By now it should be clear that resilience is not a thing, nor is there‘one’ logic of
resilience that informs all instances of its usage. A scholar from the ecology literature
using‘resilience’ may mean something di erent to a policy-maker in an international
governmental organisation. Trying to nd a xed de nition or clear understanding of
resilience across time, space and disciplines can only lead to a narrow perspective.
Indeed, the scholarly consensus is that we should embrace the conceptual vagueness
and malleability of resilience (Brand & Jax, 2007). While this position raises certain
epistemological di culties, we still wish to emphasise the pluralistic character of resi-
lience by examining what is politically at stake in discourses and practices of resilience
and how these relate to particular subjects, themes and agencies; allowing an analysis
that sees resilience as a complex and evolving process of articulation and identi cation.
Discourses and practices of resilience can carry multiple logics. A certain form of
selectivity takes place, we argue, and certain ideas of resilience are more or less main-
stream or dominant according to the particular logic it works by. This special issue will
identify such di erent political logics and discourses both in relation to dominant
approaches and in possible alternatives of a more critical or emancipatory character.
We seek to reconsider critical approaches to resilience in three ways– rst by reexamin-
ing the relationship of resilience to neoliberalism; second by rethinking the immanent or
endogenous focus of resilience upon the local and the indigenous in particular; third
challenging and extending readings of resilience itself by introducing a more mundane,
everyday conception of resilient activity.