Resilience beyond neoliberalism? Mystique of complexity, financial crises, and the reproduction of neoliberal life

Abstract

The burgeoning debate on resilience in international relations has seen the emergence of two polarized views: resilience as neoliberal governmentality and resilience as the expression of a post-neoliberal shift. This article reflects upon the ontology of complexity as unknowability at the heart of post-neoliberal resilience. It argues that this approach neglects how the discourse of complexity as unknowability is a neoliberal technology of government that is instrumental to advance neoliberal forms of resilience. The second half of the article shows how a resilience-as-post-neoliberal approach resonates with those dominant narratives which have shrouded the causes and mechanics of the 2008 financial crisis in a mystique of complexity, thus encouraging forms of cognitive and political disengagement. The article concludes that by celebrating local knowledge at the expense of an understanding of global dynamics, post-neoliberal resilience offers an impoverished notion of resistance compliant with the dictates of the neoliberal order.

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