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Resilience as the policing of critique: A pragmatist way forward
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2022
Abstract
This article offers a critical review of the main conceptual readings of resilience as a prominent policy paradigm in international development, security, and disaster management. Focusing on neoliberal, biopolitical, cybernetic, and postliberal understandings, it probes the possibilities for engaging in a socially transformative critique of resilience. In particular, the article asks how the resilience discourse polices critique in a way that includes certain forms of knowledge, such as indigenous, local, and everyday knowledge, while excluding abstract theorising. What is considered authoritative knowledge in the resilience discourse? And what are the possibilities for opposing resilience if it ‘metabolizes critique into its internal dynamic’, as Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper famously argued? How does critique turn from a tool to undermine dominant knowledge-power regimes into a motor of governance? The article demonstrates that the more seriously we engage with the underlying ontology of resilience, the more difficult it becomes to formulate a critique that is not incorporated into governance. As a possible way forward, the article discusses Luc Boltanski's pragmatist sociology of critique.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association
References
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8 Ibid.
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19 See Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, UK: SAGE Publications, 1999).
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21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p. 39.
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25 Ibid., p. 62.
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27 Joseph, Varieties of Resilience, p. 172.
28 Ibid., p. 174.
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33 The responsibilisation argument is given further traction by mainstream publications like Judith Rodin's Resilience Dividend where she argues that ‘the responsibility for resilience building can and must lie in many places and with everyone.’ Judith Rodin, The Resilience Dividend (London, UK: Profile Books, 2015), p 135.
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43 Brad Evans and Julian Reid, ‘Dangerously exposed: The life and death of the resilient subject’, Resilience, 1:2 (2013), pp. 83–98; Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
44 Evans and Reid, ‘Dangerously exposed’, p. 83; see Charlotte Heath-Kelly, ‘Resilience and disaster sites: The disastrous temporality of the “recovery-to-come”’, in Chandler and Coafee (eds), The Routledge Handbook of International Resilience, p. 312.
45 Evans and Reid, ‘Dangerously exposed’, p. 83.
46 Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, p. 21.
47 Evans and Reid, ‘Dangerously exposed’, p. 83.
48 Ibid., p. 84.
49 Ibid., p. 96.
50 Ibid., p. 95.
51 Judith Rodin, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, calls for ‘deliberate disruptions’ to foster innovation and ‘positive change’. Rodin, The Resilience Dividend, p. 306.
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54 Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, ‘Biopolitics of security in the 21st century’, p. 291.
55 Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, p. 43.
56 Ibid.
57 Julian Reid, ‘Securing the imagination’, in Jim Bohland, Simin Davoudi, and Jennifer Lawrence (eds), The Resilience Machine (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), p. 35.
58 Evans and Reid, Resilient Life; see Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop, pp. 12, 48, 49, 52–3, 54.
59 Evans and Reid, ‘Dangerously exposed’, p. 96.
60 Ibid., p. 95.
61 Claudia Aradau, ‘The promise of security: Resilience, surprise and epistemic politics’, in Chandler and Coaffee (eds), The Routledge Handbook of International Resilience, pp. 79–91.
62 Aradau, ‘The promise of security’, p. 80.
63 For example, Andrew Zolli argues that future events are ‘stubbornly resistant to prediction’ and that ‘[v]olatility of all sorts has become the new normal.’ Andrew Zolli, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (London, UK: Headline, 2012), p. 5; see Rodin, The Resilience Dividend, p. 183.
64 Aradau, ‘The promise of security’, p. 82; see also Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown (London, UK: Routledge, 2011).
65 Aradau, ‘The promise of security’, pp. 88, 85.
66 Ibid., p. 87.
67 Ibid., pp. 87, 88.
68 Walker and Cooper, ‘Genealogies of resilience’.
69 Grove, Resilience; see, for example, Philippe Bourbeau, On Resilience: Genealogy, Logics and World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 55.
70 Grove, Resilience, p. 13.
71 Ibid., p. 15.
72 Ibid., p. 21.
73 In his influential article on Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems, C. S. Holling argued that resilience is not based on the ‘presumption of sufficient knowledge, but the recognition of our ignorance’. C. S. Holling, ‘Resilience and stability of ecological eystems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4 (1973), p. 21.
74 Grove, Resilience, p. 17.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., p. 110.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., p. 174.
80 In academia, Mark Pelling has made the case for ‘ongoing policy experiment[s]’ and ‘greater inclusiveness’ even of ‘apparently weak or marginal actors’. Mark Pelling, Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (London, UK: Routledge, 2011), pp. 30, 45, 72. In the policy world, Brian Walker and David Salt highlight how ‘self-organizing systems are complex, dynamic, full of surprises and uncontrollable.’ Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012), p. 38. We will, therefore, never be able to put together a perfect model. Instead, a system description should be ‘constantly revisited, reiterated and fed into adaptive management’. Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, p. 53. That is because each system is unique: ‘There's nothing exactly like it anywhere.’ Ibid., p. 50; see Berkes, Fikret, ‘Understanding uncertainty and reducing vulnerability: Lessons from resilience thinking’, Springer Natural Hazards, 41:2 (2007), pp. 284, 289Google Scholar.
81 Grove, Resilience, p. 22.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., p. 205, emphasis in original.
84 Ibid., p. 18.
85 Ibid., p. 134.
86 Ibid., p. 238.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., p. 267.
89 Ibid., p. 45.
90 Chandler, Resilience: The Governance of Complexity.
91 Ibid., p. 50.
92 Ibid.
93 Writing on post-Cold War interventions and critiques of the liberal peace, Pol Bargués-Pedreny similarly argues that for resilience thinking ‘no representation can exhaust the rich diversity of human life.’ Bargués-Pedreny, Pol, ‘Realising the post-modern dream: Strengthening post-conflict resilience and the promise of peace’, Resilience, 3:2 (2015), p. 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
94 Chandler, Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, p. 4.
95 Ibid., p. 12.
96 For example, Paul Aldrich argues that ‘much of the destruction from a disaster like Hurricane Kathrina occurred precisely because of human attempts to subvert or artificially control nature.’ Aldrich, Building Resilience, p. 3. Paradigmatically, C. S. Holling opposed Maximum Sustained Yield (MSY) approaches to ecosystem management because they created instability. Holling, ‘Resilience and stability of ecological systems’, p. 21.
97 Chandler, Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, p. 12.
98 Ibid., p. 32.
99 Ibid., p. 35.
100 Ibid., p. 203.
101 This endeavour is doomed to failure whenever there is a clearly visible governing position and a set of normative aspirations as in liberal peace interventions. Pol Bargués-Pedreny has recently pointed out that policymakers in a resilience framework suffer from a chronic ‘sense of deficit’. Bargués-Pedreny, Pol, is, ‘Resilience “always more” than our practices: Limits, critiques and scepticism about international intervention’, Contemporary Security Policy, 41:2 (2020), p. 3Google Scholar. Interveners see their own actions and policies as invariably ‘fall[ing] short of enabling societies’ creative potential’. Bargués-Pedreny, ‘Resilience is “always more” than our practices’, p. 3.
102 Chandler, Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, p. 41.
103 Ibid., p. 221.
104 Ibid., p. 56.
105 Ibid., p. 225.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid., p. 222.
108 Ibid., p. 140.
109 Ibid., p. 225.
110 Ibid., p. 122.
111 Ibid., p. 224.
112 Brian Walker and David Salt see resilience as a way of changing in order not to change Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), p. 32; Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, p. 3.
113 Collier, Stephen, ‘Topologies of power: Foucault's analysis of political government beyond “governmentality”’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26:6 (2009), p. 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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116 Grove, Resilience.
117 Chandler, Resilience: The Governance of Complexity.
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119 Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop, p. 55.
120 Boltanski, On Critique.
121 Ibid., p. 12.
122 Ibid.
123 Similarly, Clive Barnett argues that ‘critique is a dimension of ordinary life’ (p. 3). According the Barnett, we should look for the political in ordinary claims of injustice, rather than ‘in the drama of events performed in public space’. Clive Barnett, The Priority of Injustice: Locating Democracy in Critical Theory (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2017), p. 74.
124 A pragmatist approach to emancipation would be in line with Stephanie Wakefield's recent suggestion that we should be ‘deciding for ourselves, in our own places and ways, what counts as a problem in the first place, how it is defined, what adversaries we ourselves perceive, and how we choose to respond to them’. Wakefield, ‘Urban resilience as critique’, p. 9.
125 Boltanski, On Critique, p. 12.
126 Stephanie Wakefield has demonstrated that urban experiments under the banner of climate change resilience are often conservative in nature. In her empirical study of Miami Beach, she works out how urban experiments, like elevating roads and building large pumping stations, ‘do not counter or transform existing social or economic urban relations. Instead, they attempt to extend and maintain existing relations into the future.’ (emphasis in original). They seek to ‘secure and manage an unchanging urban order’ founded on high-end real estate markets, tourism, and luxury lifestyles. Stephanie Wakefield, ‘Miami Beach forever? Urbanism in the back loop’, Geoforum, 107:2 (2019), pp. 34–44 (p. 40).
127 Boltanski, On Critique, p. 20.
128 Ibid., p. 24.
129 Ibid., p. 10.
130 Ibid., p. 24, emphasis in original.
131 Sjoberg, Laura, ‘Failure and critique in critical security studies’, Security Dialogue, 50:1 (2019), p. 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
132 By foregrounding the political claims and ethical concerns of real-world, situated actors, pragmatism invites social scientists to ‘get out of the way’ while occupying a ‘position of solidarity’, which is what Debbie Lisle and Heather Johnson call for in their critique of the EU refugee crisis. Debbie Lisle and Heather Johnson, ‘Lost in the aftermath’, Security Dialogue, 50:1 (2019), pp. 36, 24.
133 Boltanski, On Critique, p. 30.
134 Ibid., p. 34.
135 Ibid., p. 37.
136 Ibid., p. 41.
137 Ibid., p. 42.
138 Jonathan Austin, Rocco Bellanova, and Mareile Kaufmann, ‘Doing and mediating critique: An invitation to practice companionship’, Security Dialogue, 50:1 (2019), pp. 3–19.
139 Ibid., pp. 7, 6.
140 Ibid., pp. 6, 7.
141 Ibid., p. 14.
142 Boltanski, On Critique, p. 4.
143 Ibid.
144 Ibid.
145 Ibid., p. 6.
146 Ibid., p. 37, emphasis in original.
147 Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, ‘The sociology of critical capacity’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2:3 (1999), pp. 359–77.
148 Frank Gadinger, ‘On justification and critique: Luc Boltanski's pragmatic sociology and international relations’, International Political Sociology, 10:3 (2016), p. 192.
149 Ibid., p. 198.
150 Simon Susen, ‘Luc Boltanski: His life and work – An overview’, in Simon Susen and Bryan Turner (eds), The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’ (London, UK: Anthem Press, 2014), pp. 3–28.
151 Gadinger, ‘On justification and critique’, p. 191.
152 Boltanski and Thévenot, ‘The sociology of critical capacity’, p. 364.
153 Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
154 Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013); see, for example, Wakefield, Stephanie, ‘Urban resilience as critique: Problematizing infrastructure in Post-Sandy New York City’, Political Geography, 79 (2020), pp. 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
155 Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, p. 93.
156 Ibid., p. 94.
157 Ibid., 95.
158 Ibid., 139.
159 Ibid., p. 227.
160 Ibid., p. 268.
161 Ibid., p. 145.
162 Joseph, ‘Resilience as embedded neoliberalism’; Joseph, Varieties of Resilience.
163 Coaffee, Murkami Wood, and Rogers, The Everyday Resilience of the City; Jessica West, ‘Civic resilience: Securing “resilient communities” to prevent terrorism’, in Chandler and Coaffee (eds), The Routledge Handbook of International Resilience, pp. 318–30.
164 Evans and Reid, Resilient Life.
165 Walker and Cooper, ‘Genealogies of resilience’, p. 157.
166 Grove, Resilience.
167 Chandler, Resilience: The Governance of Complexity.
168 Kevin Grove, ‘Resilience and the postcolonial: Hidden transcripts of resilience’, in Chandler and Coaffee (eds), The Routledge Handbook of International Resilience, pp. 370–82.
169 Boltanski, On Critique.
170 Austin, Jonathan, ‘A parasitic critique for international relations’, International Political Sociology, 13:2 (2019), pp. 215–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
171 Austin, ‘A parasitic critique for international relations’, p. 217, emphasis in original.
172 Ibid., p. 229.
173 Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 267.
174 Ibid., p. 211.
175 Ibid., p. 170.
176 Ibid., p. 162.
177 Ibid., pp. 247, 248.
178 Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop, p. 55.
179 Ibid.
180 Ibid.