Democracy and Resilience: From Neoliberal Governance to Post-Liberal Democracy?

The paper explores the relationship between resilience thinking and democratic theory, a topic often overlooked in both fields. While resilience thinking shares ontological and epistemological commitments with neoliberal governance, it should not be equated with neoliberalism, particularly in its critical form. The paper examines David Chandler’s concept of post-liberal democracy, which builds on a critical understanding of resilience. However, it argues that resilience thinking limits human agency due to its ontological assumptions. As a result, post-liberal democracy departs from key democratic concepts such as collective will, popular sovereignty, deliberation, and representation. This is due to resilience thinking’s rejection of the modernist liberal framework of autonomous subjects and its debasement of the social. The paper concludes that while resilience cannot be reduced to neoliberalism, resilience thinking promulgates an impoverished notion of democracy, making it less stimulating for democratic theory than its widespread use in the social sciences might imply.