This extraordinary volume arises from a remarkable matrix, the Successful Societies Program (SSP) of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Since its founding in the 1980s, CIFAR has been committed to cutting-edge, long-term collaborative projects, which have helped to form new objects of knowledge and fields of research. The SSP itself arose from the intersection of two long-term CIFAR programs, one in population health and one in human development. Between the macro scale of demography and the micro scale of ontogeny, researchers realized there was a missing piece: call it society. Over several years of exploratory meetings and debates led by the president of CIFAR, Chaviva Hošek, this group of distinguished, innovative scholars emerged. They're a team of academic X-Men: each has a special super-power, and together they work wonders.

Their second collaborative book charts the contours of neoliberalism in relation to the issue of social resilience. The capacity to bounce back from trauma helps to define a society's success, but this book distinguishes itself because it focuses not on the larger unit but on the well-being of the individuals who comprise it, not simply the capacity of a state to maintain its power, which has too often been a default definition.