The resilient child, human development and the “postdemocracy”

Resilience is the popular term for a capacity to ‘bounce back’ from adversity. It is also a scientific concept informing an influential bio-psychological approach to contemporary inequality. This article recalls the origins of the term in developmental psychopathology and suggests that the project of cultivating resilient selves is an aspect of the broader depoliticization characterizing “post-democracies” today. The scientific object of resilience is produced through the study of the interplay of risky and protective variables in the individual life course. Resilience is present when developmental resources in and around the self help to combat threats to ‘adaptation’. The project of resilience is to know how to cultivate individual robustness in the face of immutable threats – including poverty, grasped as a developmental risk factor. In this way of knowing the world, structured inequality is seen to be relatively unchangeable compared to the powers of resilience. Resilience has been taken up by neoliberal governments as the model of evidence-based ‘actionable knowledge’ for population interventions. But its influence extends further, to institutions of global governance, where resilience’s central object of enquiry and intervention – the child – has been projected onto humanity as a whole. The appeal of resilience as a practical and optimistic science is undeniable but we suggest that it is time to take account of its implications for political contestation. Resilience provides positive psychology’s contribution to the narrowing of justice- and equity-seeking projects in the current moment, reducing their horizons to the care for ‘human capital’ under conditions of socioeconomic precarity.