Content uploaded by Julian Reid
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Julian Reid on Jan 22, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously
... However, resilience understandings have shifted from an emphasis on the return to equilibrium to modes of coping with constant change. This is reflected in the work of critical scholars, with the first wave of work on the concept focusing on critique of "top-down," "coercive," and neoliberal forms of resilience ( Evans and Reid 2014 ;Joseph 2016 ), before more recent approaches began to develop their own positive, productive conceptions of grassroots, transformative resilience ( Milliken 2013 ;Jon 2019 ;Grove et al. 2020 ;Juncos and Joseph 2020 ). ...
This article explores the importance of what we call “decolonial deconstruction” for contemporary global politics and policy discourses and develops a critique of this approach. “Decolonial deconstruction” seeks to keep open policy processes, deconstructing liberal policy goals of peace, democracy, or justice as always “to come”. It emerged through a nexus of postmodern and decolonial framings, well represented in the critical Black studies tradition, where theorists have focused upon identity construction, rejecting static conceptions. These approaches have increasingly been taken up in international policymaking approaches and International relations theory, particularly in the field of peacebuilding and the broad policy approach of resilience. After highlighting the ways that processual understandings of deconstruction have transformed these policy areas, we suggest an alternative deconstructive approach. In doing so, we draw upon the critical Black studies tradition but emphasize the need to critique underlying ontological assumptions about the world. We heuristically set out this approach as the “Black Horizon.”
... interpretations of resilience emphasize change and transformation, as in the case of the IPCC's (2022) definition of resilience as the capacity to "reorganize" or the European Commission's (2020, 6) definition of resilience as the "ability not only to withstand and cope with challenges but also to undergo transitions, in a sustainable, fair, and democratic manner." This tension around the use of resilience has led some scholars to call for the dis-use of the term, which has been emptied of its meaning (Brand and Jax, 2007;Davoudi and Porter, 2012), even as it represents a directly harmful concept for human well-being by propagating a view that catastrophic events are both inevitable and opportunities for growth (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013;Evans and Reid, 2014). The lack of a unified understanding of resilience may be particularly problematic when the concept is used as a measurable outcome, as in the case of the European Commission's, 2020 Strategic Foresight Report, which proposes resilience as a new compass for EU policies. ...
Our current historical moment is marked by a widespread sense of (ongoing and anticipated) crises, prompting calls to change existing economic, political, social, and environmental systems. This discourse has directed increased scholarly and policy-orientated attention to the concepts of "transformation" and "resilience." However , beyond attention, these concepts have increasingly adopted a place in rationales for policy action and measurements of its success, highlighting the need for conceptual clarity. In light of this, this paper reviews the use of transformation and resilience in the literature. These concepts appear across a broad spectrum of research fields, ranging from the natural to the social sciences. However, definitions and contexts vary broadly, further underlining the need for clarity. In this paper, we delve specifically into two disciplines: science, technology, and innovation (STI) policy research and economic history. Although unified in their explicit concern with societal change, the disciplines' different understandings of such change, particularly temporal aspects, offer fertile ground for exploring the divergent understandings, uses, and definitions of transformation and resilience in the literature. Through this work, the paper makes two main contributions. First, it produces a nuanced review of how the literature employs the concepts of transformation and resilience. Second, it offers an analysis of how transformation and resilience can be understood in relation to each other from a historical perspective. By historically anchoring these concepts while acknowledging that every time is different, the paper also offers some policy guidance on a key challenge of our era: how to successfully govern resilience and transformation in times of change.
... Inserting a question mark into our title -'the future we want?'-we seek to actively challenge the future envisioned by these IOs and advocate for a reinvigorated human subject that is attuned to the substantive causes of injustice and primed to resistrather than merely endureprevailing conditions, norms, practices and ideologies. Through an interrogation of the ideal twenty-first century learnerwhom we identify as a post-political, resilient, empathic, bio-perfected, transhuman subjectwe critique the type of world that is brought into existence through its discursive construction and highlight the necessity for alternative political subjectivities that privilege different ways of being and relating in the world (Evans and Reid 2014). ...
We examine the ideal twenty-first century learner as discursively produced in recent future-oriented documents published by the OECD and UNESCO. Drawing inspiration from Bacchi’s question ‘What is the problem represented to be?’, we identify a constellation of interrelated discourses that together craft an image of a post-political, resilient, empathic, bio-perfected, transhuman learner. This learner is conditioned to endure, adapt and adjust to ongoing socio-political conditions and crises, rather than to contest, resist, or alter them. We argue that this portrayal is reflective of a deepening ideological alignment between the OECD and UNESCO – organisations that have traditionally held divergent views on the purpose and value of education. We conclude by advocating for the reinvigoration of subjectivities that prioritise political agency, defined as the capacity to act upon and transform the existing social order and power structures.
... Pertanto, questa diventa una forma legittima di adattamento se e solo se pianificata e gestita attraverso framework normativi elaborati dagli attori della governance climatica internazionale (Bettini et al. 2017). 2. Paradigma neoliberale: la mobilità umana come forma di adattamento identifica il migrante ambientale, non più il rifugiato climatico, come un nuovo soggetto adattativo e resiliente, in grado di far fronte individualmente alle conseguenze di un problema di cui non è responsabile (Evans, Reid 2014). ...
Crisi climatica, (im)mobilità e adattamenti delves into the geographies of climate (im)mobilities in the Republic of Fiji, where internal relocations are slowly becoming a tangible reality. By taking into consideration both state-led and community-led relocation initiatives, this research aims to understand to what extent planned relocation may effectively and sustainably respond to climate change adaptation in a small island context. More broadly, this book contributes to the growing body of critical adaptation, mobilities and island studies, grasping the many facets of a complex, underexplored yet increasingly relevant issue in the realm of current and future global challenges.
This chapter analyses the correspondence between assertiveness and conflict in peacemaking processes. The descriptive method employed a conceptual analysis focused on the foundations that have defined the history of assertiveness to construct a category centred on social relations and the historical-political condition inherent to the human being and, therefore, to assertiveness. Based on documentary research and semi-structured and in-depth interview techniques, an analysis was conducted of the assertiveness, conflicts, positioning, and reflexivity of individuals victimised by structural violence. Also included are previously published materials that enable comprehensive understanding of the processes and cycles of victimisation and assertiveness, both in their political and diachronic conditions.
A world government capable of controlling nation-states has never evolved. Nonetheless, considerable governance underlies the current order among states, facilitates absorption of the rapid changes at work in the world, and that direction to the challenges posed by interstate conflicts, environmental pollution, currency crises, and the many other problems to which an ever expanding global interdependence gives rise. In this study, nine leading international relations specialists examine the central features of this governance without government. They explore its ideological bases, behavioural patterns, and institutional arrangements as well as the pervasive changes presently at work within and among states. Within this context of change and order, the authors consider the role of the Concert of Europe and the pillars of the Westphalian system, the effectiveness of international institutions and regulatory mechanisms, the European Community and the micro-underpinnings of macro- governance practices.
There has perhaps been no greater thinker of the future than Jacques Derrida. Throughout his entire body of work Derrida constantly returns to the thinking of the “perhaps,” of the arrizant . This thinking of the “perhaps” takes shape as what is “new” and other to our world, something that is therefore unknowable even as a horizon of ideality that both arises out of and points to what ought to be in any given world. I renamed deconstruction the philosophy of the limit so as to emphasize Derrida as the protector of what is still yet to come. My argument was fundamentally that Derrida radicalized the notion of the Kantian meaning of “laying the ground” as the boundaries for the constitution of a sphere of valid knowledge, or determinant judgment. In Kant, to criticize aims to delimit what is decisive to the proper essence of a sphere of knowledge, say for example science. The “laying of limits” is not primarily a demarcation against a sphere of knowledge, but a delimiting in the sense of an exhibition of the inner construction of pure reason. The lifting out of the elements of reason involves a critique in the sense that it both sketches out the faculty of pure reason and surveys the project as the whole of its larger architectonic or systematic structure.
