Racialised vocabularies of resilience — inequality, body and mind, refusal

In a global era characterised by prolonged crises, the seemingly neutral concept of resilience has gained central importance across political, academic and public discourses. This special issue sheds light on the often-overlooked racialised underpinnings and articulations of resilience. Through diverse empirical case studies across what has been called the Western racialised assemblage – spanning security policy and military thinking, EU governance, the internationalisation of labour markets and social justice activism – the contributions investigate how resilience is mobilised both to maintain and contest racialised power relations. Three themes can be discerned from the articles, highlighting how resilience operates as a vocabulary of rule: inequality, politics of the body and mind, and refusal. The issue enriches critical scholarship on both racism and resilience, calling for a deeper engagement with the complex and multifarious ways in which resilience both sustains and disrupts the racialised assemblage in which we live.