In cities like Beirut and Kabul, or in sprawling megacities in South Asia such as Karachi, one element is striking: societies caught in the grips of destruction, trauma, and ruin move through public life with an eerie cadence of recover, rebuild, repeat. In fact, such familiarity may breed an odd admiration: we look at a bombed hotel, with children playing in the rubble and volunteers rebuilding houses, and the welcomed communal notion of “resilience” feels almost assured.
In other words, the world does not just observe resilience; it fetishizes it, and in doing so, it dissociates from the conditions that produced the crisis in the first place.
The Colonial Genealogy of Resilience
The concept of resilience did not emerge during the recent age of developmental reports or post-disaster recovery handbooks; it was born under empires. Colonial regimes expressed admiration for the “endurance” of the colonized people; a superlative moral quality in the opinion of the colonizer, which thus justified their subjugation not only as possible but natural. Resilience was the language of dominance, which aestheticized domination.
In Britain’s Raj, for example, colonial officials and travel writers noted the “stoic patience” of the peasant population during famines brought about by the economic extraction inherent in empire. As British historians noted, when the Great Famine of 1876-78 killed nearly six million people, colonial officials lauded villagers, thinking to commend them for their “quiet suffering and capacity to recover.” This narrative reinvented catastrophe into a sheer cultural goodness; large numbers of Indians did not perish due to the empire, they persevered due to character. Resilience became weaponized, enabling the colonizer to shift responsibility.
This moral reasoning was routinely employed throughout the empire. In Kenya, for instance, the British described the Kikuyu as “capable of adjustment” while they were being displaced from their homelands during the Mau Mau uprising. In Algeria, the cycle of death was romanticized by French colonial administrators, who applauded the “tenacity” of rural families who survived scorched earth, thus complementing the beauty of endurance by omitting the fact of resistance. The colonized body, then, became the epitome of resilience: useful, docile, and intractable.
The legacy of that discourse can be traced directly to the modern development industry. Later, the World Bank had essentially interwoven “resilience frameworks” into its poverty alleviation policies, and UN agencies had developed community-based adaptation and “developing local capacities” into their crisis response strategies. The language sounded progressive, but in reality, survival was the noble objective; there was no mention of dismantling the structural conditions that made surviving difficult in the first place.
The Politics of Managed Collapse
In cities such as Beirut, Karachi, and Kabul, there is a particular system of order that takes the form of dysfunction, an order of managed collapse that creates a new political and economic ecosystem. The infrastructure collapses, but society survives; governance crumbles, but the world stays interested.
1. Beirut
Few cities exemplify cyclical destruction as vividly as Beirut. Since the conclusion of the civil war in 1990, the city has survived a financial collapse, paralysis of public infrastructure, and the port blast of 2020 that killed more than 200 people and displaced over 300,000. The blast, the result of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate kept in government negligence for years, became a symbol of structural rot in Lebanon.
Regardless, every disaster brings in another round of reconstruction conferences and donations. In 2020-21 alone, the EU, World Bank, UN, and others started supporting the “Reform, Recovery and Reconstruction Framework” valued at approximately $2.5 billion, but any implementation stalled in the absence of a functioning government and elite feuding. External funding, through NGOs, not the Lebanese state, helps sustain a dependent economy.
Beirut’s collapse is not total because it is profitable in pieces; to contractors, intermediaries, and political families. This dysfunction justifies an endless status of external engagement. A perpetually broken Beirut secures a permanent international footprint. As sociologist Saree Makdisi once suggested, Lebanon survives not by solving crises but by performing them.
2. Karachi
In Karachi, people have built institutional malaise on fragmentation. The city, with a population of over 20 million and a presence of 25% of Pakistan’s GDP, can be the economic engine of the country. Rather, it functions with fragmented superimposed authority; the Sindh provincial government, municipal corporations, cantonment boards, and a variety of federally governed bodies. There is no single authority fully accountable for Karachi; failure is publicly compiled but individually disowned.
Every monsoon season plays out this regime of dysfunction. In 2020, unprecedented rainfall flooded a large part of the city, killing more than 40 people and displacing thousands. Relief committees were formed, there were investigations, funds were provided, and yet the drainage system continues not to function. The Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020, touted as the future of urban development, expired without implementation.
Dysfunction is an ecosystem for a prosperous “resilience economy.” NGOs, international agencies, and donors, from the UN-Habitat to the World Bank, invest millions into “urban resilience frameworks” that often produce useful reports, discussion workshops, and pilot projects, but they rarely lead to systemic reform. Karachi, in this sense, does not fail; rather, it metabolizes crisis into continuity.
3. Kabul
In Kabul, collapse is more of a condition than an event. After the US invasion of Afghanistan, most of Afghanistan’s public spending was financed by foreign aid, creating what anthropologist Astri Suhrke termed a “rentier state.” The stability of the Afghan government was more dependent on donor aid than on governance. From 2002 to 2021, international assistance surpassed $144 billion, most of which ended up flowing back to Western contractors and private security companies.
When the Taliban retook power, this framework of dependence didn’t disappear; it simply reconfigured itself. Humanitarian corridors and aid programs run by the UN bypass formal institutions and reproduce the same logic: governance is given to a network of NGOs, local power brokers, and informal markets. The UNDP warned that up to 97% of Afghans could fall below the poverty line, but the humanitarian sector remains one of the only functioning economies. Kabul, like Beirut and Karachi, is sustained by the very forces that narrate its tragedy.
This is resilience as containment, a mode of governance where collapse is never resolved. People around the world cheer these societies as if simply coping is progress. However, underneath this admiration is a subtle cruelty, what philosopher Byung-Chul Han terms the “violence of positivity”: the spectacle of suffering, the virtue of endurance, the beauty of structural neglect.
The Theory of Managed Decay
Managed collapse relies not on chaos but governability. Political theorists show how modern power operates, not by establishing order, but by calibrating disorder. To formalize this in Michel Foucault’s terms, it’s “governmentality,” the art of governing less by command and by the modulating of life itself. A functional system produces stability; a continually dysfunctional one produces control.
In this model, disorder is not coincidental; it is a political tool. Managed decay maintains populations too entangled in survival to launch structural resistance. When people are busy accommodating, they stop requiring transformation. For instance, the never-ending reforms, the never-ending crises, the never-ending continuities of giving aid, in places like Pakistan or Lebanon, are not a sign that governance is weak; it is governance. Administrative entropy becomes a modality of rule.
The idea of “necro politics,” put forth by Achille Mbembe, builds on this rationale. In the global South, governance typically does not deal with welfare but with precarity. States regulate the boundary between life and collapse, binding their citizens to live painfully in a state of semi-viability. Individuals are permitted to “live,” but never really thrive. It is a politics of deferred death; the infrastructure is not killing you today, but it ensures that you are never safe.
Beyond the Fetish of Endurance
True resilience is not about endurance; it is the dismantling of the conditions that make it necessary, but the global conversation has inverted this logic: rather than working to end suffering, we romanticize the act of surviving it. It is, after all, much more convenient to laud the moral fortitude of families in Gaza than to work on dismantling the structural violence that maintains their precariousness, and to applaud the “phoenix spirit” of Beirut than to acknowledge international complicity in its destruction.
Resilience, in the way that is often discussed now, is a way of outsourcing morality. Judith Butler has called this the “frames of recognition,” which lives are grievable and which lives are admirable. This inversion has political value. A society characterized as “resilient” is not assumed to be oppressed but rather presents itself as self-sufficient, as a space for inspiration rather than obligation. The introduction of the notion becomes a linguistic vaccine against guilt.
What is necessary is not the end of resilience, but rather the need to reconceptualize what it means. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues in The Burnout Society, the neoliberal subject is commanded to survive as duty; “you must cope,” instead of “you deserved better.” Within this logic, the global South is told to “build back better,” even when these foundations are built on inequity. The language of resilience thus continues to sustain the very fatigue which it tries to dignify.
To be adequately resilient is not to adapt endlessly, but rather to refuse to adapt, to claim transformation instead of endurance. It is to refuse the political present of managed collapse, the aesthetics of precarity, and the quiet moralism of survival.
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Momina Areej is currently pursuing an MPhil in Clinical Pharmacy Practice. With a passion for writing, she covers diverse topics including world issues, literature reviews, and poetry, bringing insightful perspectives to each subject. Her writing blends critical analysis with creative expression, reflecting her broad interests and academic background.