Two of the most renowned scholars in the growing field of resilience research have recently published new monographs with the aim of intervening into the ongoing debate on the issue or—as some might argue—the concept of resilience. Jonathan Joseph’s and Philippe Bourbeau’s volumes are timely in a very particular sense: both authors offer accounts of the mature phase of resilience research. The excitement of the early days, when scores of scholars engaged in heated debates about the topic of resilience and its potential implications for both modern politics and the politics of modernity, seems to be gone. Exciting interdisciplinary projects, such as the journal Resilience, edited by David Chandler, have ceased to exist. Contemporary work has shifted to policy and practices and offers more sober assessments than in the early stages of the debate.

The thorough analysis of resilience applications such as in Jonathan Joseph’s Varieties of Resilience and the almost dry conceptual discussion and positioning of resilience as a concept in Philippe Bourbeau’s On Resilience therefore represent what could be called a new normal in resilience research. This does not mean that the volumes fail to offer an exciting engagement with the concept. Still, their attraction may be difficult to grasp for readers outside of the recondite crowd of resilience scholars. Both monographs are deeply embedded in the contemporary resilience debate and are hard to approach without having a keen interest in this particular matter. Joseph’s resilience-focused reconstruction of contemporarily hegemonic discourses in security, disaster relief, infrastructure protection, and development, however, does offer much broader insights that are relevant for scholars working in these fields.

Both volumes aim to develop a new and innovative perspective on resilience. Bourbeau’s dominant motivation is to overcome what he perceives as the shortcomings of all contemporary work on the subject. His declared goal is to elaborate and substantiate a thorough and all-encompassing definition of resilience. The argument of the missing definition sets the tone and limitations of his contribution. Bourbeau certainly offers a distinct take. He defines resilience as a “process of patterned adjustments adopted in the face of endogenous or exogenous shocks, to maintain, to marginally modify, or to transform a referent object” (p. 3). Without a doubt, this definition is neat. Every aspect he thinks is important finds its place. Yet he dismisses other aspects, such as the coping quality often associated with resilience.

The issue at stake is best demonstrated by what Bourbeau bemoans in Jonathan Joseph’s work. For Bourbeau, Joseph does not offer a clear definition of resilience, and therefore “we do not know what exactly Joseph is criticising” (p. 13). Indeed, defining resilience is not Joseph’s focus, neither in the two articles cited by Bourbeau in his volume nor in the monograph discussed here. But why should it be, given that defining resilience hardly answers the ontological challenge that resilience as a procedural practice provides? Joseph, undertaking his study from a Foucaultian governmentality perspective, would probably eschew taking his intervention to this point. Yet, he constructs resilience as being continuously produced by practices: “resilience derives its meaningful character from its relation to governance strategies that have various populations as their target” (p. 3).

In contrast, Bourbeau’s approach to resilience is decisively unpragmatic. The aim of his volume is to pin down the moving conceptual target; for example, by defining its relations to security and nonsecurity politics. This investigation develops insights mainly with respect to the potential of resilience as an interdisciplinary bridging concept and its state of processual duality between persistence and transformation. Nonetheless, the aim of Bourbeau’s intervention is classically liberal, which makes it difficult to approach resilience’s postliberal qualities. Consequently, an engagement with the ontological dimension of resilience, especially vis-à-vis security—an issue that has been discussed by scholars such as David Chandler, Jessica Schmidt, and Kevin Grove—is missing. Bourbeau offers a traditional liberal analysis of a phenomenon that has a distinct postliberal or postmodern character. Put in a nutshell, resilience might not overcome modernity, but it certainly comes after it.

Bourbeau’s account is mostly concerned with clearly and distinctively laying out what resilience is and, even more importantly, what it is not. As a result, the analysis cannot escape remaining at a level that feels shallow and superficial, even though—or perhaps because—it rests on fierce criticism of most of the other scholars who have ever written on the subject. In some instances, the lack of a sympathetic reading gets in the way of a thorough understanding. It overlooks potentially helpful literature that could add additional perspectives to his project, especially those accounts elaborating resilience’s relation to pragmatism (Jessica Schmidt) and normativity (Chris Zebrowski).

Joseph’s varieties approach delivers what Bourbeau’s attempt is missing: solid empirics and the willingness to engage in the construction and reconstruction of resilience processes as practices. Bourbeau’s case studies—mainly on the securitization of migration issues between Russia and China and in France—although certainly well informed, seem random and disconnected to the overall argument. Joseph, in contrast, engages with a substantial amount of resilience policy texts. His argument unfolds through a systematic comparison of the approaches of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the European Union in the main policy areas where resilience has risen to prominence.

The empirical comparison condenses to the claim that resilience appears in varieties. Such an insight not only contrasts with Bourbeau’s intention (and that of many others) to offer a clear-cut definition of the concept but it opens up a fundamentally different perspective on what resilience, with its concern for immanent impact, does. Resilience seems to be a prototypical traveling concept that moves, takes hold, adapts to contexts, and loops back. The focus on engaging with things as they happen results in resilience persistently eschewing fixed meanings. Joseph’s work impressively demonstrates the constant change that resilience is undergoing and its embeddedness in the practices of policy, governance, and society at large.

The concept “varieties of resilience” reconstructs the most important travel routes and respective adaptations that resilience has taken in its evolution within Europe. In its initial Anglo-Saxon understanding, resilience was produced as the process of adaption to complexity and uncertainty. Joseph’s empirical investigation of security policy documents in the United States and the United Kingdom reveals especially that resilience moves beyond an understanding of security provision as an obligation deriving from state sovereignty, such as in classical liberalism. Instead, it suggests that to understand resilience we need to view it as an emerging neoliberal governmentality that produces resilient subjectivity.

Such an argument runs the risk of falling into the trap of many governmentality studies that use “neoliberalism” as a metanarrative of a perceived totalized oppression of human subjectivity, which is a highly problematic claim. However, Joseph resists the temptation of totalization and instead focuses on exploring the nuances in resilience applications. Resilience’s travels across some European countries reflect different governmental traditions. France and Germany, in particular, show a deep reluctance to accept a neoliberal vision of resilience. Their efforts to conceptualize and implement resilience in public policy produce distinct varieties of the concept, because each focuses more on different elements: robustness and social stability in Germany and the coping dimension of withstanding and resisting in France.

Joseph succeeds in presenting a highly diverse story of resilience across contexts and policy areas, thus substantiating his claim of understanding resilience as a product of processual practices. Bourbeau’s approach of attributing fixed meaning to the concept, in contrast, is less convincing, despite still offering interesting and relevant insights. Whereas Joseph offers an account of traditional but compelling policy analysis, Bourbeau tends to engage in liberal critique of liberal policy-making practices, for which resilience is only an interchangeable case study.

The internal policy dimension of resilience, unfortunately, is the only real blind spot in both studies. Bourbeau introduces the notion of a “bridging” capacity that inheres in resilience, an insight that would have a lot to offer in this regard. Indeed, resilience offers a bridge in policy contexts where the attribution of clear meaning fails. When put into a liberal framework, resilience enables the enactment of constructive ambiguity in a unique way. The European Global Strategy, in which resilience always appears when efforts to pin down strategic elements are bound to fail, is a striking case in point.

Much remains to be learned about the immense uptake of resilience in policy circles. Joseph highlights the whole-of-government approaches popular in Germany (and other countries), but more could be revealed regarding the precise role that resilience plays in institutionalized policy making. The recent efforts of the European Commission to use resilience to link humanitarian relief and development aid comes to mind and leaves one wondering what role resilience ought to play in contemporary issues such as cross-departmental climate change politics.

For scholars engaged in resilience debates from whatever angles, both books under review here are indispensable reads. It is their mature character, reflecting years of tense debate, that makes them stand out in the growing number of resilience accounts. Joseph’s varieties approach in particular has the potential to fundamentally shift resilience thinking by highlighting its ontological dimension without even deploying ontological language. The move toward an empirical engagement with resilience as a requirement for gaining a deeper understanding of the subject speaks for itself.