It has been observed that the Paris Agreement has become an “analogy” of diplomatic success and institutional design because it allows emissions reduction commitments to be determined at the national level. While this is widely attributed to the United States’ insistence on excluding any provisions that would have required US Senate ratification, the success of Paris stems more from the way the agreement partly circumvents the divergent interests of developed and developing countries by allowing states to pursue their own mitigation strategies based on domestic distributional and ideological politics rather than interstate cooperation and/or competition. It is this accommodation of both an institutionalist logic of absolute gains and a more realist logic of relative gains that ultimately underpins the diplomatic and institutional design success of Paris. However, the resonance of realism, at least in its neoclassical form, also stems from its greater capacity to accommodate the heightened socioecological complexity, interconnectedness, and unknowability occasioned by the Anthropocene than other branches of Anthropocentric international relations theory. This potential is outlined in this Forum article by sketching the epistemological and ontological connections between neoclassical realism and the concept of resilience.

The language of “resilience” features prominently in contemporary climate security debates. While a basic definition of resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb recurrent disturbances so as to retain its essential structures, processes, and feedbacks, I argue that resilience is currently articulated in four distinct ways in climate security discourse. These are strategic resilience , neoliberal resilience , social resilience , and ecological resilience . Most analyses of resilience-based security discourses have hitherto been informed by Foucauldian notions of governing populations at a distance to ensure compliance with neoliberal norms. However, in the climate security field, neoliberal resilience discourses have achieved relatively little salience, while Foucauldian accounts are largely overdetermined, thus obscuring the multiple ways in which resilience is currently articulated. In this article, I identify these disparate resilience discourses through an analysis of recent US and UK government, international organization, nongovernmental organization, and academic climate security literature. I then analyze these discourses in terms of their basic discursive structure and degree of institutionalization to clarify how dominant climate security narratives construct understandings of security and insecurity in contemporary global environmental politics. While strategic articulations are currently most conspicuous, I argue that only social and ecological resilience support long-term human flourishing and ecosystem integrity.