Calling communities ‘resilient’ can let authorities evade their support duties

Evidence

The notion of ‘resilience’ in the public or community can easily be used as an excuse for authorities to absolve themselves of responsibility. If the public is ‘resilient’, the argument goes, there is less need to support or resource them. This chapter has argued that these adaptive processes that are sometimes labelled collective resilience are not inevitable. Therefore, those in authority and positions of responsibility — government, emergency services, local authorities — have a duty, as well as the knowledge (of the risks), and the resources to ‘scaffold’ (Reicher, 2019) collective resilience processes, as well as to ensure that through their actions they don’t inhibit them. — John Drury and Evangelos Ntontis, A SOCIAL IDENTITY MODEL OF COLLECTIVE…, 40

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the resilience label as a rhetorical tool for state withdrawal of responsibility — parallels how ‘grit’ narratives blame individuals for systemic failure.
• QUESTION: How does the social-identity model’s claim that resilience is not inevitable square with policy translation where the word ‘resilience’ itself becomes a liability?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John Drury and Evangelos Ntontis, A SOCIAL IDENTITY MODEL OF COLLECTIVE…, 40
• XREF: connects to: Community support during crisis doubles as self-policing and discipline; Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 337; Citizen vigilance is required because authorities cannot police everything — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1291

Broader Connections

• Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims #expands (0.95) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 337
• Community support during crisis doubles as self-policing and discipline #complicates (0.75)
• Citizen vigilance is required because authorities cannot police everything #contradicts (0.75) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1291