Rethinking the time and space of resilience beyond the West: an example of the post-colonial border

ABSTRACT

Critical resilience thinking is excessively fixated on resilience as participating in a neoliberal rationality of governance, while being itself shackled to the restrictive assumptions of crisis-oriented and disaster-based understandings of resilient systems. This paper contributes to the literature on the necessity to expand epistemological approaches to resilience thinking. It suggests that, as a silent disruption, the postcolonial border offers an insight into the overlooked complex materiality of resilience. The advocated notion of silent disruption is supported by an empirical examination of the African postcolonial border as a site of contested practices. The focus on disruptions rather than resilient practices weakens the theoretical foundations of the plurality claim advanced within critical resilience scholarship. The paper mainly contends that, by localising and politicising ‘disruption’ from an empirical perspective, we broaden out the concept of resilience to accommodate effective plurality as entangled in the interstice between the historical, the global and the national.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial border
• adversity
• resilience
• disaster
• Africa

Introduction

As reflected in most aspects of social life and policy-making nowadays, resilience has been integrated into diverse ways of thinking about the human condition and the domestication of geographical living spaces. In the neoliberal era, resilience has become a recurrent theme in subfields of world politics looking at the state–society relationship (Ancelovici, 2013; Skovdal & Daniel, 2012; Wagner & Anholt, 2016). However, this conceptual ubiquity is consistently undergirded by limitations that question the viability and relevance of resilience in various processes of addressing real world problems (Chandler, 2014). Nevertheless, as precluded by this expansion and because of too much emphasis on varying resilience practices, resilience thinking has failed to properly interrogate the triggering point of resilience. The concept is now said to be ‘at large’ (Barrios, 2016, p. 35), and carrying with it the consensus that varying forms of resilience exist. This consensus does not however extend to whatever triggers resilience in the first place. Instead, a universal understanding seems to prevail when it comes to defining what is (not) a threat or a disruption.¹ This logic owes in part to the fact that historically, applied physics, engineering and many approaches to complex systems theory, have consistently ‘naturalised’ the notion of disruption as experienced by systems and material objects to concentrate on the resilience properties exhibited. This discursive omission has enabled the scholarship to elaborate efficiently on resilience as a conceptual tool for the study and understanding of inherent properties (Klein, Nicholls, & Thomalla, 2003). Conversely, the focus on material resilient properties; and subsequently on the resilient practices of human systems, has overlooked the complexity of the disruption itself.

This paper broadens the scope of resilience through a different conceptual engagement with resilience’s building blocks across time and space. It calls for an expansion and a politicisation of the resilience paradigm, to enable the analysis of disruption as a complex component of the resilience concept. This will be done through allowing empirical examination of the African postcolonial border, as a site of resilience, to question the assumed notion of disruption that structures thinking within the resilience paradigm. Using an empirical examination of people’s daily-lived experiences to understand how (groups of) individuals respond or relate to their geographical space, it argues for an emphasis on the situated meaning of threat/disruption in relation to resilient subjects. More precisely, it looks at the colonial and postcolonial processes of bordering to analyse the postcolonial border as a silenced/silent disruption. The silence is manufactured in the understandings which accept the diversity of resilience practices, and yet take the commonly held definition of threat as a universal standard. This conceptual attitude has naturalised dominant agendas through the ideological colonisation of resilience’s primary components. An ethnographic exploration of how the Cameroon – Gabon border community comes to experience disruption within its geographical imagination (Harvey, 1990; see also Gregory, 1994) offers an insight into how resilient practices might shed light on hitherto unarticulated disruptions. This is supported by semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation of mobility across the international border, tracing the disruption historically, symbolically and throughout the ways in which a borderland community, in the African postcolonial context, rely on regularly crossing the land border to support their vulnerable livelihoods and sustain fragmented social ties. It is worth underlining here that while it looks at resilience practices effectively from an agency-based/bottom-up perspective, the main interest of this paper lies in the various disruptions that trigger resilience practices rather than on such practices themselves. For example, the paper draws on the debates about the validity of everyday practices as resilience, only to support its argument about the plurality of disruptions or threats to a resilient system.

In effect, the last decade has witnessed an increasing fracture in the resilience debate opposing what many scholars view as top-down biopolitical dynamics to bottom-up critical conceptualisations of resilience (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2016). Critical scholarship, echoing Michel Foucault’s governmentality thesis, has sufficiently elaborated on the neoliberal orientation of current resilience thinking. It has aptly criticised resilience as a ‘pervasive idiom of global governance’ (Walker & Cooper, 2011, p. 157); as a governance tactic through which the West evades its responsibility, pushes vulnerability as fatality, and attempts to disguise its self-serving neoliberal agenda (Chandler, 2012, 2013; Joseph, 2013). These debates have not only stretched the concept beyond its traditional coordinates of material recovery and equilibrium, as originally conceptualised in the ‘hard’ sciences (Holling, 1973; Walker & Cooper, 2011); they have also demystified the reconceptualization of the resilience paradigm. However, the ensuing critical endeavour is often too theoretical and grapples exclusively with setting out either positivist or Foucauldian narratives of resilience. These narratives use contextualisation mostly for illustration purposes, stopping short of using this to question key assumptions in resilience thinking.

By specifically contextualising and politicising the notion of adversity, central to resilience thinking, this study simultaneously subscribes to the phenomenological prolificacy of resilience and escapes the associated relativist trap by using the specific context of the postcolonial border to scrutinise one of resilience’s key components: disruption. The paper therefore contributes to a growing literature that calls for a reconsideration of the rigid assumptions on which critical resilience scholarship is based (Ryan, 2015, p. 300; Brassett, Croft, & Nick, 2013, p. 225). The proposed reframing of the postcolonial border, as an example of performing silent adversity, participates here to understand resilience differently.

The first section of this paper provides a brief methodological reflection on empirical approaches in resilience thinking. The second section examines the postcolonial border as a node of disturbance, using both a historical tracing of the postcolonial border and instances of resilience practices from the border community to analyse the performativity of the border as a threat to the community. The closing section lays down a conceptual framework within which the postcolonial border emerges as a peculiar form of adversity that warrants a differing perception of threat.

The empirical question in resilience thinking

While the dominant ethos of critical resilience scholarship has always been its negative agenda and impact against targeted communities, the paradigmatic shift in resilience thinking, from systems to social actors and their agency, still lacks sufficient empirical engagement to support the validity of such a shift (Berkes & Folke, 1998, p. 12). Consequently, authors such as Bourbeau have put forward the argument that an anticipatory value-judgment on resilience cannot be epistemologically justifiable as resilience must be ‘context-informed’ (2013, p. 11). In the same vein, Corry fustigates the critical literature for confining resilience to a solely neoliberal paradigm, not least because of the inconsistency of this framing as compared to resilience’s own purported philosophical origins and complexity, but also for insufficient ‘empirical examination’ that positively and systematically links resilience to neoliberal practice (2014, p. 271). Bourbeau (2018) and Manyena (2006) usefully question the commonly accepted etymology and genealogy of resilience, cautioning us against critically engaging resilience in the assumption that its practices imply one perspective or policy goal. For example, it has long been argued that resilience differs from everyday resistance because resilience building is always envisaged as threat-dependent (Alexander, 2013), while paradoxically bestowing the responsibility upon outsiders such as aid or state agencies to decide what such threat is (or is not). However, in exploring the possibility of resilience as resistance or resilient resistance, Ryan (2015) poses resilience as a means to an end, based on the agency and objectives of the communities engaging in their own resilience-building. Turning the survival paradigm upside down and viewing resilience as means-to-an-end allows for a critical examination of both its diversity and its constituent parts, namely the disruption component.

Assumptions drawn from a universalist understanding of threat, albeit while admitting the diversity of resilient practices, invariably and ultimately depoliticise processes that are, in effect, profoundly political, such as the constitution of turbulence through colonial and nation-building processes (Hsu, Howitt, & Miller, 2015). Expanding resilience to a plurality of experiences, a logical implication of freeing the concept from unsubstantiated assumptions, requires a shift in focus, from resilient subjects and practices to the nature of adversity in resilience thinking. In other words, rather than defining resilience through the extraordinary ways in which certain developed behaviours seek to circumvent a disruption, we should use them as tools to question our understanding of this perceived disruption. This is the sense given here to African international borders qualifying as a (site of) disruption, with the actions of border communities counting as resilient practices.

In accepting the need for empirical engagement in critical resilience scholarship (Corry, 2014, p. 271; Berkes & Folke, 1998, p. 12; Stern, 2006), it is important to highlight that bottom-up and people-centred approaches to resilience present a valuable opportunity to open up the conceptual framework of resilience to plurality without necessarily dwelling only on already categorised resilient practices (Ryan, 2015, pp. 300–302). One way of achieving this, as suggested in this paper, is creating room in resilience thinking that accounts for colonialism and post-coloniality in the structuring of vulnerability. When one envisages resilience from this specific bottom-up perspective, as advocated by critics of the narrow-minded scope of critical resilience scholarship (Brassett et al., 2013), we are open not only to the diversity of resilience as a set of practices, but also to some blind spots in critical approaches, which can be opened up through an expanded notion of disruption. For example, in its focus on resilience as an externally imposed neoliberal ‘tactic of governance’ (Ryan, 2015), the literature mainly criticises the ways in which neoliberalism has corrupted the concept, but the same literature seems to paradoxically avoid deeply examining its own, very Western-centred, assumptions of what constitute threats and vulnerabilities and to which systems and communities (Bohle, Etzold, & Keck, 2009; Chandler, 2012). When applied to the various policy approaches to border resilience in postcolonial Africa, it is quite evident how the African border is conceived as a challenge-proof construction.

In 2016, the European Commission allocated a EUR 25 million budget for ‘strengthening resilience of communities…on the Northern border area’ of Burkina Faso (Commission, 2016). Despite claims of ‘addressing the root causes of instability, forced displacement and irregular migration’ (Commission, 2016), the programme did not in any instance question the border itself as a possible root cause. In a similar initiative, the OECD partnered with many African institutions and NGOs to promote ‘Resilience to climate change in border agglomerations’ (OECD, 2017). Again, consideration is given here only to ways of improving funding mechanisms and legal frameworks to better streamline the climate change agenda in border areas, without questioning whether the border itself might be hindering vernacular resilience strategies in the face of climate change. There is nothing new in highlighting these defects of resilience policies targeting border areas. They generally fall under the tactical efforts concealed underneath biopolitical resilience-building approaches of neoliberal projects that emphasise individual ability to make the most of ‘situations’ without questioning structural inequalities thereof (Chandler, 2012, 2013; Richmond, 2012). This has already been theorised in the critical scholarship that views resilience as lending itself almost naturally to neoliberal ideology, forcing people to accept disaster as fated, instead of engaging with its root causes such as global capitalism or the material agency of their living environments (Barrios, 2016, p. 32). However, this criticism stops short of questioning the positivist self-image projected in the understanding of these disruptions.

Tracing out how resilience is becoming a mechanism for the preservation and perpetuation of the ‘system’ responsible for creating turbulence within communities through those very paradigms that ‘naturalise’ and ‘reproduce the wider social and spatial relations which generate turbulence and inequality’ (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2013, p. 254) nevertheless presents an opportunity. When considered outside the conventional resilience paradigm, it allows the moving of the cursor to the fact that threats or disruptions can also be embedded within the discursive transformation of environments. As such, the pertinence of vernacular practices of resilience signifies more than mere illustrative representations of the varieties of resilience. One way to move beyond this framing is to show how every-day actions of border communities in Africa can be regarded not just as exotic resilient practices, demanding legitimate entry into resilience axiology, but rather as fundamental questions posed to the making of resilience itself.

Performative disruption from the postcolonial African border

Historical performativity of disruption at the border

Following the 1884 Berlin Conference, colonial empires mainly saw the delineation of African territoriality as unbridled extensions of their own Westphalian territoriality vis-a-vis rival empires. However, precolonial communities, whose living spaces experienced a depression through colonial territorial demarcations, moved to sustain their status quo ante. These communities deployed many strategies to tolerate or circumvent the presence of imposed borders, drawing heavily on the colonial border’s extraversion and weak structure to maintain their livelihoods, communal ties, and social organisation (Lukong, 2011; Zartman, 1985). Colonial spatial delineation and the dynamics of colonial imperial competition destabilised local dynamics through imposing a reshuffling of geographical representation and spatial organisation. In this context, the Cameroon-Gabon border shifted location several times during the colonial period, consistently cutting across the Ntomou-speaking community that used to live on, and share, a single spatial continuity (Asiwaju, 1983; Wesseling, 1996, p. 3–4). Interestingly, the colonial administrators who had been tasked with demarcating the border noticed that they had neither the powers nor the resources to stop farmers living on the one side of the border, from crossing into their own ‘pre-boundary’ plantations located on the other side of the border (Nugent, 2002, pp. 58–60). This is an indication of how, having perceived a disruption to their geographical imagining, borderlanders proceeded to maintain connection between the social spaces divided by the colonial border. Their various strategies sought to ensure continuous access to their farms; maintenance of their social ties; and socio-cultural fulfilment of various sorts. It worth noting here that all these resilient practices point to the establishment of the border as their trigger. The border as a statement of external pressure began the discursive transformation of their geographical space, thereby shaping all other ensuing forms of adversity.

As the border inherited from colonisation ossified, in the various processes of nation-building in the postcolonial era, side effects on language, culture and identity emerged as a turbulence for a community that once enjoyed a certain degree of homogeneity and continuity across a single geographical unit. Today, although people from both sides of the Cameroon-Gabon border speak Ntoumou, speakers of that same language report that Cameroonians and Gabonese speak it differently. An 80-year-interviewee told me that this was not the case even 40 years ago. According to his testimony, the border was repeatedly closed, and stringent restrictions imposed on cross border interactions during the wave of coup d’états in the early 1980s. Nation-building discourses encouraged Cameroonian Ntoumous and their Gabonese ‘brothers’ to severe ties for lengthy periods. These incited mutual suspicions, rivalry and even hatred during the Biafran War.² Over time, these processes, initiated by the respective postcolonial states along borderlines, sealed linguistic and cultural divisions. This postcolonial symbolic rift is a constant challenge that members of the Ntoumou community have to deal with in their cross-border interactions.

Stephen Slemon (1991, p. 3) differentiates the post-independence historical period from the ‘post-colonial’, which he views as: ‘a discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that colonial power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occulted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations’ (italics in original). Slemon’s phrase ‘colonial power inscribes itself onto the body and space’ (1991, p. 3) renders a vivid portrayal of the materiality of colonial borders in their discursive capacity to disrupt in the physical world, by externally imposing new identities. As originally a colonial discursive practice, African borders have naturally retained Western hegemonic inscriptions as part of their spatial organisation objectives, chiefly in the ‘theatre of neo-colonialist international relations’ (Selmon, 1991, p. 3). Concerning the persistence of colonialism albeit in veiled form and despite the dismantling of the visible structures of colonial empires, the postcolonial African border remains an important way in which Western subjectification (especially of border communities) is still potent. This arbitrarily-imposed (from the standpoint of Africans, of course) international spatial arrangement remains the infrastructure supporting security and trade policies designed to serve the democratic peace agenda, usually at the expense of border communities. The permanence of this disruption was set in stone by the OAU-endorsed uti possedetis juris principle, (Cukwurah, 1973, p. 181). This has made the quasi-totality of international boundaries in Africa an unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable legacy of European colonisation, but most importantly a performing feature of adversity on the ground.

The relationship between colonialism and neo-colonialism, and indeed extending to neoliberalism makes the most sense when we thus consider the place of border communities within larger historical processes (Marx & Engels, 1973, p. 71). Starting as far back as the 15th century, the relentless expansion of capitalism, of which imperialism and colonialism were mere derivatives, has been consistently described as a constant (if not the constant) of world history (Childs & Williams, 1996). Today, this incomplete project of globalising capitalism, pursuant to market needs or low-cost labour forces (Marx & Engels, 1973; Wallerstein, 1983, p. 39), can arguably be described as operating neoliberalism. Postcolonial borders in Africa play a significant role in the infrastructural apparatus supporting the pursuit of various neoliberal policy interests on the continent, notably in the key areas of trade and security (Joseph, 2013, pp. 40–43). Thus, border communities are triply subjected to the effects of colonialism, postcolonial state nation-building and neoliberalism, the inherent nature of which has contributed to marginalise them. In their situated spatial experience, border communities find themselves on the receiving end of a triple centripetal force that creates turbulence and threatens their existence in varying scales. As such, the geographical location of border communities exposes them to turbulence and disruptions that may not count as disaster in the nomenclature of globalising understandings of threats, but which nevertheless affects them substantially.

Contemporary performativity of disruption at the border

Eighty-year-old Padday³ invariably referred to people living on the other side of the border as ‘brothers and sisters from the other side’. He described how community members from both sides regularly come together to partake in traditional rituals destined to maintain the shared sense of family and fellowship. This can be studied both as a desire to preserve their socio-cultural links and as a form of collective resistance to neo-colonial forms of cultural subjugation. These silent forms of resilience can be considered trivial since they do not seek to tackle issues such as insecurity or climate change. Consequently, they would hardly be integrated in policy designs, considering their lack of explicit engagement. The call to recognise such forms of resilience has already been robustly articulated in the resilience literature, but the more important task is to recognise that the diffuse resilience of communities dealing with the presence and persistence of externally-imposed international borders provides material resources and practices for uncovering the border itself as a disruption. Contrary to the notion that the materiality of borders has ‘since become an integral part of the lives of borderlanders’ (Lentz, 2003, p. 274), mobility practices across the Cameroon-Gabon border continuously reject the state superstructure on the border as a ‘silent disruption’, which borderlanders rely on their own resources to circumvent, absorb, or subvert, in the unending reassessment of their relationship to a destabilised spatial arrangement.

Because the survival of the postcolonial nation-state is vitally dependent upon a sustained and consolidated demarcation between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ of the space-society-state triptych, Gabon and Cameroon use the border to physically and symbolically reinforce and perpetuate the colonial disruptive inscription onto the border community’s geographical space. Usually, disruptions to social systems are assumed through the gaze of the intervener rather than critically interrogated from the perspective of the resilient subjects, leaving unexamined the dynamics of power embedded in this crucial labelling process applied to such disruptions. This fieldwork study followed travellers as they used different techniques to outsmart border officials, with the aim of avoiding/mitigating harassment, financial losses and even imprisonment. They faced an acute problem because complying with all immigration requirements is not practicable and would in any case not protect them from harassment on the part of immigration officials who can abuse their powers simply by detaining a passenger an entire day awaiting ‘immigration interview’. In fact, central powers in both countries rely on very limited resources in their efforts to rationalise the border as a tool to politicise territorial space and ensure the exclusivity of control. As a consequence of limited resources and inadequate governance structures, a blind eye is often turned to abuses by officials operating in border areas. This normalisation of state agents’ malpractices becoming a standard feature of the postcolonial state’s territorial rationality, consecrates the existence of the postcolonial border as ingrained in the persisting adversity perceptible only from the standpoint of travellers.

This is a very subtle form of adversity, which silently affects border communities by simply limiting and restricting their scope of expression within their own living environment. It hampers them from fully expressing their lived spatial identities. This can be observed for example in self-censorship when crossing the border or expressing opinions unless absolutely necessary and safe to do so. Djanga, a Cameroonian living across the border in Bitam, reflects on the situation as follows, ‘If you stay in your house […], they will never come […] in your home, will they? But at the same time, when they haven’t caught enough people at the border and they are hungry, they start combing the neighbourhoods to arrest us.’ Yaya, who crosses the border daily for business says, ‘I don’t talk to anyone…I just give them all my money until they believe I have nothing left. […] The border area is always an “affaire d’état” you know…it is not like in the hinterland […] where you can get away with certain things.’

Resignation is the underpinning mindset, which paradoxically sets into motion the coping or adaptive strategies of limited engagement with the border as interiorised by borderlanders, especially in their mobility practices. It shows on the one hand, that claiming state-space in the postcolonial context endorses the brutal and excessive subjugation of citizens based solely on their relationship with the territorial edges of state sovereignty. On the other hand, this voluntarily reduced scope of action and expression by border communities differs in essence from the ‘invisible power’ as theorised by James C. Scott in Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of resistance (1985). Whereas in Scott’s formulation, this sort of reduced engagement will seek to economically undermine the oppressor and enact a hidden political transcript, border communities’ resignation here constitutes an end in itself. The oppression as perceived by border communities is thus materialised through the process of substitution between spaces and realms (Lefebvre, 2003, p. 87), whereby the symbolic state power is transferred unto the physical realm, while retaining all the disruptive properties of the colonial state.

Between Kye-Ossi and Bitam, the two cities on either side of the Cameroon-Gabon border, less than 10 km apart, there are at least 15 checkpoints (i.e. an average of 1 checkpoint every 750 m). Because it is known that having all required travel documentation is not feasible, travellers are made to get out of the vehicle at every checkpoint so they can give bribes in lieu of correct travel documents. Sidia expressed her frustration ‘They check truck drivers once for the whole crossing, why not do the same for us? They might as well just tell us a fixed price for their money, and we pay at once, instead of wasting our time like this, pretending…’ The frustration says more about the nature of the border than it does about the travellers devising strategies to mitigate its impact. The disruptive performativity of the border through state agents is reinforced by the extraversion of the border itself, as an enactment of a wider international infrastructure.

Major developments in trade and security policies are cascaded down at regional and/or national levels to support global trends. As the nodal point of expression between two states, borders are more likely to be exposed to the implementation of such regimes and borderlanders usually only experience the undesirable effects of these developments. For example, as part of the global move towards the regional integration of economies, five countries in Africa, grouped under CEMAC (including Cameroon and Gabon), instituted the mutual waiving of visa requirements for their citizens who hold valid passports, implemented in October 2017 (while I was still doing fieldwork in the area). I immediately witnessed first-hand how this measure instead worsened the plight of travellers who henceforth had to pay higher bribes for ‘waived’ visas. Many travellers knew the visa waiving policy was only temporary as it would be impracticable in reality. In the meantime, market laws applied to the scarcity of visa stamps whose supplies had stopped, visas became more expensive to come by even though officially no longer required. This is an instance of the complexity of disruption, whose shared representations by the border community completely diverge from the problems identified and allegedly solved by a ‘big’ policy. The main theoretical contention of this paper remains that, in order to be coherent, a people-centred resilience approach should go beyond resilient behaviour and interrogate the labelling process of the challenges faced by given human systems. Attention needs to be paid to the multi-layered and complex disruptions likely to occur below or beyond the radar of normative governance technologies. In other words, the question of who is authorised to define or assess turbulence for a social system should be posed more persistently and clearly, before that of categorising resilience practices.

Following this, I propose that shared mobility practices performed by travellers across the border reflect the dynamics of a social system responding to a shared sense of threat. The shared knowledge is both a protection for the community and the preservation of their livelihoods in response to the performativity of the border. Example: In their mobility practices, border communities would not typically participate in child trafficking, but would smuggle pharmaceutical contraband across border. Characterising this threat emerges from the ways in which these resilient practices complete, compete or contest the institution and state structure expressed through the performative character and the dynamics of the international border. This kind of theoretical framework, which combines history, structure and context, has often been used in border studies (Brunet-Jailly, 2005, pp. 634–36; Banerjee & Chen, 2013; Rumford, 2011). This is also seen in James Scott’s celebrated study of poor peasants in Malaysia (1985), which in turn is echoed by Caitlin Ryan’s study of Sumud as a resilient practice of Palestinian political resistance (2015). Finally, within such a framework we are able to focus on subtle but powerful forms of ‘permanent disruptions’ rather than ‘sensible’ historic ‘events’ to comprehend how a particular type of disruption might not fit the standard representation within resilience thinking. This framework allows for a differing perception of disruption and the examination of a shared representation of disruption by border communities namely through their non-essentialising mobility practices.

Allowing for a differing perception of threat

Shortly after starting the fieldwork in the border area, I had to question my own assumptions on social cohesion and reconsider the idea of border community understood as strictly the inhabitants of border spaces between two countries. I began noticing that long distance travellers who were just passing through the area would, as they negotiate their way across the border, instantly join in the practices of ‘fighting the border’ (helping one another with hiding compromising documents between checkpoints, refining stories to tell immigration officers, etc.). As it stood, the ‘border” turned out to be one of the ways in which a community defined by a common practice was acted out, therefore underscoring the dualistic performativity of the border. In other words, the materiality of the border is expressed on the one hand through the political and economic sovereignty markers placed by the state on this specific territorial space, and on the other hand, as a web of social relations and practices generated in response. This destabilises the notion that communities are necessarily place-based. It would therefore be more accurate to say that border communities are defined by their shared experience of the adversity expressed through the materiality of the border. A critical reflection on the ontological basis of resilience therefore requires an exploration of community in a relational approach, as a performative network of human relations acted out in practice. This can be echoed in many similar theories, such as the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Callon, 1986; Law, 2009) or Latour’s ‘sociology of associations’ (2005): the process by which communities come together, the patterns that show ‘how the social is assembled’ (Pauwelussen, 2016, p. 3).

The border goes against the assumption of a primordial ‘social fabric’ holding the community together and foregrounds the notion that this ‘social fabric’ is shaped by perceived threats and woven in practice. Of course, this does not cancel the fact that the border as a geographical feature is place-based, even though its own performativity can be politically abstract, multi-layered or perceived through the resilient practices of border communities. This forcefully underscores the necessity to shift the focus from where community is located to how the community taps into its social capital to represent threat or turbulence.

Within resilience scholarship, the ‘external problems or threats’ (Chandler, 2012, p. 17) are commonly envisaged as exogenous disruptions to eco-systems like earthquakes, armed conflicts or even pressure on material objects This crisis-oriented or disaster-based understanding views disruption as based on naturalistic assumptions and metaphors imported from ‘hard’ sciences. It drags into public policy fields the ecologically rooted understanding of shock and the deterministic expectation of turbulence within social systems (Jones et al., 2010; Save the Children, 2007; UNISDR, 2004). This also shapes the resilience discourse around crises as perceived by governance structures and overlooks divergent understandings of disaster as well as corresponding resilient practices. It is extremely important to question this conception of adversity because resilient attributes do not materialise overnight; they are constructed over time, bouncing off multiple versions or degrees of crises. Agency-based studies of resilience themselves fail in that, despite their critique of the resilience-building biopolitics and the externality of disasters’ root causes, they remain discursively fixated on threat as spectacular disaster or long-term threat. That is why resilience to climate change in border areas can be discussed without noticing that the border itself, however improved, will remain a contributing factor in climate change.

Usually, the assessment of resilient capacities foregrounds the transformative attribute of resilience, seen as the agential aspect likely to ‘engage governance’ (Maclean, Cuthill, & Ross, 2014, pp. 144–152; Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013, p. 6). Accordingly, resilient mobility practices used by borderlanders as described above, would not be seen as transformative strategies, the most prominent capacity of resilience in the scholarship (Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013, p. 10). In other words, these practices would not normally count as significant resilient practices as the border community is not seen as trying to profoundly transform the border. While there are clear moves to address to the performativity as barriers to their mobility, no organised attempt to bring about border policy change has been registered. On the contrary, they are on the receiving end of border policy changes, which leaves them worse off. Nonetheless, I would like to argue that, in the same way that threats can be understood as silent and slow, resilient behaviour can be evidenced by corresponding approaches. Furthermore, and considering the political impotence of border communities in themselves, we understand disruption better by also looking at resilience as the adaptive behaviour of the less powerful who do not necessarily set out to alter the structure of society.

The ‘elitist’ approach laid out in transformative strategies limits itself to testing the capacity for local communities to craft sets of institutions and influence conventional structures of governance. Bearing in mind that institutions are an expression of (unequal) power relations, with power in an institutional model as a key determinant for the degree of resilience, the power to define threats as such becomes contentious in the tension between the state and the community; the divergence between the neoliberal global agenda and the local community’s concerns, all at the nodal point of the border. Instead of considering the limitations and constraints imposed by the political geographical imaginations of social actors as self-imposed boundaries to resilience, I offer that these supposed limitations are simply outside the concerns of borderlanders. For example, the divergence between border communities’ interests and state interests are low level and resolved mostly by a degree of laisser-faire in the state’s approach to border regulation. In the same vein, the border community’s use of borderland principally shows that their primary pursuits of economic gains and maintenance of social connections across borders makes a clear distinction between lawful/legal/legitimate activities in response to the laisser-faire surreptitiously granted by the state and which they can negotiate directly.

The border community only engage in subtle forms of ‘resilience’ because these are strategies matching the nature of the threat(s)s they perceive. Yet, the consensus in the literature on the plurality of resilient practices surprisingly excludes the plurality of disruptions. At best, such disruptions can be dismissed in the literature as ‘stress’, either at individual or at system level (Krasny, Lundholm, & Plummer, 2011; Mullings & Wali, 2001). The focus on the resilience tandem of material integrity and adaptive practice casts the notion of disruption as either a given that needs no further examining or as a natural inherence of the system itself. In other words, the ability to adapt in the face of adversity is understood as inherent to the nature of things and beings seeking preservation of their essential function through space and time. As I argue, implying that this same nature of beings and things determines the kind of disruption likely to jeopardise their integrity is an unsubstantiated epistemological assumption.

Assuming a universal normativity of disruption, while acknowledging the diversity of resilient behaviour, precludes the reasoning that some might see adversity where others see nothing. Nevertheless, this deterministic understanding of disruption and adversity is still articulated as a key element of current resilience thinking, as modelled on the decentralised and resilient processes of nature (Swanstrom, 2008, p. 15). This model tends to take social relations and structures for granted rather than problematizing them. In so doing, the widespread conception of ‘disruption’ and resilient attributes of social systems fails to account for any threat outside a certain predetermined framework. Consequently, critics of resilience as a ‘pervasive idiom of global governance’ (Walker & Cooper, 2011, p. 157) focus their attention on issues like the agency of the resilient subjects while inadvertently calcifying the externally imposed identification and assessment of threat targeted by the alleged resilient practices. This positivist ‘naturalisation’ of external threat through governance technologies evades the critical scrutiny of emancipatory aspects of resilience, which delve into possible hegemonic ramifications of the concept.

As has been demonstrated by political ecological approaches, disasters or disruptions are shaped through long-standing human practices (Faas, 2016). Yet the timeframe, socio-political scale and geographical space of disruptions are arbitrarily decided through disproportionate focus on a particular type of resilience. Put differently, a disruption is not considered until it threatens to, or actually destabilises, the key structures of governmentality. Going against this approach to adversity and, in an attempt to unmute certain types and levels of threat, I argue that shock can also be slow and silent, which may call for corresponding resilient behaviour indiscernible even to critical lenses. As a case in point, the postcolonial border in Africa offers various degrees and scales of disruption, a combination of colonial, structural and neoliberal regimes of intervention. Expanding resilience thinking to plurality therefore means questioning the assumed understanding of turbulence in the conventional resilience framework, which focuses much of its attention on the spontaneous, catastrophic and time-bound disruption. Looking, for example, at the coloniality of the border allows for the examination of disruption in slow motion, before it reaches what would be characterised as a threat by governmentality approaches. However, this examination must be carried out within a theoretical framework that allows for such a politicisation of the site of resilience.

Conclusion

The postcolonial border should be considered as a site of disruption; a permanent turbulence in the lives of border communities, owing to its being a colonial legacy, a physical feature of the postcolonial nation-state doubling as an instrument of neoliberal global agenda. Border communities then, and today, have had to constantly reassess their geographical imagination following various historical developments and policy changes in the wider international context affecting them directly and adversely. However, this paper is far from constituting the record of these changes and the resilient dynamics they engender. It has only used these dynamics as an entry point into expanding the concept of resilience to plurality. This conceptual expansion has been emphasised here as necessary because despite critical resilience scholarship turning to bottom-up approaches and agency-based conceptualisations to ascertain the diversity of resilient practices, certain key assumptions undergirding the literature continue to trap the thinking within a limited western-centric framework.

Ethnographic data collected as part of a fieldwork at the Cameroon–Gabon border expose a body of cross-border social relations built around mutual interests and a community acting through shared knowledge of subversive strategies. This has allowed for the conceptualising of resilience through the assemblage of mobility practices and systemic relations in the border area both because, and in spite, of disruptions emanating from the performativity of the border. This observation has been done at three levels: historical, structural and contextual. Most importantly, the focus was shifted from merely the diversity of resilient practices, to trace how social actors conceive these practices according to their own understanding of disruption. Based on this data and starting from the perspective of border communities experiencing the border as a silent form of persisting adversity, mobility practices were analysed as an assemblage in which the disruption and resilience practices are entangled together. The absence of engagement by the border community with resilience as transformation, diminishes the meaning of such resilient practices in the eyes of decision-makers. While critical literature has usually focused on drawing attention to the validity of other forms of resilience, this paper has taken issue with the arbitrary way in which the object of transformation is determined. This extends to the question of who gets to decide what a threat is, and to which extent a disruption constitutes a disaster? A divergence emerges here between threats as identified by governance technologies and the limited assumptions of resilience thinking on the one hand, and threats as perceived by communities based on their own vernacular interests on the other hand. Hence, the necessity in the resilience literature to clearly address the above question with particular emphasis to definition and scale. Answering this question seems far more important than legitimising agency-based resilience practices.

To answer this question, the postcolonial border provides an example where disruption and the practice of resilience escape the labelling processes of disaster-oriented resilience-building policies and the self-absorbed assumptions in the academic literature. By going beyond the mere inclusion of various forms of resilience, so as to question the notion of disruption at the base of resilience as a practice, it becomes possible to pin down a threat located outside the usual parameters of resilience normative assessment. The postcolonial African border can accordingly be understood as a ‘silent threat’, a quiet disruption against which corresponding mobility practices of resilience are deployed. In the context of the contested hegemonic logics of resilience thinking, this approach paves the way to articulating more systematically how resilient attributes are built independently of crises and could help answer this question: why does resilience vary from one community to another or from one type of disaster to another?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dieunedort Wandji

Dieunedort Wandji is a Researcher in the School of Sociology and Education, at the University of Portsmouth. In 2016, he conducted research fieldwork for his PhD Project at the Cameroon-Nigeria border.

Notes

1. Threat, disruption, disturbance and adversity will be used interchangeably throughout this paper and simply understood as a break in the spatial, social or temporal continuity of a group/system.

2. Gabon supplied weapons to secessionists at the behest of France.

3. All names have been changed for the purpose of anonymity.