Unfit to Bounce Back

On the Martial Politics of Resilience in WWI-Weimar Germany and Austerity Britain

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2236670
AutoresLaura Jung (0000-0001-5759-8945)
Año2023
Volumen17
Número4
Fecha de publicación2023-10-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ips/olad017
OpenAlexW4388184622
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas47

Resilience discourse, with its implicit assumption of a return to health and productivity following a crisis, is often mobilized to target disabled people. Yet while resilience scholarship has rapidly expanded and become prevalent in various fields over recent decades, it has largely failed to analyze the multiple connections between resilience, disability, and eugenics. This article argues that resilience discourse is a form of martial politics, wielded against disabled people to protect the health and prosperity of the political community. A martial politics of resilience works through three registers, responsibilizing disabled subjects by withdrawing state support, dehumanizing them as unproductive and a burden, and exposing these subjects to abandonment/death through medical and policy interventions. I use the lens of martial politics to think through relationships between resilience, disability, and security in Germany and Britain in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, focusing on psychiatric treatment of trauma in the former and the implementation of austerity policies in the latter. The article thus expands our understanding of relationships between resilience, subjectivity, and security by highlighting the ableist and lethal contours of resilient subjects, polities, and economies

Austerity · Martial law · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poor relief · Prosperity · Psychological resilience · Resilience (materials science) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Employment and Welfare Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology