Resilience beyond neoliberalism? Mystique of complexity, financial crises, and the reproduction of neoliberal life

The burgeoning debate on resilience in international relations has seen the emergence of two polarized views: resilience as neoliberal governmentality and resilience as the expression of a post-neoliberal shift. This article reflects upon the ontology of complexity as unknowability at the heart of post-neoliberal resilience. It argues that this approach neglects how the discourse of complexity as unknowability is a neoliberal technology of government that is instrumental to advance neoliberal forms of resilience. The second half of the article shows how a resilience-as-post-neoliberal approach resonates with those dominant narratives which have shrouded the causes and mechanics of the 2008 financial crisis in a mystique of complexity, thus encouraging forms of cognitive and political disengagement. The article concludes that by celebrating local knowledge at the expense of an understanding of global dynamics, post-neoliberal resilience offers an impoverished notion of resistance compliant with the dictates of the neoliberal order.