Resilience in British social policy: Depoliticising risk and regulating deviance

Abstract

Over the past decade, resilience has emerged as a key priority linking disparate areas of British policy. Yet research to date has focused heavily on resilience as a dimension of international development and security agendas. This article maps the movement of resilience into British social policy. It finds that, as in other areas of policy, resilience in social policy functions to depoliticise, placing the structural determinants of gender, racial, and other inequalities beyond the reach of policymakers. Yet, in a departure from academic accounts of resilience, in social policy, resilience appears to play another role: that of regulating social deviance.