External Speaker: Prof. Jonathan JOSEPH (Professor, University of Sheffield)

Failure and denial are two very apt ways of describing the focus of new resilience approaches to international intervention. The paper argues that resilience thinking sees failure in terms of a world of unpredictable events and contingent outcomes over which we have very little control. Resilience thinking links this general condition to failures of intervention and regulation. It rejects a classical liberal framework of intervention whereby states and other institutions and organisations attempt to control and regulate their environment or to provide comprehensive security and protection. These perceived failures are used to justify governance through denial. Our failure to control the wider environment with its crises and uncertainties leads to a shifting of responsibility on to poorer states, communities and individuals who have to learn how to better cope with their risks and insecurity. The paper looks at this through a governmentality lens and insists that this remains a form of neoliberal governance. Governance through denial of our ability to control things might be actually more effective in securing compliance to international norms, forcing states and local populations to adapt their behaviour in the face of problems that the international community either cannot, or does not want to deal with itself.
The paper will circulate beforehand.