Abstract
In his new book, Resilience, Kevin Grove provides a thorough and detailed account of the emergence of the discussion on resilience in geographical thinking. The starting point of the book is that despite the concept being increasingly used, the ways in which it functions to shape human–environmental relations remain largely unscrutinized. In the volume, Grove builds bridges between a broad spectrum of resilience scholarship, viewpoints of design theory and studies informed by Foucauldian genealogy. The question he poses at the outset is what resilience does as opposed to the better studied and more conventional question of what resilience is. Grove’s theorization of a will to design succeeds in breaking through the contemporary dichotomy of resilience as either a source of ‘salvation’ or a tool for neoliberal control. He points out that the concept of resilience, used as it is to capture, synthesize and address the present complexity, acts to continuously redefine the relations between truth and control. Overall, this is a fresh take on the concept of resilience and the discussions surrounding it. This novel approach is among the salient contributions of the work, making it compelling and accessible to readers from different disciplines.
We also find Grove’s question of what resilience does to be the most pressing one for research and politics to address. Resilience has become an attractive term betokening an approach that addresses all of today’s unpredictabilities and uncertainties. The concept has piqued the interest of those who study international politics from a critical perspective. A central question for these studies has been how resilience enters national and international policies and operates and persists in them. In our joint work, we have been particularly interested in how the emergence of resilience in global politics meshes with the question of indigeneity (e.g. Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2018). Our research has led us to reflect on resilience from two angles: as not only newly emerged rhetoric and a means through which politics programmes its responses to change but also, more importantly, as something through which politics attaches itself to subjects. Resilience is a feature that politics presumes, encourages and nurtures in the subject itself, and the measures designed to address and respond to the increasing global challenges rely on resilient subjects. We have argued that the case of indigenous peoples, as a distinctive and particular group, is a revealing example of the intricate interlinkage between resilience, politics and subjects. Our contribution to the discussion inspired by Grove’s examination of the ‘doings’ of resilience springs from our engagement with the politics of resilience and indigeneity. In fact, Grove makes references, albeit brief, to indigenous peoples as an identifiable group within the ‘designs’ of resilience thinking.
As we interpret it, Grove’s interest lies largely in the systems and structures aimed at designing resilience. By entering into a discussion with scholars such as CS Holling, Elinor Ostrom and Carl Folke, he tackles the fundamental question of complexity that calls for resilience in a world where finding a single ‘solution’ or ‘truth’ has become impossible. Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, as Grove points out, has been seen as one way to respond to that complexity and to strengthen resilience. It is noteworthy that indigenous peoples are among the few distinct population groups that are specifically cited as examples in the book. Indeed, indigenous peoples are often referred to as examples of resilience in current politics, which celebrates their historical and ongoing capacities to persevere. Referring to the work of Paul Nadasdy, Grove addresses the challenges involved in endeavours to merge indigenous knowledge with other types of knowledge (e.g. pp. 65–67, 124–125). Mechanisms aimed at building and strengthening resilience, such as inclusion and co-management, (can) reinforce existing inequalities. While Grove’s book addresses the important issue of knowledge, we wish to highlight here that the issue of indigenous peoples and resilience goes beyond that of knowledge; it is but one part of the puzzle. Indigeneity – as a particular type of being – is seen to encapsulate the kind of subjectivity that signals resilience. Thus, gazing at resilience through indigeneity reveals the depth to which resilience pervades the subject and its alleged difference.
The connection between resilience and indigenous peoples goes back far into history. Although ‘resilience’ might not have been the word used to describe the peoples in the day, the features that they are seen to possess are those of the resilient subject – adaptability, persistence and malleability. The peoples have had a remarkable ability to cope with and adapt to changing conditions, be these environmental, political, social or legal. Their resilience has evolved under pressure from the physical and human forces around them and failing to be resilient has meant ceasing to exist. The continuing existence of indigenous peoples bears witness to their exemplary resilience, and this is what the world now values in and expects from indigeneity. Grove’s references to indigenous knowledge signal this prevailing understanding that the peoples could and should make a unique contribution to resilience (p. 217).
By no means do we wish to imply that indigenous peoples could not make such a contribution. On the contrary, the peoples have extensive direct experience of living with unpredictability and change. For us, the key question is not one of the peoples’ concrete contributions to global resilience but of how resilience lays claim to subjects, indigenous in particular. As Grove also mentions, critical research on resilience has noted the irony of resilience expecting most from those who are the most vulnerable (e.g. Evans and Reid, 2013). We have found this to be perhaps the most striking aspect of resilience. Despite the violent past that indigenous peoples have endured, and despite their continuing dispossession and long history of being overlooked or disparaged, politics now yearns for their resilience. This contrast is brought into sharp relief in the case of the peoples’ traditional knowledge: what the Western ‘civilized’ world used to deem inferior and unsound is now hailed as the ultimately ‘right’ way of living with change and the environment.
However, as we see it, to a large extent resilience and indigeneity are not questions of what indigenous peoples know as much as they are issues of what they are and how they live. At issue is existence in its deepest sense. The peoples’ knowledge is intimately bound to their ways of life and cultures. Thus, the usefulness of traditional indigenous knowledge cannot simply be seen in terms of how to extract it and combine it with other types of knowledge. The ethos of resilience – that indigenous knowledge is there for the taking, to be utilized for the purposes of systems that aim to build up resilience – is essentially problematic.
Equally problematic is the way in which resilience and vulnerability have become inseparable. Robin May Schott (2013) has noted how vulnerability, in becoming the condition for resilience, has eroded on many levels the capacities of those deemed vulnerable to protest and demand justice. By coupling vulnerability and resilience, contemporary politics does not acknowledge vulnerability as a valid basis for political challenge and legal demands; it is merely a sign of a subject’s insufficient resilience (see also Welsh, 2014). In this vein, the celebration of indigenous peoples’ resilience, and their knowledge as part of it, works as a move that directs attention away from (continuing) conditions that have required resilience from them in the first place. The vulnerability of indigenous peoples appears detached from unresolved colonial relations and their role in producing the peoples’ vulnerability. Rather than signalling an effort to alleviate the peoples’ vulnerability, the focus on their resilience leaves the biased power setting intact. As a result, their vulnerability has become reduced to a shortcoming in the indigenous subject, as if it were an innate feature of indigeneity.
It is well worth noting how the politics of resilience deploys vulnerability to different degrees. Resilience makes distinctions in its treatment of the vulnerable by attuning its expectations to the characteristics of different groups. Indigenous peoples are not merely one among the many social groups who are now expected to perform resilience or know how to be resilient. On the contrary, indigenous peoples are presumed to embody resilience, while the rest of the globe’s poor, marginalized and dispossessed have yet to learn to adapt to and cope with change. The power of resilience in governing subjects stems precisely from its not being a universal condition and the requirements it imposes on the vulnerable not being universal either. For indigeneity, this has meant the position of the peculiar ‘other’. While the ethos of resilience seems to boast a great deal of positive attention for indigenous peoples, their knowledge and ways of living, it ends up locking indigeneity into a permanent state of difference and otherness. The power entailed in proffering resilience lies in the requirement that the indigenous subject demonstrate and retain its detectible difference, for without that difference there is no ‘traditionally knowing’ indigenous subject.
If Grove is occasionally concerned and wary of the designs of resilience eroding and flattening out difference, we are critical of the tendency of the politics of resilience to underline and foreground certain differences. In the case of indigenous peoples, the global resilience hype, despite its benign appearance, is yet another way to produce an ‘acceptably’ and ‘properly’ different subject. This type of ordering through othering continues the fundamental premises that we find so familiar in our colonial histories.