ABSTRACT
Within the resilience literature many have found it useful to distinguish what might be labelled general resilience from specific resilience. That is to say, resilience to any kind of disturbance versus resilience towards specific types of disturbances. This chapter targets the notion of general resilience and aims to problematize this concept.
The first part of the chapter analyzes the idea of general resilience. Several reasons why the concept is problematic are highlighted. An important set of concerns relate to the ontological commitments recruiting this concept inevitably brings in its wake. These concerns both the ontological status of the property itself, the implications this has for how systems should be thought of, and, consequences for the interaction between general and specific resilience within a given system. A central concern revolves around how persistence and identity are understood in practice and how these concepts relate to the concept of resilience.
A number of different ways of understanding the distinction between general and specific resilience are discussed and it is suggested that the very notion of general resilience obscures from the role of describing and understanding the system.
