Resilience is “always more” than our practices: Limits, critiques, and skepticism about international intervention

Abstract

This article examines the response to the crisis of liberal statebuilding in conflict affected societies since the end of the 2000s. It shows how both resilience policy approaches and academic critical understandings are dissatisfied with the implementation of policies and programs, which seem to fail time and again. That is, there is a widespread perception that resilience is "always more" than what current approaches are providing. In consequence, it is assumed that international interventions require even more locally-sensitive initiatives that are in tune with local needs; new and better technologies, for instance, digital maps to assist practitioners in obtaining sheer volumes of information and accurate representations of space; and programs that are open-ended and flexible. The article cautions that by assuming that satisfactory outcomes are yet to come (i.e., that resilience, or a desired outcome such as peace and security, is still lacking), policy and critical approaches are reproducing and legitimizing failure, furthering neoliberal governance and cementing a profound skepticism. KEYWORDS Resilience; ownership; digital maps; peacebuilding; critique During the 1990s and 2000s, international intervention was conceived as "statebuilding," a process to guarantee a stable peace by the means of strengthening governmental institutions and consolidating a liberal democratic state; yet, towards the end of the decade of 2000s, most operations were not delivering (Paris, 2010). While just an anecdote, the UN advertisement speaks to the crisis of the theory and practice of liberal statebuilding: It was felt that international interventions were full of limitations and any attempt to achieve peace was deemed insufficient; so peace had to be continually attended, waged. Critical scholars helped highlighting the negative impact of statebuilding approaches, which resulted in costly and burdensome projects. These were engineered and executed top-down by external actors and had little resonance with local interests, experiences, and perceptions (for example, see S. Campbell, Chandler, & Sabaratnam, 2011). Accordingly, international interventions had to be reimagined against over-simplified, linear, technocratic, and Eurocentric understandings of development and peace (Autesserre, 2014;Mac Ginty, 2011;McLeod, 2015;Richmond, 2011). These critics argued for an emancipatory "hybrid" or "post-liberal peace," rooted in everyday settings and inclusive of diverse perspectives.Over the last decade, the idea of resilience has become central in diverse areas such as development, food, cyber and energy security, conflict prevention and peacebuilding, disaster risk reduction, climate change, and poverty reduction. Although it has never been a coherent policy framework and takes on multiple forms (Cavelty, Kaufmann, & Søby Kristensen, 2015;Joseph, 2018), resilience is generally understood as the capacity of systems to withstand and adapt to complex crises and shocks (

Community Resilience in Belarus and the EU response

“…In this article, and elsewhere (Korosteleva and Flockhart, 2020; Petrova and Korosteleva, 2021), we argue that not only must resilience be ‘home‐grown’, inside‐out and relational, it is also ‘always more’ (Bargués‐Pedreny, 2020) – a way of thinking, living and governing – which in the context of complex life posited above, should be seen both as a quality of a system (for example the human community in Belarus impressing the world with its incredible tenacity, creativity, stamina and perseverance). Additionally, it is also a process of self‐organization demonstrating a system's ability not just to adapt and survive, but most crucially, to transform with, and learn from change , which a prominent democracy scholar Larbi Sadiki (2015, 2021) refers to as ‘democratic knowing’ by doing when examining the Arab Spring.…”

(Gendered) resilience in community-based natural resource management in fragile and conflict-affected settings

“…In terms of the wider debates in which I have situated this argument, it is possible to see two potential contributions of my findings. Through bringing together the International Relations literature on resilience in peacebuilding projects, and the literature on resilience in NRM from political ecology it is possible to see how the emerging international agenda on conflict prevention through NRM is bringing in logics that reflect wider international initiatives for peacebuilding through resilience-building (Juncos and Joseph 2020;Bargués-Pedreny 2020b). That global agendas such as Pathways for Peace and the UN Sustaining Peace agenda and a subsequently high number of donor-funded peacebuilding projects are focusing on making connections between resilience and NRM illustrates that research on peacebuilding needs to pay much more concerted attention to the question of natural resource management.…”

A new business as usual? The impact of the ‘resilience turn’ on the EU’s foreign policy and approach towards the eastern neighbourhood

“…Within the institutional structure of the EU, resilience has also provided a common language and set of benchmarks that actors can systematically employ, and thus go beyond the EU's seemingly impermeable policy silos (Tocci 2020, 183). Nevertheless, other studies emphasise that the impact of the resilience turn on the practices of the member states has been rather limited (Bressan and Bergmaier 2021;Bargués-Pedreny 2020). A key aspect that has made evaluating outcomes in EU foreign policy cumbersome is the EU's goal of applying an understanding of resilience that frames it not always a linear process, but rather as a complex evolutive process (European Commission 2016).…”