Evolving framework for an alternative resilience to resilient capitalism

Abstract

Resilience is contemporary theoretical and practical mainstream framework approach in risk management. Emerging new forms of response to crisis and novel dynamics in addressing it challenge it and spur changes. Changes in relations are being initiated at global, regional, and local scales. Post-liberal social practices are being generated within the neoliberal practice itself, as an open-ended and potentially transformative process of resilient subjects that actively participate in those processes. In contrast with neoliberal practice, post-liberal practices rest on individual capacity for change, not on an actors’ agency to adapt. If choice between transformation and adaptation is a matter of free autonomous action, it implies that the subject is not reduced to the level of mere adaptation to changes and that autonomous actor has capacity to exercise influence. The main idea highlighted in this article is that of human agency as the central point of resilience. In the course of social learning process and participative decision-making, resilience becomes rooted in social actors fostering collective transformation in challenging times. The aim of this article is to contest the concept of resilience as a feature of mainstream theoretical discourse on resilient capitalism, by highlighting elements of an alternative perspective on neoliberal, individualistic, entrepreneurial forms of 'resilience'. The authors use this idea to suggest a paradigm shift in humanities on the basis of alternative routes of development as offered by alternative resilience to resilient capitalism.