Resilience for Whom? Resiliency Humanitarianism and Everyday Resistance in a Carceral Camp

Abstract

This article pushes beyond critiques of resilience as a neoliberal object and descriptor, approaching the term as an analytical diagnostic of power to open new anthropological query around resilience and resistance in refugee camps. The rise of resiliency humanitarianism in the past decade has responsibilised refugees, and this article analyses resilience narratives surrounding two residents of a securitised Syrian refugee camp who are featured in humanitarian ‘success stories’. Peering behind the scenes of these stories, it argues that camp residents quietly resist the logic of resiliency humanitarianism by reclaiming temporal, spatial, and imaginative autonomy within a context of limited choice. Acting on opportune moments, refugees disrupt humanitarian notions of resilience in their refusal to subscribe to the singular vision of displacement dictated for them. This article proposes a new avenue for critical engagement with resilience that interrogates who resilience is for and who gets to decide.