A social theory of resilience: The governance of vulnerability in crisis-era neoliberalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, we set out a critical realist-informed Marxist approach to resilience, the principal argument being that the discourse is best explicated through a theoretical lens which situates its rise in the context of a neoliberal order which is undergoing a global organic crisis. Our key contribution to the literature is to show not only that extant resilience discourses ontologise vulnerability and thereby strip political discourse of the language of social struggle, but also that they provide a crisis-recovery imaginary more congenial to the interests of capital and state than to the vulnerable populations they ostensibly aim to capacitate. We conclude by joining a chorus of other scholars committed to exposing resilience as an insidious technology of the self.