Resilience has fast become a popular catchphrase used by government, international finance organisations, NGOs, community groups and activists all over the globe. Despite its widespread use, there remains confusion over what resilience is and the purpose it serves. Resilience can, in some cases, speak to a desire to successfully respond and adapt to disruptions outside of the status quo. However, this conceptualisation of resilience is far from uncontested. Emerging research has shown a lack of consideration for power, agency and inequality in popular and academic use of these frameworks. Criticism has also been raised regarding the use of resilience to justify projects informed by neoliberal ideologies that aim to decrease state involvement, increase community self‐reliance and restructure social services. Despite this, resilience is being used by community and activist groups that aim to address local and global environmental and social issues. With this critical insight, the need has arisen to question what is being maintained, for whom and by whom, through these discourses of resilience. In this review, I trace the evolution of the concept in the literature. Building on this, I discuss three interpretations of the resilience paradigm in current academic, political and activist arenas. I conclude by discussing possible future directions for critical geographic perspectives of resilience.

Violence in the Rakhine State of Myanmar has led to a humanitarian crisis as Rohingya people flee across the border to Bangladesh (1). With the rapid influx of nearly 700,000 arrivals between August 2017 and the beginning of 2018, the Bangladeshi city of Cox's Bazar is now under severe strain from a Rohingya population of almost 1 million, one of the largest concentrations of refugees in the world (2). The crisis seized global attention, and the international response was rapidly escalated to a Level 3 emergency (3). In addition to the humanitarian challenges, the mass influx of Rohingya refugees has resulted in environmental degradation both within the refugee camps and in the surrounding areas (2). The expansion of existing campsites has led to more than 2000 ha of forest loss in the Cox's Bazar region (4). Expansion of the old Kutupalong camp blocked the only corridor used by the globally endangered Asian elephant as a migration route and trapped about 45 elephants in the western side of the camp (5). The latest Rohingya settlement has also amplified humanelephant conflict in the area, with 13 human casualties so far (6). The remaining elephant habitat is under severe pressure from uncontrolled fuelwood collection in the forest (7). The pressure on forests has caused tensions with local

Resilience has been criticised in many fields for focussing on attempts to bounce back or maintain the status quo following a disturbance. Such conceptualisations can uphold the hegemony of discourses of stability and are potentially unhelpful to groups seeking to achieve radical change. Despite this, the concept is fast subsuming sustainability as the latest catchphrase for community organisations wishing to address social and environmental injustices. Grass-roots groups are mobilising activism to shape this interpretation through post-capitalist visions -creating alternatives to dominant capitalist narratives in the present. This paper will discuss the expression of such radical notions of resilience through exploring how activism intersects with experiences of disaster. Through the case study of Project Lyttelton, a community organisation at the epicentre of the 22 February 2011 Christchurch earthquake in Aotearoa, New Zealand, this research examines the potential for a radical notion of resilience to challenge hegemonic understandings of everyday capitalist life. By exploring this tension between resilience and post-capitalist activism, this paper contributes to an emerging area of critique through articulating a more nuanced understanding of the radical potential for what is often expressed as an inherently non-radical concept.

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As disasters increasingly affect a greater proportion of the population with growing strength and frequency it is becoming even more important to comprehend how recovery from these events is mediated and managed by society. Emerging from several decades of concerted work on the social determinants of disaster, vulnerability and risk, research is now being established that underlies the importance of the politics and power in shaping the processes and outcomes of disaster recovery. In particular, there is a need to situate the central role of neoliberal capitalism in shaping the values and practices of reconstruction and recovery, particularly through engagements with crisis politics. At the same time, disasters may open up space for contestation and resistance that allows for alternative and transformative forms of recovery politics. In this paper I draw on geographies of crisis and hope to frame a theoretical perspective that encapsulates both the capitalist dynamics of disaster recovery and the radical potential of post capitalist politics for facilitating transformative action at the community scale.