Unfit to Bounce Back: On the Martial Politics of Resilience in WWI-Weimar Germany and Austerity Britain

Abstract

Abstract Resilience discourse, with its implicit assumption of a return to health and productivity following a crisis, is often mobilized to target disabled people. Yet while resilience scholarship has rapidly expanded and become prevalent in various fields over recent decades, it has largely failed to analyze the multiple connections between resilience, disability, and eugenics. This article argues that resilience discourse is a form of martial politics, wielded against disabled people to protect the health and prosperity of the political community. A martial politics of resilience works through three registers, responsibilizing disabled subjects by withdrawing state support, dehumanizing them as unproductive and a burden, and exposing these subjects to abandonment/death through medical and policy interventions. I use the lens of martial politics to think through relationships between resilience, disability, and security in Germany and Britain in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, focusing on psychiatric treatment of trauma in the former and the implementation of austerity policies in the latter. The article thus expands our understanding of relationships between resilience, subjectivity, and security by highlighting the ableist and lethal contours of resilient subjects, polities, and economies.