Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2026

In a global era characterised by prolonged crises, the seemingly neutral concept of resilience has gained central importance across political, academic and public discourses. This special issue sheds light on the often-overlooked racialised underpinnings and articulations of resilience. Through diverse empirical case studies across what has been called the Western racialised assemblage — spanning security policy and military thinking, EU governance, the internationalisation of labour markets and social justice activism — the contributions investigate how resilience is mobilised both to maintain and contest racialised power relations. Three themes can be discerned from the articles, highlighting how resilience operates as a vocabulary of rule: inequality, politics of the body and mind, and refusal. The issue enriches critical scholarship on both racism and resilience, calling for a deeper engagement with the complex and multifarious ways in which resilience both sustains and disrupts the racialised assemblage in which we live.

In recent years, the concept of resilience has rapidly proliferated across the social sciences and policy domains, with evolving and often ambiguous meanings. Drawing on critical discourse analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, this paper investigates how resilience is conceptualised in the European Union’s National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), introduced following the COVID-19 pandemic. I demonstrate how the representation of a ‘resilient Europe’ functions ideologically, naturalising economic priorities while marginalising social diversity. The concept is deployed strategically to frame crises as opportunities for growth, thus obscuring systemic inequalities. I argue that NRRPs discursively construct an ethnocentric vision of Europe around a colour-blind logic that excludes racial and ethnic minorities. The analysis reveals that the resilience discourse aligns with neoliberal and exclusionary governance structures that reinforce existing power relations.

Critical resilience studies have successfully pointed out the neoliberal individualising and depoliticising aspects of resilience. However, while viewing resilience and resistance as contradictory, little room has been left for alternative interpretations. This article addresses this gap by introducing a social movement–based perspective on embodied resilience. Drawing on the legacy of Black feminists and women of colour, as well as the embodied counternarratives of today’s social justice practitioners, it calls for a careful analysis of oppressive power dynamics while recognising embodiment’s liberating potential for resilience and resistance. By employing a critical feminist phenomenological lens, special attention is given to how the narratives reflect the interconnections of embodiment, resilience and political resistance. The findings show that instead of mere adaptation, embodied resilience serves as the basis for sustainable resistance that aims to dismantle the racialised and gendered power structures rooted in the history of Western colonialism and neoliberal capitalism.

This paper examines Finland’s transformed security and defence policies. Following a broader European trend, Finland has begun emphasising resilience as a source of national security. Drawing on previous scholarship that has problematised the normalisation of resilience in security discussions, we examine Finland’s resilience rhetoric. Our focus is on two government reports from 2024 that represent the country’s new security vocabulary. Using Toulmin’s model or argumentation, we dissect how the argument for security-driven resilience is constructed. Finland is an Arctic country where an Indigenous people — the Sámi — live and, overall, the country has acknowledged Indigenous peoples’ vital role in the development of the region. Accordingly, it is pertinent to study how the notion of resilience proffered by the state acknowledges Sámi perspectives. By problematising the assumptions of unity and neutrality that characterise Finland’s security and defence rhetoric, the paper contributes to the discussions on the colonial underpinnings of resilience.

Resilience is promoted as a positive virtue for adaptation to changes that need perseverance to new conditions, often worse. However, highly-skilled immigrants — especially from Sub Sahara Africa –seeking employment in Finland experience a prolonged and uncertain cycle of new demands for resilience. By drawing on research interviews with highly-skilled black Africans, the article illuminates the negative aspects of resilience for negatively racialised immigrants in the global North. The findings of the thematic analysis bring forth the how skilled jobseekers understand, navigate, and give meaning to the resilience demanded of them as the Finnish labour markets keep shifting goal posts and adding barriers of exclusion and precarity. Accordingly, resilience can further and uphold injustice and for those having to perform resilience it can become a curse, antithetical to positive change.

This article analyses how the US military constructs dangerous Others through the language of neurobiology, with reference to the resilience and plasticity of human brains. To explore this, we conduct a Laclau and Mouffe inspired discourse analysis of the neurobiological research supported and disseminated by the US Department of War’s Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) programme. Our focus is on the racialised imaginary of the SMA programme, and we analyse how neurobiological research is enlisted to distinguish between populations on account of perceived brain differences. Violence in both the Global South and among ethnic minorities in the Global North is seen to emanate from these differences according to the SMA. Revealing the racialised underpinnings of this discourse, including its eugenic genealogy, this article challenges critical approaches invested in the emancipatory potentials of neurobiology with respect to race and racism, as well as violence and colonialism.