SoLiXG:Resilience

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Resilience

Resilience is generally understood as the capacity to quickly adapt to or recover from shocks. The European Union defined it in 2016 as “the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crisis” . The attractiveness of the notion of resilience can be ascribed to its function as a guiding concept in times of what some have called the ‘polycrisis’. Economic, ecological, medical, political and social shocks and catastrophes are seen as a constant feature of the future. They are understood to be at the same time more probable and also as inherently unpredictable. The objective of resilience entails the promise of a society, which is able to withstand the turbulence of uncertain and increasingly catastrophic times. The term was first used in psychology but was made popular by ecologist Crawford S. Holling in 1973. He criticized notions of ecological systems as governed by equilibrium states and understood them instead as systems “profoundly affected by changes external to [them], and continually confronted by the unexpected“. All the central pillars of the resilience conception, which still dominates today, can already be found in Holling's programmatic text: (1) an epistemological defeatism that assumes an unknowable "random world" (ibid.: 13). Derived from this is (2) an ontological fatalism, visible in a view of disruptions and crises as unpredictable and at the same time inevitable events, for which the term 'black swan events' has meanwhile become established. This fatalism is at the same time (3) intertwined with an ontology of vulnerability, which assumes that actors and systems are permanently exposed to dangers through abrupt changes in their environment. However, since the reasons for the crisis-like shocks and abrupt disruptions are considered unknowable on the basis of one's own epistemic premises, (4) crisis prevention is limited to strengthening post hoc strategies of adaptation. The resilient subject is thus constructed as one which is characterized by spontaneous adaptive rather than reflexive agency and which views existential uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a burden. Therefore, resilience is sometimes contrasted to robustness. As economist Markus Brunnermeier has argued, robustness is the ideal that a society can be static and avoid shocks altogether. Resilience on the other hand has discarded that ideal and strives for a society that is dynamic and can quickly adapt to whatever intricacies it faces. The analogy Brunnermeier uses to illustrate this distinction is the difference between an oak tree and reed. While the oak looks robust and crisis prone it can only resist strong winds to a certain degree. At one point its wooden body simply breaks. A reed on the other hand, due to its elastic and adaptive nature, is able to bend and is therefore resilient enough to wither even the strongest storms.