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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.

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.