Abstract
Introduction
Have you heard? There is a new superhero in town! Her name is Resilience and she has quickly made herself indispensable to the Security Empire. Resilience materializes in crisis situations and fights against Complete Breakdown by granting the vulnerable means and responsibility to help themselves. Her nemeses are Contingency and Uncertainty – yet, they also give her reason to exist. At a certain point, she was reported to be in a league with Risk and Preparedness, but that is unconfirmed. Others are in a clearly ambiguous relationship with Resilience. Prevention suspects that she might be an imposter, Precaution eyes her warily, and Resistance wonders whether he should become her sidekick or start a campaign against her. Resilience is mysterious: she can be in many places at the same time, takes on various forms, slips into different subject-bodies, and eludes clearly-defined dimensions of time – some say she is only ever emergent in essence. 1 She is a typical postmodern heroine, existing in different universes, with various stories of origin – her multiple personalities imbue different characteristics, normative concepts, and ways of interacting with subjects. 2
Fiction aside, resilience seems to enjoy the status of a superhero today. Yet, is resilience really a universal solution to a set of complex challenges? How does it come into being and what does it set in motion? In introducing this special issue, we argue that resilience takes on multiple shapes at the same time. In the pages that follow, we outline how diverse, sometimes even contradictory, concepts and practices of resilience have proliferated into a wide range of security issues and policy domains, including military programs, critical infrastructures, migration policy, city planning or counterterrorism. However, we seek to do more than point to the multiplication of resilience. The special issue problematizes and critically discusses ways in which different practices of resilience change environments, create subjects, (un)link temporalities, and redefine relations of security and insecurity.
To set the stage for the contributions in this special issue, this introduction first substantiates the increased attention – scholarly as well as political – given to resilience. This is followed by a review of the critically inclined academic discussion of resilience and security. We argue that to advance the discussion, resilience needs to be conceptualized and investigated in plural terms. Since resilience places a focus on processes of dealing with disruption and of enacting security practices (Kaufmann, 2013), the contributions in this special issue illustrate how resilience is being practised in multiple ways, and show how the performance of resilience practices entails concrete subjectifications and affects the temporalities of security.
Resilience: A decade of proliferation
Within various policy fields, resilience is discussed as the answer to a ‘world of rapid change, complexity and unexpected events’ (Chandler, 2013a: 1). It has gained momentum as a policy concept focused on a highly diverse set of issues. Beyond that, resilience also inspires academic discussions across a broad range of disciplines. Figure 1 shows the number of published items on resilience, registered between 2003 and 2013 in the Web of Science (WoS) database. We can observe an almost fivefold increase from approximately 500 to over 3,000 publications in 2013, a surge that seems to continue.
Number of resilience pieces in the Web of Science.
Across disciplines, resilience has emerged as a universal mode of thinking about the relations between unpredictable subjects and their complex environments. According to Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, resilience expresses no less than ‘a governmental philosophy of nature and society’ (2011: 145). It seems to be universal in its applicability and aspirations. The basic assumption is that the (in)security of a subject is not only dependent on the character and severity of the threat it is exposed to (its vulnerability), but also on the subject itself – namely, its resilience to detrimental events. The concept thus aspires to describe mechanisms for maintaining stability, survival, and safety – mechanisms that seem equally applicable to the individual, society, nature, and technical systems.
Given the close ties of resilience to contingency and uncertainty, it is not surprising that its rise to fame is reflected in the fields of security studies and international relations. Searching the terms ‘resilience’ and ‘security’ in the WoS ‘social science’ section results in two hits in 2003 and 85 in 2013 – an increase indicating a change in notions of security governance. Resilience links security to logics of governance rooted in ecology, engineering, and psychology, which were previously not prominent in the security discourse. It provides novel conceptual linkages and forms of knowledge and asks for interdisciplinary epistemic communities as well as new modes of governance, including more and different types of actors. These interlinkages are the key to understanding how resilience functions in the realm of security, and how resilience is inscribed in a longer historical sequence dealing with the relationship between threats and the threatened and between effect and the affected.
A central and longstanding problematic in the practice of security in complex environments is the inability to foresee, identify, and act upon threats in time. Resilience promises answers to this problematic and
The rapid rise of resilience across disciplines and policy issues requires critical analysis of the consequences that its practices and policies have for security governance. In the critical security studies literature, we diagnose a tendency to overly generalize effects of diverse resilience practices. We further highlight two crosscutting issues characterizing the shift in security governance induced by resilience: new subjectivities and new temporalities. Critically and empirically engaging these two is essential to further theorize expressions of resilience in political practice.
Resilience in critical security studies
Resilience has emerged as a significant theme within critical security studies in the past few years. 3 Overall, the critical literature sees resilience as an increasingly prominent organizing principle in political life. Here, resilience is a highly political concept that is being translated from a variety of disciplines into security. Therefore, its spread and its apparent ‘normalcy’ need to be contested and questioned.
Critical resilience literature has close ties to literature addressing new or changing practices of anticipation, precaution, pre-emption, and risk in security governance (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Anderson, 2010; Anderson and Adey, 2011; Aradau and van Munster, 2007; Petersen, 2012; Rasmussen, 2007). These practices thrive on security threats with complex emergent qualities that infuse the security environment with uncertainty (Aradau and van Munster, 2012; Dillon, 2007; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008; Dillon and Reid, 2009). Furthermore, resilience speak to two ‘turns’ in critical security scholarship: the complexity turn, which signifies an appropriation of insights and methods from complexity theory in social theory (Urry, 2005), and the material turn, which explores how power is constructed and exercised by and through material objects (Aradau, 2010; Connolly, 2013).
Theoretically, critical resilience scholarship focuses predominantly on how resilience is situated within liberal notions of security or moves beyond it (Chandler, 2012, 2014; Duffield, 2012; Evans and Reid, 2013; Lentzos and Rose, 2009; O’Malley, 2010; Walker and Cooper, 2011; Zebrowski, 2013). In doing so, the critical literature follows Walker and Cooper’s genealogy (Walker and Cooper, 2011), which foregrounds Hayek’s and Holling’s notions of complex systems theory and the limits of control and prediction. Going beyond this genealogy, a number of scholars have attempted to provide typologies of resilience to structure the debate. For example, Bourbeau (2013) bases his three-type typology on a categorization of resilience (Handmer and Dovers, 1996) that links resilience not to self-emergent autopoietic processes of (complex) systems, but to political choice – or rather, various degrees of aversion to secondary risk by political actors (Power, 2004). Rogers, in turn, identifies three distinct articulations of resilience, which he calls organizational, technological, and community resilience, based on where resilience unfolds its effect (Rogers, 2013a). Yet a different typology is advanced by Walkate et al. (2013), who focus on different organizational levels: the individual, familial, communal, institutional, national, regional, and global. These typologies help to highlight the multiple, sometimes fundamentally different, social and political processes inherent in resilience practices.
Empirically, the policy-driven incorporation of resilience into a growing number of social domains has led to an expansion of topics that are being studied. On the one hand, we see a move from purely national (often UK-focused) contexts to international contexts (Chandler, 2012, 2013b; Duffield, 2012; Rogers, 2013b; Williams, 2013). On the other, there are projects that add comparative perspectives (Joseph, 2013b; Lentzos and Rose, 2009) or those that study the emergence of resilience in new fields such as riot-culture (Rogers, 2013a), cyber-security (Herrington and Aldrich, 2013), or the military (O’Malley, 2010). Nonetheless, most critical resilience literature is still developed in a specific Anglo-Saxon academic milieu and empirical context, which is reflected in a relative homogeneity in the types of cases studied and the theoretical approaches to resilience (see. Joseph, 2013a).
Resilience as a governmental philosophy places optimal recovery from an adverse event – a shock, disruption, emergency, crisis, or trauma – at the heart of security processes. When understood through the disastrous event, two main topics gain prominence in the study of resilience and in particular that of the diverse resilience practices: temporalities and subjects.
Complex temporalities …
Underlining the importance of the disastrous event splits time into past and future and gives particular political significance to the practices of resilience – which either refer to overcoming past events or potential future disruption. In preparing for resilience, it is the imagined event of the future that determines the present. In enacting resilience, it can also be the disastrous event of the past that determines action in the present (and potentially the future, too). Therefore, resilience is related to technologies of preparedness, but also to the actual process of ‘coping’ (O’Malley, 2010: 488). With this emphasis on adapting to new situations, the discourse of resilience becomes ‘a discourse of futurity’ (Schott, 2013: 213). At the same time, it is backwards-oriented and encourages ‘actors to learn from catastrophes so that societies can become more responsive to further catastrophes on the horizon’ (Evans and Reid, 2013: 91). Resilience therefore promotes a vision of uncertain and traumatic futures (O’Malley, 2010: 488, 492) in tandem with the possibility of overcoming past adverse events and experiences. The necessity to further explore and theorize these complex links between resilience temporalities is one of the underlying themes of this special issue.
… and vulnerable subjects
As a form of governmental philosophy and practice, resilience creates subjects. Analysing these practices and subjectifications makes room for discussions of the diverse (de)politicizing and (dis)-empowering effects of resilience. The formation of the resilient, actively engaging subject may be attributed to the logics of (neo-)liberalism as often alluded to in the literature, or it may be a result of pragmatic ‘buck-passing’ by governments. In either case, resilience redistributes responsibilities – and possibilities of blame. It moves from government to municipalities, from national to local, from security authorities to the citizen – expecting and encouraging beneficial self-organization in the face of crisis by those units that are both knowledgeable of local contexts and directly affected by the adverse event (Hagmann and Dunn Cavelty, 2012). Such a responsibilization has been discussed as a form of empowerment by some, especially if linked to participation and citizen-led initiatives (Bulley, 2013; Rogers, 2013a). Others have warned against an overly romantic notion of community, which is sought through resilience attempts targeted at the vulnerable (Bulley, 2013). Resilience programs create the subject they speak about and valorize it as either resilient and desirable or vulnerable, undesirable and in need of state intervention.
Because resilience and the adverse event are two sides of the same coin, resilience always presupposes vulnerability, or a susceptibility to harm. This has led to a powerful critique of the governmental philosophy of resilience, seen as essentially de-politicizing (Evans and Reid, 2014; Neocleous, 2013), as it turns life into a ‘permanent process of continual adaptation to dangers that are outside our control’ (Evans and Reid, 2013: 83). Since resilience needs a vulnerable subject to thrive, it constantly re-produces it, therefore robbing human subjects of political options, especially options of resistance. Rather than subjectifying, resilience therefore works as an objectifying force: humans become mere playthings of greater and uncontestable powers such as neoliberalism or social Darwinism. Such accounts, in turn, have been criticized for presupposing resilience as a unidirectional and objectifying process and therefore, a priori, robbing it of any democratic or emancipatory potential; in positioning resilience as anti-resistance, no interplay of concepts and no resistance against resilience is possible (Schott, 2013; see Figure 2).
Resistance to Resilience? Poster in New Orleans. Photo credit: candychang.com.
Resilience may indeed be depoliticizing, but positing it as the opposite of resistance simplifies the complex workings of power, empowerment, disempowerment, and the linkages between them. In departing from some of the literature discussed above, we argue below that there is theoretical as well as critical value in abandoning singular conceptualizations of resilience for an exploration of the multiplicity of subjectification processes – repressive as well as emancipatory – associated with resilience. It is necessary to move beyond positioning ‘resilient subjects’ simply as an effect of broader rationalities and practices of liberal governance. There is no such thing as
Proliferations, multiplications, and variations of resilience
There is a tendency to gloss over inconsistencies, differences, and contradictions in the existing literature and too easily assume what resilience is and how different types of resilience work – independent of time, polity, case, and overall context. However, ‘determining a consistent set of resilience rationales is already challenged by the diversity of coexisting resilience definitions’ (Kaufmann, 2013: 59). Clearly, resilience should be studied in its many different forms and contexts (see Ciută [2009] for the same argument in the context of security). We contend that – like all security rationalities before and after it – resilience is not the only paradigm with security relevance today. It is interwoven with other forms of security governance, especially technologies of risk, insurance, and preparedness.
This issue is dedicated to drawing out these variations by examining five concrete applications of resilience. In the first subsection, we show how the articles in this issue highlight a complex temporal dimension of insecurity, since resilience is presented as a capacity to deal with threats of an uncertain future, a disastrous past, and chronic emergencies. In addition to this, resilience also produces different subjects, which are the focus of the second subsection.
The multiple temporalities of resilience
The ‘re-’ in resilience is the Latin syllable meaning ‘back’. Resilience can thus be understood as a reaction to something that happened in the past. In security, this backward orientation of resilience is reflected in efforts to deal with threats that have materialized as disasters or shocks. Resilience is then a response to this past event, while processes of adaptation, reorganization, or memorialization are performed with the intention to establish a sense of normality, security or at least a sense of having dealt with the disruption. Whether these performances contribute to a sense of security varies greatly and is subject to the cultural and situated interpretation of such actions and processes. Heath-Kelly, for example, takes us to the 2002 bombsite in Bali, where resilience reworks security failures of the past retrospectively, but also ‘in anticipatory terms as productive of future successes in disaster recovery’ (2015: 70–71). This form of resilience is thus not exclusively backward-looking – it also has significance for the future. In her case, the stark reality of the bombsite also confronts victims and nations with potential future failures to secure. Resilience, Heath-Kelly argues, ‘attempts to erase security failure through its retrospective, anticipatory and “despatialized” operations, rather than actually addressing disaster recovery’ (2015: 71). Ultimately, resilience emerges as a chimera that relates to the past and the future, but never exists in the present.
Reacting in a resilient manner thus also adheres to the future, since resilience epitomizes that which can be done if future threats cannot be averted in time. ‘Unknown unknowns’ (Daase and Kessler, 2007) have become a signifier for a security rationale that expects the unexpected at any time (Aradau and van Munster, 2012). Brassett and Vaughan-Williams claim that resilience reinforces this rationale: ‘the issue of uncertainty is essentially folded into governmental logics … via discourses of resilience’ (2015: 38). As a result, resilience becomes a necessity that is both a product of contingency thinking and the tool that answers it. This means that it presupposes and rationalizes an ongoing need to secure the future in the present. In a world determined by uncertainty and incalculability, subjects and policies interested in ontological security will continuously have to deal with looming threats. Emergent disaster has to be thought of, prepared for, and dealt with continuously through resilience. Brassett and Vaughan-Williams (2015) capture this idea of resilience as a continuous activity that is marked by constant failure by drawing upon Butler’s reiterative temporality of the performative. In a similar vein, Coaffee and Fussey (2015) explore further aspects of the integration of the uncertain future into security governance by looking at security-driven resilience through the lens of surveillance.
However, not only the possibility of disruptive one-time events integrates the need for future resilience into the present. Structurally different from disastrous events are chronic emergencies that have already materialized and continuously materialize in the present. In its assumed universal applicability, resilience is also used to provide answers to such persistent insecurities. Chronic emergencies – for example, climate change (Methmann and Oels, 2015) – inject yet another temporality into the resilience concept. This already materialized insecurity requires a specific set of skills in the resilient subject to deal with insecurity, as the authors of this special issue illustrate. Howell’s account of the soldier takes yet a different angle on the chronic aspect of insecurity, since a resilient soldier, by dealing with the crisis of combat, also contributes to its perpetuation. Resilience thus not only responds to but actively extends crisis, adding to the temporality of the continuous (Howell, 2015). In sum, resilience assembles diverse security practices of dealing with a disruptive past, a potentially disruptive future and ongoing, chronic disruption in the present, all of which emphasize the reiterative temporality of resilience practices.
The multiple subjects and subjectifications of resilience
All contributions in this issue explore empirically how resilient subjects are defined and come into being. This act of defining is not only powerful because it makes an assumption about which kind of subjects are capable of dealing with insecurity and which are not, but also because it seeks to produce a subject that is aligned with a specific political ontology. Even though the field of security largely borrowed the contents of resilience from eco-systemic thinking, an increasing interpenetration of the field with resilience concepts from the psychological domain has led to a (not necessarily structured) widening of the focus from ecological, socio-ecological or automated systems to include communities, groups, and individuals. This is traceable in the way in which resilience approaches put emphasis on local reactions, responsibilizing the smallest sensible units and populations to address insecurity (Kaufmann, 2013). In line with this re-scaling (Coaffee and Fussey, 2015), resilience is often characterized by an autonomous, self-organized or self-initiated response. Resilience thus brings the subject into the focus of security policies – not as an entity to be protected but as an active and responsible contributor to security. This results in a specific relationship between political practices and subjects. Not only is the subject a central enactor of resilience, but resilience policies and practices are productive of specific subjects: the autonomous, organized, emergency-managing subject who behaves in the way that the respective political rationale or practice promotes.
The resilient subject does not always have to be an individual, such as the climate migrant or the soldier. Heath-Kelly, for example, depicts a collective subject that invokes the Australian spirit and incorporates political institutions into its conceptualization of resilience. Brassett and Vaughan-Williams point to a spectrum of different subjects by analysing the resilient individual promoted by humanitarian emergency preparedness, as well as resilient critical infrastructure. Each contribution to this special issue shows how a specific resilience practice forms a particular kind of subject. In most cases it is a subject that seeks to overcome the exposure to threat, but threats, temporalities, conditions, as well as concrete strategies for response differ from case to case. This variation in the governance of and through the subject leads to a multiplicity of subjectifications.
Heath-Kelly highlights collective mourning as key to understanding the attempt to establish a resilient subject. She explores the Australian way of dealing with the bombing of the nightclub in Bali. By invoking notions of the ‘tough, fair and resilient’ (Heath-Kelly, 2015: 74) Australian spirit, the Australian nation is challenged by its government to actively incorporate such characteristics into its way of overcoming past failures to secure its safety. The creation of a resilient subject is here clearly articulated in terms of national identity, a collective subject that manages to turn the failure to protect and the subsequent trauma into something positive. Not only is the resilient subject constructed as a fair subject, since it refrains from blaming the Indonesian people for the attack, but it learns from this past event about potential future failure. Through this process, the resilient subject is asked to proactively counter fears about the reoccurrence of such events and is prompted to adapt and trust those institutions and technologies that promise to protect it from similar future events. In Bali, however, the bombsite itself stays empty, symbolizing – according to Heath-Kelly – that resilience is in fact a chimera.
For Coaffee and Fussey (2015), the future is the starting point for the production of resilient subjects. The resilience practices they describe – such as the management of public spaces through surveillance, preparedness, community planning, and local empowerment in Birmingham neighbourhoods – are productive of contradictory subjectifications and thus show the inconsistencies of security-driven resilience practices. While surveillance indiscriminately designs suspicious and potentially dangerous subjects needing to be policed, controlled, and potentially removed, community planning approaches attempt to empower potentially dangerous subjects and their community with the responsibility to overcome threats together at an early stage. The resilient subject is thus both suspicious and dangerous, but also encouraged to engage with its community to acquire the responsibility to deal with its own threat. Essentially, different enactments of resilience thus clash in rescaled government practices, showing how resilience is a plural and unstable practice characterized by internal conflicts.
Methmann and Oels (2015) describe a change in the way climate refugees have been the subject of different discourses and practices. While climate-induced migration was securitized at first, it was soon re-framed as a form of resilience. Such practices produce a subject that is a victim of random forces, but needs to cope with such risks self-responsibly. It is a subject that embodies a neoliberal rationale as it adapts in the face of danger through entrepreneurship. Migration is, through resilience, framed as a strategy of a progressive, flexible, and optimizing subject that transforms itself instead of the problem. In this case, resilience not only eludes the cause of the problem, but the political rationalizations of such migratory practices entail concrete consequences for migrants’ lives. Above all, it is depoliticized. The resilient subject is made to believe that it has a free, self-contained choice that, in fact, it does not have. It cannot decide to stay, as that would require a change in global climate policies.
Within the context of armed conflict the soldier is increasingly framed – and trained – as a resilient subject. With scientific rigour, insights from psychology are being translated into resilience programs for soldiers and their families. What began as a description of a child’s psychological capacity to deal with adversity (Garmezy, 1973) has now grown into ‘family fitness’ (Howell, 2015: 15–31), in order to cope with the stress of soldiering in wartime. Howell analyses how military resilience programs are productive of such plural subjects who do not grapple with the cruelty of warfare but simply exclude it from their professional and private worlds. Optimally, resilient subjects do not block themselves with negative emotions, such as hurt and shock, but instead embrace war as a moment to enhance themselves. By meeting complex and potentially persistent insecurity with optimism and fitness, the resilient subject also becomes more than a ‘means for responding to violence’ (Howell, 2015: 23). It actively contributes to the expansion and production of it. The resilient soldier is, however, not only an optimistic character, but also efficient. Military resilience programs thus produce a subject that is happy, optimistic, flexible, and cheaper to maintain in service.
Most articles in this issue investigate how resilience politics and practices subject individuals and populations to specific forms of power. These subjects range from climate refugees, soldiers, and Australians to surveyed inhabitants of Birmingham. Brassett and Vaughan-Williams (2015) additionally show that resilience produces not only the individuals and populations it targets. Resilience equally reorganizes the subjectivities of its enactors and the power relations between them. Furthermore, they show that resilience can also be enacted by technology. One of their cases illustrates how a critical infrastructure protection system is imbued with the political power to conduct risk-assessments and enact security measures. Resilience practices thus also produce non-human, self-learning subjects and delegate both political knowledge-creation and political choices to these non-human entities.
Resilience and (in)security: A preliminary conclusion
The collection of articles in this special issue shows that resilience is not a universal solution to a complex set of problems and it is surely not an all-powerful superhero categorically delivering security. Instead, resilience ties security to insecurity. That becomes evident when studying the role that temporalities and subjectifications play in the multiple political practices of resilience explored in this issue.
Resilience not only incorporates different temporalities, but produces and perpetuates them. It interweaves different temporal strands, which reinforces a continuity of insecurity in the long term. It connects the past, the future, and the present, while instantiating a constant struggle of redefining and recreating security. This struggle is not only evident in the context of chronic emergencies. Since the framing of life as contingent and uncertain is tightly linked to resilience rationales, the continuous effort of dealing with insecurity through adaptation is inscribed into the very notion of the living subject. How different subjects seek to establish resilience and what kinds of effects this produces, in terms of politics, society, and the ontology of the subject itself, take various forms. In this special issue, we draw attention to these different processes of subjectification. What ties them together is the creation of a subject that, sometimes in retrospect, sometimes proactively, attempts to deal with insecurity. The resilient subject seeks to (re-)establish security, whether that is security as trust in technology or politics, security as a form of community, as a response to uncertainty and randomness, as the exclusion of the experience of violence, or as resistance to surveillance.
Only by carefully tracing how temporalities of resilience interweave and how the act of dealing with insecurity generates different subjects can we outline and discuss the ambiguities and contradictions, the dynamics of power and empowerment, and the relationship between security and insecurity that resilience instantiates. What is needed for further critical engagement with resilience policies and practices is a focus on contradictions and multiplicities. There is a broad assortment of governmental techniques and technologies directed towards increasing the capacity to adapt to, and evolve through, crises – not all of them have the same political effect. Furthermore, there are fault lines, tensions, and contradictions between discourses of complexity theory and the traditional episteme of human sovereignty, predictability, and control, which still informs the discourses of resilience in security (Rosenow, 2012: 535). A focus on contradictions inevitably leads to a focus on the limits of resilience (Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams, 2011) and on the interplay of different forms of resilience; for example, the way in which marginalized forms of resilience can challenge dominant forms. In exploring and acknowledging the limits, failures, and contradictions of resilience practices, this special issue advances the discussion on the different forms security and insecurity take, whether in the past, the present, or the future.