Resilience and International Politics: Premises, Debates, Agenda

Resilience has gained substantial traction in international politics of late. This scholarship has sparked debates concerning the meaning of resilience and how scholars should go about studying it. Scholars attuned to Michel Foucault's governmentality thesis argue that resilience is a product of contemporary neoliberalism and constitutes a strategy permitting states to abdicate responsibility in times of crisis. The overarching objective of this article is to tell a different sociopolitical story of the connections between resilience and international politics. In mapping International Relations (IR) scholars working on resilience, the gist of the argument presented here is that although resilience may be in some instances a neoliberal device for governance, it has a wider range of meanings as well. By setting out a different narrative of resilience, this article opens the possibility of an analysis that sees the emergence of resilience in international politics holding great promise for renewing and deepening current IR debates, including securitization, international interventions, vulnerability, resistance, and the political use of myth.