Rejecting and Recreating Resilience after Disaster

The upheaval and uncertainty of disaster provides fertile ground for the propagation and reinforcement of norms, values and ideologies. Thus, these destructive events provoke a rupture that can threaten the status quo, as well as the legitimacy and power of the political and economic elite. In this context, the rise of resilience as a tool for politically managing disaster contexts is not a surprise. The potential for these discourses to depoliticise contestation and shift responsibility for response and recovery to the individual scale has been well documented. Yet there also exists the potential for disruption and transformation that facilitates a challenge to neoliberal capitalism. This chapter builds on and explores this dynamic to document how resilience can be articulated as a form of neoliberalised disaster politics while also interrogating the space that exists to resist and reconstruct the concept at the everyday scale. These themes are explored through the case study of Christchurch city following the earthquakes of 2010/11 to situate resilience as a tool that can foreclose as well as rupture open potential for radical transformation. These diverse interpretations and enactments of resilience underscore a politics of possibility that can emerge following disaster.