The politics of resilience: promises of a Polanyian reading
Dorottya Mendly
Abstract
This article is a theoretical attempt to connect resilience studies and Polanyian scholarship for the first time, through reconstructing the politics of resilience. It argues for politicizing resilience, as a crucial tool in humanity’s struggle for survival, considering the severity of the ongoing crises of neoliberal globalization. It identifies key components of this politics, following the path devised by Karl Polanyi with his idea of the double movement, and reworks these to construct a strategic resource for transformative resilience-building projects. It reflects on subjects, objects, and dynamics in articulating the politics of resilience and argues for the possibility of establishing democratic control over re-embedded markets, along these lines. The resulting strategy departs from revolutionary ideas of social and political change, while it advocates for transformation rooted in the lived experiences and everyday lives of peoples.
Keywords: resilience, resilience-building, double movement, transformative politics
