Postneoliberal resilience: Interrogating the value of the resilience multiple in the post-Covid-19 conjunctural crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19 response has revived scholarship on the end of neoliberalism. And yet resilience, long associated with neoliberalism by critical scholars, has persisted as a norm orienting state action. This article explores how resilience ideas are being adopted and adapted within a period of postneoliberalism. Employing a conjunctural approach, this article details how resilience ideas are being reinscribed within an emergent set of critiques, rationalities, and reforms in the wake of Covid-19. Analysis centres on how resilience is invoked both as a paradigm, through which problems of pandemic preparedness are being framed and as a core idea, for building back better within Covid-19 recovery plans. Rather than being overdetermined by neoliberalism, this article examines how resilience ideas are being drawn upon to support projects that aim to depart from or oppose neoliberal logics of governance. This affirmational approach, I argue, departs from a critique of resilience based on rejection, and instead operates by affirming the value of resilience and repeating it differently. Here, the multiplicity, mutability and, indeed, resilience of resilience ideas enables the concept to not only support distinct political programmes, but to consolidate disparate ideas, policies and institutions into new political configurations and state forms. I argue that that the remarkable persistence of the value of resilience has been achieved by the ability of resilience ideas to support emergent assemblages of diverse political ideas, programmes, and institutions in a time of postneoliberal conjunctural crisis.