The world today has set itself the goal of improved adaptation, preparedness and alertness in the face of global change. Rapid and drastic global changes have prompted the political and social scientific use of ‘resilience’. In social scientific scholarship to date, resilience is presented as an answer to and a necessity in dealing with the current unpredictability. By developing resilience, it is claimed, individuals and communities can avoid the worst-case scenarios deriving from uncertainty and be prepared to cope with the unknown.

In the midst of the upsurge of resilience, its fundamental premises have remained understudied: How does resilience order society? The Nordic network Politics and Power of Resilience explores this question. With funding from the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS), the network has organised a series of exploratory workshops in 2023-2024. The workshops gathered researchers from different career stages to debate resilience and its emergence in Nordic discussions on politics, security, economy and, for example, welfare.

The founding partners of the network include Marjo Lindroth, Julian Reid and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen from the University of Lapland, Claes Tängh Wrangel from Swedish Defence University and Frank Sejersen from the University of Copenhagen.

The aim of POWERS is to develop multidisciplinary critical discussion on resilience and its power effects in the Nordic context.

Special Issue: Resilience and Racism (Journal of Language and Politics, forthcoming)

In a global era characterised by prolonged crises, the seemingly neutral concept of resilience has gained central importance across political, academic and public discourses. This special issue sheds light on the often-overlooked racialised underpinnings and articulations of resilience. Through diverse empirical case studies across what has been called the Western racialised assemblage – spanning security policy and military thinking, EU governance, the internationalisation of labour markets and social justice activism – the contributions investigate how resilience is mobilised both to maintain and contest racialised power relations. Three themes can be discerned from the articles, highlighting how resilience operates as a vocabulary of rule: inequality, politics of the body and mind, and refusal. The issue enriches critical scholarship on both racism and resilience, calling for a deeper engagement with the complex and multifarious ways in which resilience both sustains and disrupts the racialised assemblage in which we live.

Journal of Language and Politics, Online First