Theme-based book review: Resilience, migration, and global health

Resilience remains a common if misunderstood term in popular and academic circles. A search of the WorldCat library catalog at the time of this review lists over seven thousand book titles since the year 2000 that include the word.1 According to Google Trends, the interest in the term has been increasing worldwide, subject to occasional fluctuations; in searching for information about resilience, Internet denizens want quotations about the term, want to know more about its relationship to climate or disasters, and are desirous of definitions.2 Its distinction seems to be in its amorphous and malleable nature, filling human voids, providing hope in time of need, and showing a path forward out of gloom. Because the term is used without certainty about what it means, one also might perceive that resilience could have a seedy side. As with self-help books that make their authors wealthy but provide little return for their readers with promises of easy answers to life’s most complex questions, resilience could be trotted out as an answer to an extensive range of societal ills. The lack of connection between problem and solution means that results can vary considerably from promises made. With so many books on resilience and related concepts, the proof of the worth of texts is in ability to translate concepts into understanding of practical worth and actionable recommendations for better ways forward. In its public guise, the hope of resilience must be balanced against realism and an awareness of context. Research in this area, while extensive, has nevertheless struggled for clarity; governments seem to agree that resilience is worth having, but misunderstanding about how to achieve it nevertheless persists (Atkinson, 2013). The problems of swelling societal vulnerability and a lack of resilience in public-led institutions and efforts have heightened concerns in this regard. With all the work that exists on resilience and areas of extreme societal vulnerability, public officials and institutions still wrestle with how to address pivotal questions. Problems in global health quality and the compounding challenges experienced by migrants as a life-threatening example only serve to demonstrate just how much we do not know about achieving resilience and how short of such goals civilization actually falls. This theme-based book review takes up the topic of resilience in theory and an area of applied policy relevant to resilience: global health and mobility of people and populations. Two recent books are considered: Elgar Introduction to Theories of Organizational Resilience, by Luca Giustiniano, Stewart R. Clegg, Miguel Pina E. Cunha, and Armenio Rego; and Transnational Mobility and Global Health: Traversing Borders and Boundaries, by Peter H. Koehn.Book ReviewJournal ArticlePublishe