Mark Neocleous: Resisting Resilience
When the only thing a sad, lonely and oppressed young woman thinks might help her turns out to be the very same thing being taught by the world’s largest military power, something interesting is going on, something that takes us from mundane tips about how to live well to the world of national security, emergency planning and capital accumulation.
‘Resilience’ has in the last decade become one of the key political categories of our time. It falls easily from the mouths of politicians, a variety of state departments are funding research into it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration, and academics are falling over themselves to conduct research on it. Stemming from the idea of a system and originating in ecological thought, the term connotes the capacity of a system to return to a previous state, to recover from a shock, or to bounce back after a crisis or trauma. Thus, for example, a 2008 OECD document on state-building, styled ‘from fragility to resilience’, defines the latter as ‘the ability to cope with changes in capacity, effectiveness or legitimacy. These changes can be driven by shocks … or through long-term erosions (or increases) in capacity, effectiveness or legitimacy.’ As well as offering a succinct definition, this OECD document also reveals what is at stake and why the concept has become so appealing: rather than speak of fragility and its (negative) associations, we should be speaking of resilience and its (positive) connotations.
The first thing to note is the impact this is having on the concept of security. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), published as a major statement of US strategy following 9/11, mentions ‘resilience’ just once. In contrast, five years later the National Strategy for Homeland Security (2007) is almost obsessed with the idea of resilience. The document outlines the need for ‘structural and operational resilience of … critical infrastructure and key resources’, but resilience is also planned for ‘the system as a whole’ and even for ‘the American spirit’, with the overall aim to ‘disrupt the enemy’s plans and diminish the impact of future disasters through measures that enhance the resilience of our economy and critical infrastructure before an incident occurs’.
The UK’s National Security Strategy, published a year later, notes that ‘since 2001, the Government has mounted a sustained effort to improve the resilience of the United Kingdom.’ The document goes on to talk about the resilience of the armed forces, of police and of the British people, of ‘human and social resilience’ and of ‘community resilience’. Yet, more than anything, the document is focused on preparing for future attacks: ‘We will work with owners or operators to protect critical sites and essential services; with business to improve resilience.’ It outlines a ‘programme of work to improve resilience’ at national, regional and local level, and across ‘government, the emergency services, the private sector, and the third sector’. Such claims have created the rationale for state institutions and personnel to be reorganized and retrained: from the resilience training offered to armed forces (the USA is not alone with CSF2, as other states have similar programmes), to the creation of units such as ‘UK Resilience’ based in the Cabinet Office, right down to the fact that sniffer dogs now receive resilience training.
What both the USA and the UK strategy documents reveal is the extent to which resilience is subsuming and surpassing the logic of security. The demand of security and for security is somehow no longer enough. Thus whenever one hears the call ‘security’, one now also finds the demand of ‘resilience’. For example, much was made of the security measures enacted for the London Olympics of 2012, but the relevant body of the London Organizing Committee had not a ‘Security’ section but a ‘Security and Resilience’ section, working with a ‘London Resilience Team’ whose task it was to ‘deliver Olympic Resilience in London’. It is as though the state is fast becoming exhausted by its own logic of security and wants a newer concept, something better and bolder: enter ‘resilience’.
As well as being newer, better and bolder, resilience is also more imaginative. For resilience both engages and encourages a culture of preparedness. The state now assumes that one of its key tasks is to imagine the worst-case scenario, the coming catastrophe, the crisis-to-come, the looming attack.. Read more:
