This book advances a unifying argument that resilience is not a fixed trait, sector-specific response, or technical solution, but a dynamic, context-sensitive capability that emerges through strategy, learning, institutions, and social relations.
Across its 16 chapters, the book brings together diverse empirical settings and theoretical lenses to show how resilience is constructed and enacted in conditions of uncertainty, constraint, and disruption. From organisations and value chains to entrepreneurs, universities, financial systems, digital infrastructures, and public institutions, the chapters collectively demonstrate that resilience is shaped less by isolated resources and more by alignment across systems, actors, and environments. The book challenges celebratory or simplistic narratives of resilience by revealing its ambivalence: while resilience enables survival, adaptation, and innovation, it can also mask structural failures, shift responsibility onto individuals, and normalise precarity when institutional support is weak. A recurring theme is that resilience is strongest when embedded in learning processes, inclusive governance, ethical values, and long-term capability-building rather than short-term coping or compliance.
By integrating perspectives from strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, education, development, systems thinking, and cyber governance, the book offers a coherent yet pluralistic framework for understanding resilience as a socio-technical, organisational, and political process. Overall, it positions resilience not as an end state to be achieved, but as an ongoing practice of navigating risk, mobilising resources, and shaping more sustainable, just, and adaptive futures across global and local contexts.