The Resilience Trap: Moving Beyond Resilience for Understanding Disasters and Crises

Scholars studying disasters and crises often use the term “resilience” to describe the ability of affected people to “bounce back” and reestablish pre-crisis behaviors, patterns, and institutions. In this article, we outline the emergence, meanings, and genealogy of the term in various disciplines. We discuss how resilience is typically conceptualized and operationalized, and we provide a sociological critique of its current usages. The term, we argue, is difficult to measure and often erases social structures and processes of power and inequality shaping the disparate impact of disasters, and risks pathologizing those with less ability to recover. Showing how the private sector has appropriated “resilience” to offer products and services that do little to help an affected community’s most vulnerable people, we argue that “resilience” instead serves as a tool for profit extraction and rent-seeking, as well as a way to push ideologies around individualization and bootstrapping. In the final section of the paper, we offer alternatives to “resilience” and conclude that the objective ought not be to re-define or clarify the term, but to move beyond it in favor of developing more explicit and perhaps more helpful understandings of social and institutional responses to disasters and crises.