Beyond resilience? State failure, mutual aid and local action

Abstract

Resilience offers an important framing for analysing responses to crises. However it is a highly contested concept, roundly condemned by many because of its associations with neoliberal logics of rule and the shedding of responsibility from states to citizens and ‘third sector’ organisations. In this paper we draw on the work of Cindi Katz to explore resilience as multi-faceted, and linked to Katz’s notions of ‘resistance’ and ‘reworking’. We use this framework to assess the political significance of mutual aid and other forms of grassroot support to the COVID pandemic in the UK. We draw on three empirical vignettes: one of a mutual aid group in south-east England that emerged during the pandemic; a second of a long-established voluntary sector organisation, part of the ‘Settlement’ movement; and a third of civic action in a small town with a strong tradition of volunteering. These offer vignettes of action at different geographical scales, and with different political and cultural histories. We argue that neither discourses of ‘resilience’ as self -reliance, nor the transformative promises in some accounts of mutual aid, adequately capture the shifting and contingent politics at play. Instead we stress the complex dynamics of different patterns of social action in particular places as practices of resilience, resistance and reworking emerge in response to perceptions of state failure. Following Katz’s framework we illuminate this fragile and emergent terrain of action, and suggest how such action might mitigate other emergent crises.