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Correspondence to Professor Bruno Marchal; bmarchal@ itg. be © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Reuse permitted under CC BYNC. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. INTRODUCTION In the wake of the COVID19 pandemic, the use of the concept of ‘resilience’ has boomed in the field of global health. The European Union and agencies such as the World Bank, WHO and the Global Fund now embrace strengthening resilience as the best way to prepare health systems for shocks. Resilience emerged only relatively recently in global health and it can be traced back to the outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Middle East respiratory syndrome and especially Ebola. It crossed over from international development, food and nutrition security, and humanitarian aid, where it has been used from the 2000s onwards as a frame to look into how communities could be strengthened to deal with crises. In global health, the initial focus was on emergency preparedness, aligning well with the health security paradigm. Gradually, authors widened the scope, for instance, from ‘community responses’ to ‘social resilience’, and from ‘minimising exposure to acute shocks’ to ‘dealing with chronic or everyday stressors’. The objective of strengthening resilience is commonly formulated as ensuring that health systems and services cover the needs of people affected by a shock while maintaining the continuity of services for all other people. Shocks are typically defined as disturbances or stressors to people and health systems, such as natural disasters, conflicts, extreme weather events, sudden migration influxes or economic crises. Cynics may say that the objective of strengthening resilience and the broad range of shocks may the only things authors agree on, given the multitude of definitions of resilience, the diversity of methods to assess health system resilience and the limited consensus on how resilience can be enhanced. 8 With the increased use of ‘resilience’ came a divergence of its meaning; yet, diffuse definitions can sometimes be useful. The concept has become a boundary object, facilitating ‘communication across disciplinary borders by creating shared vocabulary although the understanding of the parties would differ regarding the precise meaning of the term in question.’ In this comment, we go back to the pioneering work on governance and resilience in the field of socialecological systems (SES) theory, to which several authors refer. Cote and Nightingale argued that SES theory overemphasises the role of physical shocks in defining vulnerability, ignoring political and social determinants. Such critique led to the more comprehensive concepts of social resilience and equitable resilience, which have not yet been taken up fully in the field of health: many frames of resilience have ‘no inbuilt moral compass’ and ignore the role of unequal power positions. We argue that revisiting key concepts SUMMARY BOX