Governing the network society: a biopolitical critique of resilience

Looking at the way risk is employed within the United Kingdom’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat’s policy of resilience, this article critically examines how contingency is managed within contemporary biopolitical security practices seeking to protect and promote species-life. Underlying these changes, it will be argued, are profound changes in the way species-life is generally understood in terms of a complex adaptive network. Paying particular attention to how contingency is understood within the literature on complex adaptive systems that inform contemporary notions of the ‘network society’, this article will seek to draw a link between risk and governance within the modern ‘network society.’ In doing so, this paper seeks to examine how advances in the protocological control of networks are informing biopolitical security practices and their relation to the governmental rationality of neo-liberalis

Introduction: The Value of Resilience

Introduction: The Value of Resilienc

The nature of resilience

The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been premised on a profound re-evaluation of the referents of security governance. Together, the discovery of the ‘myth’ of panic and the natural resilience of populations has encouraged the spread of resilience strategies which aim to promote the adaptive and self-organizational capacities of populations in emergency. This chapter seeks to advance an alternative to this positivist explanation: that the appearance of ‘resilient populations’ is the correlate of a broader restructuring of rationalities and practices comprising liberal governance. Tracing the evolution of the figure of the natural underpinning liberal governmentalities through the historical development of Ecology and Economics, this chapter looks to make explicit the epistemological order supportive of neoliberal governance. In doing so, this chapter identifies the historical conditions of possibility for ‘resilient populations’ to emerge as a referent of governance

The nature of resilience

The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been premised on a profound re-evaluation of the referents of security governance. Together, the discovery of the ‘myth’ of panic and the natural resilience of populations has encouraged the spread of resilience strategies which aim to promote the adaptive and self-organisational capacities of populations in emergency. This article seeks to advance an alternative to this positivist explanation: that the appearance of ‘resilient populations’ is the correlate of a broader restructuring of rationalities and practices comprising liberal governance. Tracing the evolution of the figure of the ‘natural’ underpinning liberal governmentalities through the historical development of ecology and economics, this article looks to make explicit the epistemological order supportive of neoliberal governance. In doing so, this article identifies the historical conditions of possibilit

Acting local, thinking global: Globalizing resilience through 100 resilient cities

This article investigates the globalization of resilience by examining a particular and prominent vehicle for the dissemination of resilience-ideas: the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative. As a philanthropic initiative organized through a network of international cities, 100RC demonstrates how the spread of resilience-thinking has been facilitated by exploiting changes in the structures and processes of global governance afforded by neoliberal globalization. The analysis focuses on explicating 100RC’s animating logic of governance, which is committed to the cultivation of network connectivity. Rather than directly fostering resilience, connectivity is established as a condition under which resilience solutions can be immanently surfaced from the interactions of a diverse selection of stakeholders brought together through these networks. The article situates this governmental logic within broader changes associated with neoliberal globalization, namely: the emergence of multi-scalar governance networks, the rise of philanthrocapitalism and the inception of platform capitalism. The conclusion discusses the implications of this analysis for further study of the relation between connectivity, danger, knowledge and value contained within resilience discourses

Memories of security

A review of Charlotte Heath Kelly’s Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite (2017: Manchester University Press

Staging an emergency

An article commissioned by Rowena Easton (supported by ACE funding) to document the play “!” [Hollywood Blues] (Nightingale Theatre, Brighton: 2013 Brighton Festival

Response: resilient times

Response: resilient time

Emergent emergency response: Speed, event suppression and the chronopolitics of resilience

Emergency responses are premised on the hope that even when events cannot be wholly predicted and prevented, that timely action in the present can be exercised to strip an emergent event of its disruptive potential. Yet, while the speed of emergency responses plays a critical role in underpinning UK resilience, it has been a relatively neglected subject in studies of resilience advanced through the paradigm of preparedness. This article aims to contribute to and extend work in the field of emergency governance by arguing that concerns surrounding the speed of response contribute to a distinct form of security enacted in contemporary emergency response strategies which I term ‘event suppression’. Drawing on policy analysis, Preparedness Exercise observations and practitioner interviews, this article investigates how speed operates as a core problematic orienting the design of UK emergency responses organized through the Integrated Emergency Management (IEM) framework. IEM promises to accelerate emergency response operations by utilizing advances in communications technologies to drive the bottom-up emergent self-organization of emergency responses. Event suppression ensures security not by preventing an event from happening, but by quickly closing down the ‘disruptive’ time of the emergency event and restoring the linear historical time of standard political processes

Organising community resilience: an examination of the forms of sociality promoted in community resilience programmes

Communities have emerged as a principal strategic target for contemporary resilience programmes. Going beyond community preparedness campaigns, which aimed to responsibilise individual citizens to their dangers, community resilience programmes aim to intervene in, and enhance, the social relations binding a community together in order to promote resilience. The benefits of resilience for communities, it is claimed, go beyond emergency preparedness and recovery, promising to enhance development, wellness and equality. This article examines the forms of sociality valued and promoted within the discourses and practices of community resilience programmes. We begin by examining how ‘communities’ emerged as a site for post-social forms of neoliberal governance. Next, we turn to examine the ideas of community, the forms of sociality and the modes of resilience enacted within community resilience programmes. We conclude with a discussion of how ‘community resilience’ could be enacted otherwise through a critical examination of alternative organizations