City Research Online

Abstract

The Special Forum addresses the politics of increasing precarization of society, on the one hand, and on the other, the precarization of politics itself with the growth of autocratic rule. Our focus is on the way this affects democracy’s prospects, especially in extreme circumstances of war and crisis. We introduce the concept of “transformative resilience” as a potential antidote to precarity. Going beyond an entity’s capacity to absorb shocks (“restorative resilience”) and maintain continuity (“adaptive resilience”), “transformative resilience” denotes an entity’s capability to acquire political agency and deploy it creatively in imagining and enacting alternative futures. Exploring the dynamics of transformative resilience, especially in the context of acute crises, allows us to discern new pathways for reducing precarity in a way that does not replace it with oppressive stability, but instead enables us to creatively engage our agency in navigating the complex uncertainties of modern life.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	War, precarity, transformative resilience, political agency, crisis
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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