[Introduction JID Virtual Issues] Resilience in an Unequal Capitalist World

The papers in this special issue have been selected from past issues of the Journal, dating from 2000 to 2010, on the subject of resilience. We chose to highlight the theme of resilience as one of the sub-themes of the EADI-DSA conference in September 2011 on „Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty: New Values, Voices and Alliances for Increased Resilience‟. In particular, this subtheme carries a close connection with the dominant conference themes of scarcity and uncertainty. Moreover, all three themes need to be conceived as relative concepts within the context of contemporary capitalism – that is, they are relative to the constant systemic creation and reproduction of scarcity and uncertainty within capitalist systems, in the face of which understandings and forms of resilience need to be similarly contextualised.