The critical turn of resilience: Mapping thematic communities and modes of critical scholarship

This paper explores the structures of the critical literature on resilience by mapping the ways in which critical trajectories developed and travelled across thematic communities. We use bibliometric analysis to examine 49 years of scholarship on resilience from international relations, geography, political ecology, and other social science disciplines that foremost focused on questions of power, inequality, and social justice. As a result, this paper delves into the composition of different types of critique mobilised in resilience scholarship and identifies the interdependencies between modes of critical thought and their degree of interdisciplinary connectivity. The recent proliferation of resilience discourses invited critical inquiries into the concept and its ability to construct policy narratives of “certainty.” Critical works have deconstructed and debated the instrumentalist notions of resilience as overly simplified, raised to the forefront questions of power, emphasised the linkages of the concept to dominant political and economic regimes, and underscored the absence of any real call for transformative action, hence leading to the reproduction of perpetuating crises over the long run. To explore the structure of the critical literature on resilience, we map the ways in which critical trajectories developed and travelled across thematic communities. We use bibliometric analysis to examine 49 years of resilience literature from international relations, geography, political ecology, and other social science disciplines that foremost focused on questions of power, inequality, and social justice. As a result, this paper delves into the composition of different types of critique mobilised in resilience scholarship and identifies the interdependencies between modes of critical thought and their degree of interdisciplinary connectivity.