
Walker and Cooper foreclose any inductive research into alternate facets of resilience, since
the conclusion is already known. They trace the evolution of resilience into international
4
politics as a logical process toward a known end, i.e. neoliberalism (see Figure 1).2 The result
of this narrow view of resilience has been a circular set of arguments: scholars have been
busy documenting neoliberal expressions of resilience without paying much attention to
expressions of resilience not dictated by neoliberalism. Instead of engaging in a debate as to
whether resilience is in fact a by-product of neoliberalism—in all expressions, everywhere,
for all issues, and at all the time—or whether and to what extent some governments have
instrumentalised and even perhaps hijacked the concept of resilience, some critical-theoryattuned scholars accept the assumption as face value, thereby reinforcing Walker and
Cooper’s view of a single, unidirectional path of development.3
[Figure 1]
Third, for anyone interested even tangentially in resilience, Walker and Cooper’s claim that
resilience was ‘invented’ in ecology is surprising. Part of the problem is that other scholars
have boldly re-stated this claim without properly examining it. Claudia Aradau, for example,
claims that not so long ago “resilience was quasi-absent from academic debates. In the
1970’s, C.S. Holling’s [article] and Jerome Kagan’s [article] appeared to be the only
significant contributions, which lacked any substantial follow-up for quite some time. Hardly
any other articles mentioned resilience at the time” (Aradau 2014, 73).
Yet, this is a supposedly “accepted truth” that does not sit well with a vast body of literature
in psychology and social work, for example. A search in the two main databases for
psychology and psychiatry (PsycINFO and MedLine) between 1955 and 2000 reveal the term
“resilience” (or “resiliency”) in the title of 1315 peer-reviewed articles and academic press
books, in the abstract of 3211 articles and books, and as a keyword in 1310 publications.
Nearly 500 PhD dissertations focusing on resilience were completed between the end of
World War II and the close of the 20st century.
This hardly qualifies as absence of debates. If critical theorists are right in suggesting that a
focus on silenced discourses reveals as much as a focus on dominant discourses then one is
led to wonder why, and for what purpose, vast swaths of literature on resilience have been so
bluntly ignored. Certainly the consequence of this choice is obvious: claiming that ecosystems specialists invented resilience permits scholars to treat expressions of resilience in
world politics as a logical extension of the literature on ecological systems’ adjustment
capacity (that is, a literature that emphasises equilibrium and management). On the other
hand, if one acknowledges that resilience has been around for more than sixty years in
numerous theoretical capacities, this direct association is harder to justify. This illustrates to
extent to which Walker and Cooper’s analysis acts as an authoritative and definitive study on
2
Chris Zebrowski presents a similar argument (but with a twist) in his study of emergency and critical
infrastructures programmes in the UK: for him (2015: 10, 88), the emergence of resilience in contemporary
governance is the “correlates of the emergence of a neoliberal order of security governance.” In other words,
resilient populations are “an interpretation of social behaviour determined by, and supportive of, neoliberalism.”
3
To be sure, there is an important critique that investigates whether governmental programmes that ‘build’
resilience induce adjustments to a situation without helping the ‘beneficiaries’ to challenge the underlying
conditions of a given situation. However, the key point here is that such an understanding equates a particular
government’s use of resilience with the concept of resilience. In only focusing on these expressions of resilience
there is a risk that the myriad forms that resilience takes are subsumed (Bourbeau and Ryan 2017).
5
the origin of resilience. It leaves scholars with no other way forward when faced with
expressions of resilience that do not fit neatly with the neoliberal argument: they must either
disregard these expressions as idealistic and anecdotal or ignore them altogether.
If Srdjan Vucetic (2011, 1302) is right that the effectiveness of a genealogy depends on its
ability “to foreground how the conventional assumptions about the world have implications
for our present-day reasoning” and if we take seriously Richard Price’s (1995, 103)
conclusion that one of the insights of genealogy as a method is to open up “insightful,
important, and fruitful avenues of inquiry” then I hope to (a) show the limits of the
conventional assumption, made by some scholars, that resilience is nothing more than a byproduct of neoliberalism, and to (b) suggest alternative ways to understand the place and
applicability of resilience in world politics.
A (brief) non-linear history of resilience
I insist that the relationship between the concept of “resilience,” its disciplinary origins, and
the multiple expressions that scholars have found in a multitude of fields, area studies, cases,
and regions of the world have followed multiple paths. The genealogical tree of resilience
does not have a single branch, but rather possesses several branches. Expressions of
resilience in world politics need to be studied not only within an overdrawn eco-systemspolitics frame of inference, but in terms of its multiple relations with other disciplines,
concepts, and approaches.
In the next few pages, I underscore the multiple origins of resilience within disciplines as
varied as psychology, social work, engineering, and ecology, and trace the diverse
expressions of resilience in world politics, branch by branch, to these various markers within
the history of resilience. I use genealogy as a method to make sense of the ubiquity of
resilience in the social sciences and to underscore the different paths by which resilience has
been imported into world politics, as shown in Figure 2. It is important to note however that
the branches upon which I am focusing in this article are genealogical branches among
(potentially) many others—they are not totalising ones and they do not constitute a
theoretical argument about ‘the’ origin of resilience.
This is an opportune moment to trace the diverse expressions of resilience in world politics if
we are to work toward a more comprehensive, open, and multidirectional understanding of
the ways in which resilience has been and could be further applied to world politics. This is
not to say that the proliferation of usage of resilience in world politics literature should be
celebrated, nor do I want to suggest that resilience is inherently a positive course of action
devoid of negative political consequences. In fact, these questions have been sufficiently
debated elsewhere and there is no need to rehash them here (Bourbeau 2015b, Dunn Cavelty
et al. 2015, Wagner and Anholt 2016, Walsh-Dilley and Wolford 2015). Instead, what is
important to highlight is that, before we can conduct an analysis of the application of
resilience in world politics, we must understand the diverse paths through which resilience
has percolated into world politics.
[Figure 2]
6
Several scholars have been keen in the past few years to push forward a conceptualisation of
resilience that goes back few centuries ago, if not more. The notion that an individual would
‘bounce back’ has indeed long been associated with resilience. After all, the English word
‘resilience’ itself derives from the Latin verb ‘resilire’, meaning to ‘jump back’. Key markers
in the history of the word include Francis Bacon’s philosophical treatise on the nature of
sound, Sylva Sylvarum, published in 1626, in which he uses the term resilience to illustrate
the capacity of an echo to bounce back and to characterize conditions of the reflexion of
sounds (Bacon 1627).
An English lexicographer of the 17th century, Thomas Blount, included resilience in his
dictionary Glossographia, defining it as “a leaping or a skipping back, a rebounding” (Blount
1656, 126) Yet, Blount’s dictionary is no ordinary dictionary. The aim of the glossary was
not to list the complete words of English but rather to provide definitions of specialist words
employed in specialised literature so that those outside of these circles of knowledge could
understand the texts. As he explained in his preface, although “I had gained reasonable
knowledge in Latine and French tongues… I was often graveled in English books: that is, I
encountered such words, as I either not at all, or not thoroughly understood” (Blount 1656, i).
The inclusion of the term resilience in Blount’s work strongly suggests that its use was
restricted to intellectual circles at the time.
In 1668, in a treatise on the nature of space (which he sees as an “exemplary immaterial
entity”), the Cambridge Platonist and philosopher Henry More has one of his characters state
that “by the special providence of God, at the releasement of the soul from the body, there is
the strong and peremptory resiliency from this sordid region of misery and sin” (More 1668,
III, XXIV, 369). Almost a century later, in 1751, Samuel Johnson spoke about “the common
resiliency of the mind” (1751, 344).
It was not until the 20th century, however, that this idea of the “resiliency of the mind” was
coupled, in the psychological literature, with the notion of coping in the face of difficult
circumstances. By the middle of the 20th century, resilience was used to describe the response
of children in war-torn England (Scoville 1942), and an increasing number of scholars began
to theorise “ego-resilience” as the capacity to bounce back or to recoil (Block and Thomas
1955). Indeed, Lili Peller (1954) highlights that ego-resilience is often expressed as part of
the cathartic function of play in child development; J.S. Tyhurst (1957) finds a consistent
pattern in individual reactions to disaster that comprises three overlapping phases: (a) a
period of impact, (b) a period of recoil, and (c) a post-traumatic period; Paul Chodoff (1968)
speaks about the “coping capacities” of Jewish infants and children who survived the
Holocaust; and in a series of articles, Jerome Kagan (1973, 1976) underlines the capacity of
children’s and young adults’ cognitive functions to bounce back despite infant retardation;
observing the partially reversibility of infant retardation, he concludes in favour of the
inherent resiliency of human cognitive development.
Although a considerable amount of psychological literature has focused on the theorisation
and application of individuals’ capacities to “bounce back”, this broad research agenda has
not necessarily been uniform. Among the various turns it has taken, scholars have focused on
7
notions of “invulnerability” (Anthony 1974), “invincibility” (Werner and Smith 1982),
“protective factors” (Garmezy 1974, Rutter 1987), “successful adaptation” (Masten et al.
1990), “positive adaptation” (Luthar 2003), and the multiple and sometimes unexpected
“pathways” to resilience (Bonanno 2004).
In this strand of literature, resilience is understood in individualistic terms, as a set of
individual qualities allowing someone to bounce back. Resilience is a characteristic that some
individuals possess while others do not. For these scholars, studying resilience is important
because it allows scholars to better understand the ‘little something’ that permits certain
individuals, but not others, to bounce back in the face of a trauma.
Within the literature in world politics, this agential understanding of resilience has proven to
be influential. For David Chandler, a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualize critical
agency is currently pervading world politics: at its crux, this can be described as a shift from
an external to an internal focus. Whereas the formerly dominant liberal internationalist
paradigm emphasizes the agency of external interveners, the newly emergent resilience
paradigm emphasizes locally based prevention and individual empowerment; this new focus
on resilience puts “the agency of those most in need of assistance at the center, stressing a
program of empowerment and capacity-building” (Chandler 2012, 216).
Similarly, scholars often criticise resilience—as a whole—without acknowledging that they
are, in fact, criticising this particular understanding of resilience. Brad Evans and Julian Reid
(2013, 14) argue that there lurks beneath resilience a dehumanising political agenda because
resilience emphasises risk to and care for the self: resilience distinguishes between those who
have the ability and the power to secure themselves from risk and those “who are asked to
live up to their responsibilities by accepting the conditions of their own vulnerability and
asking not of the social.” Resilience is a strategy for creating “contemporary regimes of
power which hallmark vast inequalities in all human classifications” (Evans and Reid 2013:
14). Because they borrow psychology’s understanding of resilience as a set of individual
qualities, Evans and Reid see in a rather grim light the social and political (and potentially
terrible) consequences of resilience on the marginalised-ones in today’s world. They indeed
have gone a step further in portraying resilience in bleak, individual subjugation terms.
In their responses to the forum on their newest book, Evans and Reid (2015, 154) declare that
their conceptual journey across the resilience terrain has forced them to “appreciate the
hidden depth of its nihilism, the pernicious forms of subjugation it burdens people with, its
deceitful emancipatory claim that force people to embrace their servitude as though it were
their liberation.” The authors have become exhausted by “the chains [resilience] places
around all our necks” (2015, 154). Because resilience’s nihilism is “devastating”, its political
language “enslaving”, and its modes of subjectivity “lamenting”, Evans and Reid (2015, 157)
have decided “after this volume to never write, publicly lecture or debate the problematic
again.”4 Admittedly, these sweeping assertions are made with style and elegance. But they
4
A promise that appears to be too difficult to fulfil as at least one of them has wrote a book-chapter about it, and
has even published a co-authored book on resilience.
8
remain un-substantiated and constitute a fragile foundation upon which to build our
theorisation of resilience.
Part of the problem is that these scholars adopt an understanding of resilience that has been
long abandoned by many psychologists. Indeed, wanting to move away from a conception of
resilience as a set of dispositional and individual qualities, psychologists, social workers and
criminologists have proposed, since the 1990s, to ‘de-individualise’ resilience and to see it as
a social and multifaceted process working at the individual, family, community, and societal
levels. The problem with understanding resilience as a personality trait that an individual
possess (or not) is that it opens the door to the danger of blaming the victim, of rendering
injured parties responsible for not being able to react with resilience to a given shock. As we
will see shortly, psychologists and social workers have proposed different conceptualisations.
In the context of this genealogy, world politics scholars who criticize resilience based on such
a partial understanding of the concept are guilty of the translation problem in
multidisciplinary work: in short, these scholars are importing an incomplete set of elements
from one discipline to address a given issue while leaving aside the more nuanced
understandings of the discipline that have been developed over the years in the literature.
Although a parsimonious shortcut might thus be obtained, it is gained at the great expense of
exactitude, richness and complexity.
Another key marker in the history of resilience appeared in 1807, when Thomas Young spoke
about resilience of material. Young was arguably the first to propose that the capacity of
solid material to resist impulse “may properly be termed resilience”. The resilience of a
material, he continues, “is measured by the product of the mass and the square of the velocity
of a body capable of breaking it” (Young 1807, 110). The work of Thomas Young, a scientist
who made notable contributions to the fields of Egyptology and solid mechanics, has been
particularly influential on the work of another scientist: Thomas Tredgold. Tredgold picks up
on Young’s idea first in his study of timber’s “power of resisting a body in motion (called
resilience)” in 1818 and then in his 1822 Practical essay on the strength of cast iron and
other metals (Tredgold 1818, 216, 1822). The leitmotiv of “bending but not breaking”
captures well this particular understanding of resilience.
The idea of resilience as a measurement of the vulnerability of a given material has seen
widespread adoption in several disciplines, including chemistry and mechanical engineering.
Most notably, it led to the development of the Charpy impact test, a standardised high strainrate test that provides a measure of a material’s notch robustness. The test became pivotal in
World War II. Before the war, riveting was the almost universal method used to fabricate
steel structures. By 1939, however, welding was gaining acceptance in steelwork
construction of ships, and extensive adoption of this new technique was enabling the United
States to produce ships at an unprecedented rate. A critical problem emerged, however: more
than one fifth of all ships produced by welding had serious fractures, and some of these
fractures were sufficiently severe to force abandonment of these (brand new) ships at sea. A
Board of Investigation, convened by the Secretary of the US Navy to determine the causes of
the fractures, made crucial use of the Charpy test to identify resilience failures in important
9
notches of the ships; based on the results of the test, fabrication standards and material
remedies were developed, resulting in a consistent reduction in fractures from over 130 per
month in March 1944 to less than five per month in March 1946 (US Navy 1947).
The Young-Tredgol’s themes of persistence, endurance, and robustness were also at the heart
of some of the uses of resilience in world politics. This theme of resiliency in the face of
disaster would be picked up by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey during and after
World War II (MacIsaac 1976). Commissioned by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and
headed by a board of experts, the objective of the Strategic Bombing Survey was to study the
effects of allied aerial attacks on Germany (and later on Japan) and thus to evaluate whether
air power was an important instrument of military strategy. Among the board members were
John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul H. Nitze, and Rensis Likert (an organisation psychologist
studying people’s beliefs, attitude, and feelings toward international affairs). The documents
and official report released by the study underscore the resilience of the German society,
economy and army; in fact, the Strategic Bombing Survey report underlined resilience to
such an extent that sociologist David Stark (2014) describes it as one of the first systematic
studies of resilience in a social system, casting the relationship between vulnerability and
resilience into a new light.
Scholars have also equated resilience with the persistence and endurance of an institution.
For example, Robert Powell maintains that “international institutions history matter”, i.e. that
“the cost of changing or constructing new regimes thus gives existing regimes some
resilience to shifts in the balance of power” (Powell 1994, 342). Equally, Peter Hasenclever
et al. (1997) argue that international institutions can be more or less effective, and “more or
less robust (or resilient).” For them, “regime robustness (resilience) refers to the ‘staying
power’ of international institutions in the face of exogenous challenges. […] In other words,
institutions that change with every shift of power among their members or whenever the most
powerful participants find that their interests are no longer optimally served by the current
regime lack resilience” (Hasenclever et al. 1997, 2, their emphasis).
Other scholars have underscored the resilience of authoritarian regimes to democratic
pressures (Goldstone 2011, Li 2012, Nathan 2003, Shambaugh 2008), and of nationalism in
the face of regionalism (Dieckhoff and Jaffrelot 2004). Past research has focused on instances
of sociopolitical resilience in the modern world, including the differing resilience of social
capital in Britain and the United States (Hall 1999) and the resilience of the welfare state of
advanced industrial societies in the face of neoliberalism (Pierson 1996). In the same lineage,
Tat Yan Kong (2006) and David Clark (2002) underscore, respectively, the resilience of labor
market reforms and of public service regimes in the face of globalisation and economic
liberalisation. Similarly, resilience has been employed to underscore the enduring capacity of
national sovereignty against various global dynamics (Ansell and Weber 1999) or even the
very existence of NATO in the post-Cold war era (Barany and Rauchhaus 2011).
Unsurprisingly, a focus on robustness and persistence can also be found in the literature on
critical infrastructures. For some scholars, the objective is to gain a better understanding of a
community’s properties, strengths and limits in order to enhance, promote, and maximise its
10
resilience (Aldrich 2012, Boin and McConnell 2007, Vale and Campanella 2005). For others,
a more critical perspective is needed to understand the origins as well as the consequences of
these strategies, which might not all be in the interest of the individual/citizen (Coaffee
2013).
One of the main limits of understanding resilience merely in term of persistence is that it
eschews the renewal and transformational aspects of resilience. Resilience is not only about
maintaining the status quo, but it is also about transforming and remodelling an individual, a
group, or a social structure. The transformational aspect of resilience implies the introduction
of novel vectors of response that will (implicitly or explicitly) change existing policies and
set new directions for governance in this field (Bourbeau 2013, Bourbeau and Ryan 2017).
The field of ecology has also formulated its own comprehension of resilience that have had
several ramifications in world politics literature. The key ecological episode in our
genealogical analysis of resilience concerns the juxtaposition of equilibrium and system with
resilience: what are the conditions under which an ecological system can be displaced from a
fixed point of equilibrium and then return to that equilibrium once the shock has passed? For
scholars investigating this question, resilience is a characteristic of a species that describes
“the rate at which population density returns to equilibrium after a disturbance away from
equilibrium” (Pimm 1991, 18, 1984, Mittelbach et al. 1995). For C.S. Holling (1973, 14),
resilience is a “measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables,
driving variables, and parameters, and still persist […]. Resilience is the property of the
system.” Holling’s seminal article would become the inspiration and the starting point for a
dynamic and varied literature on socio-ecological resilience (Adger 2000, Carpenter et al.
2001, Pimm 1991). Scholars will indeed push Holling’s argument a few steps farther, directly
highlighting the synergistic and co-evolutionary relationship between social and ecological
systems, by understanding resilience as “the capacity of linked social-ecological systems to
absorb recurrent disturbances […] so as to retain essential structures, processes, and
feedbacks” (Adger et al. 2005, 1036). For Carl Folke and his colleagues, the emphasis is on
the combined capacity of humans and natural systems to achieve “management that secures
the capacity of ecosystems to sustain societal development and progress with essential
ecosystem services” (Folke et al. 2003, 354, Folke et al. 2010).
The influence of an ecological understanding of resilience is best captured in the literature on
climate change. For example, a special report on climate change adaptation published by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adopted the ecological/system approach
to resilience in defining resilience as the “ability of a system and its component parts to
anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely
and efficient manner” (IPCC 2012, 5). In the same lineage, the UN Secretary General’s HighLevel Panel of Global Sustainability uses an ecological approach to resilience in its 2012
report Resilient People, Resilient Planet (UN 2012, Corry 2014).
The wording employed by ecologists (equilibrium, systems, variables, measurement,
probability, management), their forthright objective of bringing resilience “thinking” to the
forefront of social sciences scholarship, and the fact that some governments’ and
11
international institutions’ initiatives have relied on this literature has provoked strong
reactions and responses from some scholars, especially critical-theory-attuned scholars.
For many critical theorists, resilience is a form of reasoning that participates in a neoliberal
rationality of governance. For Pat O’Malley, resilience is a “technique […] aligned with
advanced liberal governance” (2010, 506). While Joseph (2013, 42) contends that resilience
is best understood in the context of “rolling-out neoliberal governmentality” and that
neoliberalism is the “logic behind the rise of resilience”, and Methmann and Oels (2015, 52)
agree “with the existing literature that resilience governs through advanced liberal
government.” Resilience, argue Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose (2009), “has become
something that can be engineered into systems, organizations, perhaps nations and persons.”
A growing body of research, particularly popular among critical theorists, views resilience
one-dimensionally as a neoliberal by-product; on this view, resilience is a means to the end of
imposing the rationalist state’s interests onto a populace in an unexamined way. Among other
things, resilience is lamentable on this view because of its insistence on the dominance of
natural scientific systems over social perspectives.
Unfortunately, at the centre of this perspective lies a problematic conflation of one particular
manifestation of resilience (the state’s neoliberal understanding) with the concept of
resilience itself. Rather than rejecting the application of neoliberal resilience by certain
governments many critical theorists use these examples of government overreach as a basis
for rejecting the concept of resilience altogether. In equating application with
conceptualization in this way, I believe that these scholars lose the opportunity to arrive at a
more nuanced understanding of our sociopolitical world. Even though advocates of a
neoliberal understanding of resilience have so far failed to engage with this line of argument,
an increasing number of scholars have raised similar criticism (Bourbeau 2015b, Chandler
2014, Corry 2014, Ryan 2015, Wagner and Anholt 2016). In sum, accepting that the
ecological definition of resilience is but one possible facet of a broader, multidimensional
concept offers a richer approach.
One last path that I want to uncover in this genealogy is the processual path. For the past two
decades, psychologists and social workers have sought to fully detach the concept of
resilience from the “blaming the victim” problem that comes with understanding resilience as
a personal trait. In doing so, they have rallied around a definition of resilience that stresses
process and diversity. For Suniya Luthar, resilience is “a dynamic process encompassing
positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity” (Luthar et al. 2000, 543); for
Ingrid Schoon, a “dynamic process whereby individuals show adaptive functioning in the
face of significant adversity” (Schoon 2006, 6). Perhaps the work of social worker Michael
Ungar best characterises this trend away from understanding resilience as a set of qualities.
For Ungar (2004, 342), resilience is “the outcome from negotiations between individuals and
their environments for the resources to define themselves as healthy amidst conditions
collectively viewed as adverse.” This is important as these efforts at defining resilience in
processual terms are not idiosyncratic nor are they isolated attempts; they reflect a large
consensus in psychology, a discipline that has been working on resilience for more than 60
years. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting
12
well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of stress”
(APA 2014, Southwick et al. 2014).
From this processual perspective on resilience, scholars have put forward several sets of
arguments and propositions about resilience as applied to world politics. Caitlin Ryan (2015)
has demonstrated the importance of thinking about how communities and groups engage in
their own resilience building because resilience itself may be a tactic of resistance employed
collectively and strategically to adapt to protracted conflicts and chronic adversity. Using the
example of “sumud” in Palestine, she shows that a processual understanding of resilience
provides a better understanding of the complex and dynamic relationship among sumud,
resilience, and resistance than other conceptualisation of resilience.
In a co-authored piece, Ryan and I argue that conceptualising resilience and resistance as
mutually exclusive reflects a substantialist ontological position rather than a relationalist one
(Bourbeau and Ryan 2017). A substantialist position accepts that entities exist prior to their
relations with others, a position that allows scholars to identify these fixed entities as primary
units of analysis in research. In sharp contrast, a relationalist position posits that entities gain
their meaning through their processual relations with other entities. From a relationalist
approach, we suggest that resilience and resistance are engaged in mutual assistance rather
than mutual exclusion.
Scholars have also argued that resilience has both a dark and a bright side (Potvin and Davis
2017). Against this rigid critical-theoretic view of resilience as an inherently negative quality,
much literature can be arrayed to suggest that resilience strategies have had a positive impact
in many international contexts. Bouchard (2013), for example, highlights Québec’s pushback
against neoliberalism as a successful case of socioeconomic and cultural resilience, while
Davis (2012) introduces the case of Medellin, Columbia, where a positive capacity for
resilience yielded invigorated urban institutions and a reduction in urban violence; other work
in this vein emphasizes the importance of resilience in reducing sectarian attacks and
violence against civilians during times of war. Researchers in this vein may be understood as
advocates of a processual understanding of resilience. Others have highlighted the
importance of local networks and knowledge in reducing violence against civilians in war
zones, and the role of local religious leaders in forbidding sectarian attacks has been
identified as a key factor for the development of resilience in Baghdad City (Carpenter 2014,
Williams 2013). Seeing resilience in this processual lineage, I have has proposed a threefold
typology—resilience as maintenance, resilience as marginality, and resilience as renewal—in
which resilience as maintenance captures the idea of seeking to maintain the status quo after a
shock or a disturbance, of ‘bouncing back’ in the face of adversity, while resilience as
renewal implies the transformation of basic policy assumptions and encapsulates the idea of
“bouncing forward” and the potential remodelling of social structures (Bourbeau 2013).
The processual approach to resilience differs crucially from the critical theoretic approach in
emphasizing the importance of context in understanding the resilient actions of a community
or governing body. Factors such as communal history, collective memory, and social
convention significantly affect the behaviour of sociopolitical agents during times of crisis
13
and cannot be disregarded by a well-grounded theory. For example, research suggests that for
war-affected youth, forgetting negative memories or creating more benign memories is an
essential component of resilience. In their study of trauma memories and resilience among
Afghan youth, Catherine Panter-Brick and her colleagues (2015) demonstrate that the impact
of war on youth depends in large part upon whether youth are able to make sense of
collective violence in historical and social terms. Others have shown that in the context of
children affected by armed conflict, the social environment (including the immediate family
as well as peer, school and community settings) is a vitally important factor in determining
the resilience of the children (Betancourt and Khan 2008, Tol et al. 2013). Resilience is not a
matter of individuals taking steps toward building individual resilience, but plays out on
multi-levels. This is particular true in the subfield of terrorism and counter-terrorism studies.
For Jon Coaffee (2013, 10), “community resilience cannot simply be left to communities
themselves but requires steering, not rowing, from state level in some form of collaborative
alliance to be successful.” A recent special issue of Studies in Conflicts and Terrorism also
debates the added value of resilience from a multilevel point of view (Malkki and Sinkkonen
2016, Argomaniz and Lehr 2016).
The processual approach also emphasizes the importance of inertia in determining the
trajectory of an agent’s response to a shock or disturbance: once a particular understanding of
an issue is established, based on past experiences and decisions, that understanding becomes
difficult to alter. For example, Daniel Aldrich and Michele Meyer (2014) highlight the
critical role of social capital and networks in resilient strategies associated with disaster
management. Building on previous research—including Hall’s (1999) and Pierson’s (1996)
studies of modern sociopolitical resilience described above—Peter A. Hall and Michèle
Lamont’s (2013) work examines resilience not as a neoliberal tool, but as a social response to
neoliberal policies. Hall and Lamont’s research mirrors the processual approach to resilience,
in the sense that both perspectives emphasize the importance of social construction and
interpretation in determining a population’s or individual’s resilient strategy in the face of
shocks and critical junctures.
Conclusion
One often reads that a genealogical analysis is most useful when a scholar has identified an
issue (or a given set of arguments) as problematic but largely uncontested in the present; such
a situation opens up the need to investigate how that issue has come to be represented in the
present. By deconstructing the particular series of events and markers that led to the present
understanding of an issue, a genealogy offers a “counter-memory” that not only examines
known elements and rearranges them, but also highlights the ways in which an issue
originates, practically and discursively, from multiple, diffuse points.
For a genealogist, the origins of an issue are characterised by a disparity and diversity of
meanings; some interpretations get forgotten, set aside, or defeated, while others become
integrated into the construction of a dominant narrative. This narrative can be broad: two
positions at the top of the genealogical “tree” might be quite distant from each other. In
mapping out the tree’s branches, the relevant pathways are not just presented and described;
14
rather, a genealogy emphasises points of contention and contestation in the interpretation of
the issue at hand. Instead of searching for a single, sequential, overarching path in the
evolution of a concept, a genealogy accepts, highlights, and builds on multiple conjunctures,
branches, and non-linear paths. A genealogy reveals tension and embraces conflict.
Adopting an extensive genealogy of resilience has several implications. First, it opens up
space for debates on the strength, benefit, limits, and weaknesses of applying resilience to our
study of world politics. Second, it acknowledges the validity of arguments about the
relationship between resilience and neoliberalism while putting these arguments into a
broader and richer context so that the literature does not develop on the assumption that
resilience is only a by-product of neoliberalism. Third, it permits the development of
analytical frameworks capable of incorporating the multiple and multifaceted expressions of
resilience manifested in our contemporary social world. My hope is that the study of
resilience will develop into a field of research where the different ‘branches’ highlighted in
this article are developed, studied, compared, and contrasted.
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19
Figure 1. Walker and Cooper’s genealogy of resilience
Figure 2. A Genealogy of Resilience
Hall & Lamont
Response to
challenges provoked
by neoliberalism
Evans & Reid critique
Dehumanising political
agenda; Subjugation
Joseph, Lentzos & Rose,
Methmann & Oels, and others
Neoliberal rationality of
governance
Tactic of resistance
Path-dependence;
Critical junctures
New paradigm
Agency
International
Intervention
Response to
chronic adversity
rather than single
trauma
Dark and bright
side
Protective
Factors
Invicible
Walker & Cooper
unidirectional
genealogy
Critical
infrastructures
Maintenance
Status quo
Renewal
Transformation
Collective memory;
Social history
Individuals caught
in wars and
chronic violence
US Strategic
Bombing Survey
International
Institutions
Intergovermental Panel
on Climate Change
(IPCC)
UN Global
Sustainability
Authoritarian
regimes
Interaction between
individual and social
surrounding
Outcome of
negotiations
Invulnerable
Socio-ecological
systems;
management
Endurance;
Robustness
Measure of the
return capacity
Process
Set of Qualities
Bouncing Back
Equilibrium
Social Work
Engineering
Ecology
Psychology
Resilience