Resilient subjects: uncertainty, warfare and liberalism

O’Malley, Pat

doi:10.1080/03085147.2010.510681

Cited by 199 publications

(147 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Indeed, the synergies between resilience-oriented development practices and liberal and neoliberal ideologies are readily noted by critics (Cooper 2008, O'Malley 2010, Walker and Cooper 2011, Cote and Nightingale 2012, Reid 2012, Joseph 2013, Aradau 2014). Watts (2011) argues that the rising interest in resilience thinking not only reflects the depth of neoliberal ideology in development but is in fact generative of such thinking.…”

Section: Resilience Thinking For Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice

Walsh-Dilley¹,

Wolford²,

McCarthy³

2016

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Even as resilience thinking becomes evermore popular as part of strategic programming among development and humanitarian organizations, uncertainty about how to define, operationalize, measure, and evaluate resilience for development goals prevails. As a result, many organizations and institutions have undertaken individual, collective, and simultaneous efforts toward clarification and definition. This has opened up a unique opportunity for a rethinking of development practices. The emergent consensus about what resilience means within development practice will have important consequences both for development practitioners and the communities in which they work. Incorporating resilience thinking into development practice has the potential to radically transform this arena in favor of social and environmental justice, but it could also flounder as a way to dress old ideas in new clothes or, at worst, to further exploit, disempower, and marginalize the world's most vulnerable populations. We seek to make an intervention into the definitional debates surrounding resilience that supports the former and helps prevent the latter. We argue that resilience thinking as it has been developed in social-ecological systems and allied literatures has a lot in common with the concept of food sovereignty and that paying attention to some of the lessons and claims of food sovereignty movements could contribute toward building a consensus around resilience that supports social and environmental justice. In particular, the food sovereignty movement relies on a strategy that elevates rights. We suggest that a rights-based approach to resilience-oriented development practice could contribute to its application in just and equitable ways.

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Section: Resilience Thinking For Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice

Walsh-Dilley¹,

Wolford²,

McCarthy³

2016

E&S

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“…resilience as a supplement to neoliberal re-structuring; part of a more generalised trend to responsibilise individuals for the vicissitudes of market life (Dean, 2014;O'Malley, 2010). Indeed, Jonathan Joseph (2013) has argued that resilience can be read as a form of embedded neoliberalism, whereby the responsibility for dealing with the excess of politics in neoliberal agendas is re-embedded through individuals and communities.…”

Section: Resilience: Managerial and Critical Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Uncertainty therefore becomes a supplement for the governmental logics of liberal society via discourses of resilience that seek to foster subjects capable of living with the existential possibility of shock (Evans and Reid 2014;O'Malley, 2010).…”

Section: Resilience: Managerial and Critical Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Section 1 engages the existing critical literature on resilience, which portrays the concept as an important supplement for neoliberal forms of governance in times of crisis (Evans and Reid 2014;Joseph, 2013;Lentzos and Rose, 2009;O'Malley, 2010;Walker and Cooper, 2012). While elements of this literature provide a powerful diagnosis -not least through the politicization of (apparently) apolitical terms like 'uncertainty' and 'adaptability' -we call into question the coherence and success that is implicitly attributed to discourses of resilience in such accounts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building Resilient Finance? Uncertainty, complexity, and resistance

Brassett

Holmes

2016

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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The article develops a critical analysis of the politics of financial resilience as an increasingly prevalent discourse of economic policy and practice. Against existing critiques of resilience which focus on the neoliberal rationalities and subjectivities that it (apparently) perpetuates, we argue that resilience per se does not-of necessity-infer any particular form of governance or subjectivity. Instead, resilience can be thought of as a sphere of political engagement. An emphasis on system, structure, and the relations between actors over time gives financial resilience a productive ambiguity: neither structure nor subject is ever fully defined and thus remains open. To this end, we engage the Bank of England's recent turn to complexity modeling and its correlative, somewhat metaphorical, ethos of 'clear thinking' in 'complex times'. This idea of complexity foregrounds the 'unknown' through positing the unpredictability of systemwide events; however, ensuing attempts to 'model complexity' entail a closure, rendering uncertainty 'known' in particular (and limited) ways. Indeed, we identify a general disconnect between the radical rhetoric of resilience agendas that emphasize complexity and the relative banality of resulting policy advice: self-regulation, capital ratios, and so on. We then explore how a focus on the 'unknown' can also give financial resilience an open quality, emphasizing the role of imagination and the diversity of agency. Put simply, if financial governance must be imagined, then it can be imagined differently. We therefore examine a set of everyday attempts to use the openness of resilience/complexity, in order to imagine finance in more democratic or communitarian terms. In particular, market formations such as local banking, peer lending, and wider attempts to politicize financial regulation through documentaries like Bank of Dave play on the productive ambiguities of financial resilience in critical ways. Such agendas do not exhaust or solve the dilemmas identified, but do represent a creative set of attempts to engage the politics of finance in inclusive, participatory, and reciprocal terms.

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“…Theoretically, critical resilience scholarship focuses predominantly on how resilience is situated within liberal notions of security or moves beyond it (Chandler, 2012(Chandler, , 2014Duffield, 2012;Evans and Reid, 2013;Lentzos and Rose, 2009;O'Malley, 2010;Walker and Cooper, 2011;Zebrowski, 2013). In doing so, the critical literature follows Walker and Cooper's genealogy (Walker and Cooper, 2011), which foregrounds Hayek's and Holling's notions of complex systems theory and the limits of control and prediction.…”

Section: Resilience In Critical Security Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience and (in)security: Practices, subjects, temporalities

2015

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Diverse, sometimes even contradictory concepts and practices of resilience have proliferated into a wide range of security policies. In introducing this special issue, we problematize and critically discuss how these forms of resilience change environments, create subjects, link temporalities, and redefine relations of security and insecurity. We show the increased attention -scholarly as well as political -given to resilience in recent times and provide a review of the state of critical security studies literature on resilience. We argue that to advance this discussion, resilience needs to be conceptualized and investigated in plural terms. We use temporalities and subjectivities as key analytical aspects to investigate the plural instantiations of resilience in actual political practice. These two issues -subjectivity and temporality -form the overall context for the special issue and are core themes for all the articles collected here.

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Resilient subjects: uncertainty, warfare and liberalism

Cited by 199 publications

References 16 publications

Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice

Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice

Building Resilient Finance? Uncertainty, complexity, and resistance

Resilience and (in)security: Practices, subjects, temporalities

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