Decolonising Resilience: African Voices in Conversation

Over the last twenty-five years, resilience has become a central concept in political philosophy, crossing the disciplinary fields from its origins in psychology, engineering, and ecology to policy concerns of coping with the consequences of Covid-19 and other zoonotic diseases, global climate change, intra- and inter-state conflict and social and economic disruptions. Resilience has been particularly a question for those in the Global South, not only bearing the brunt of these ‘global’ problems but also facing a shift in policy discourses from direct aid and support to indirect forms of capacity-building and enablement.

At the same time, ‘resilience’ has also developed into a concept at the heart of contemporary policy making in a wide range of areas. Through diverse angles such as humanitarian relief, mitigating violent conflict, pandemics or climate change, resilience has made its way into the Global South, opening up a considerable conceptual gap between critical resilience discourses in the Global North and the overarching demand for applied resilience research in the Global South. Our networking endeavour, ‘Decolonising Resilience: African Voices in Conversation’, aims to address this conceptual gap by stimulating critical debates on resilience and contributing to the formation of a network of critical resilience scholars in the Global South.