This chapter explores the possibilities for and limitations upon social mobility as Defoe conceived them. His own biography exemplified the roller-coaster trajectory of the first-phase professional writer. In his non-fictional prose, he showed that commoners without pedigree, land, or title could aspire to the highest social echelons. His fiction, though, was energized by the opposite trajectory: downward mobility. His protagonists live on the paper-thin line between respectability and criminality, terrified of falling off the edge. The conflict between an absolute system of morality as prescribed in the Ten Commandments and the relative morality by which people in the world must live is one experienced repeatedly by Moll Flanders and other Defovian characters. Understanding the pragmatic ethical codes to which such characters must resort does not, though, entirely explain their fictional fates. Narrative energy is produced by the gap between the explicable and the mysterious in his characters’ motivations and actions.

In the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea and the civil wars that preceded and succeeded it, victims have rebuilt their lives, demonstrating a desire and capacity to survive in the face of extreme hardship. This chapter explores resilience in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Using a social ecological lens, it examines how various systems – and in particular political, legal and economic systems – interact to provide resources that enable and foster resilience among victim populations. It also demonstrates, however, that these systems, individually and in interaction with each other, often remove resources or even undermine resilience. Within this systemic structure, the chapter analyses how transitional justice work in Cambodia has affected resilience. Focused specifically on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, it argues that while the tribunal has the potential to contribute to resilience (and does for some victims), its design and procedures constrain it in this regard, even inadvertently reinforcing broader marginalising systemic dynamics. The key point is that national actors in Cambodia recognise that they can gain significant advantages through corrupt practices and autocratic power, and thus they have used transitional justice strategically to undermine peacebuilding.