Duffield, Mark

English

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55
Ideas of ‘resilience’
The origins of this talk lie in the discussions, spanning a
year or more, that fed into the creation of the Cabot
Institute at the University of Bristol in 2010. The Cabot
Institute brings together the natural, physical and social
sciences around the issue of environmental uncertainty.
For someone working on the politics of disasters, it was the
first time I had engaged with colleagues from the natural
and physical sciences. 
The discussions were fascinating, mainly because of the
overlaps and convergences they revealed, rather than the
expected differences, especially in relation to emergencies.
It quickly became evident, for example, that the idea of
‘resilience’ now operates as a lingua franca of preparedness,
adaptability and survivability across the natural, the
physical, and the social. Definitions vary, but if resilience
is understood as a basic ability to withstand shock and
survive disaster through adaptation, one can talk about the
resilience of simple organisms, entire ecological systems,
or built structures, including cities and critical
infrastructure – as well as the resilience of social
institutions, communities and lone individuals. 
If nothing else, resilience-thinking has encouraged a
range and depth of dialogue across the disciplines that,
even a generation ago, would have been difficult. As a
platform for exchange and cross-fertilisation, resilience has
much potential. 
And in less than a decade, resilience-thinking has also
risen to dominance in the popular media, in social policy,
and in political discourse generally. Resilience is
everywhere, especially now at a time of austerity – we’re all
expected to be resilient. However, if we are to extract
something from this new ability to communicate, it is
necessary to address the more hidden and troubling
dimensions of resilience. My concern is with how
resilience has been used, especially in translation from
ecology, to understand the human condition. 
Since resilience is inseparable from emergency, I will
tease out these concerns by first considering how our
understanding of disaster has changed since the 1980s, I
will then use the international aid industry as a brief
example. 
Ideas of disaster and security
The difference in understanding lies between seeing
disasters as accidents arising outside of normal society and
against which society could and should protect itself, and
today’s belief that disasters are internal to society and
against which protection is not only difficult but may well
be harmful. This fundamental difference lies between,
what could loosely be called, modernist and
postmodernist conceptions of disaster. 
Compared to the certainties of Cold War nuclear
stalemate, it is argued that we now live in a different
world, where security is increasingly challenged by the
growing radical interconnectivity of contingent global
events. The idea of ‘national security’ is now based upon
the principle of radical uncertainty. Since the past has not
equipped us to deal with today’s new emergent,
unforeseen and networked threats, we are constantly
finding ourselves exposed and unprepared.
Security now struggles to assert itself in a risk-terrain
made dangerous by the immanent possibility of systemic
failure and hence catastrophe. Dangerous climate change
is a good example of emergent uncertainty. As an
unpredictable force-multiplier of the various drivers of
global poverty, and thus something able to increase the
chances of conflict, displacement, refugee flows,
transnational criminality and even terrorism, climate
change has morphed seamlessly into a threat to global
security. 
Historically, the logic of security within liberal states
has been to seek freedom from danger and surprise. The
logic of resilience is different. Since disasters are uncertain
and unpredictable, rather than protect or secure against
them, resilience urges us to accept the immanence of
disaster and, in learning to adapt in order to survive, to see
in disaster a new meaning of life. Resilience has called
forth, allegedly for our own benefit, a historically novel,
post-security condition. It is a condition where being
unprepared is not so much an oversight or act of neglect,
for many – especially the world’s poor and marginalised –
it is rapidly becoming an officially sanctioned way of life. 
1970s’ approaches
If we could teleport the disaster experts of the 1970s into
the present, today’s complexity and resilience-thinking
would appear rather fanciful, if not morally dubious. The
dominant approach to emergency was then based upon
modernist assumptions and their corresponding
technologies of protection and rescue. Disasters were not
seen as a necessary outcome of the functioning of society
and the social-ecological interface. Natural disasters were
more or less random accidents or unusual occurrences that
originated outside of normal society. The aim of
How did we become unprepared?
Emergency and resilience in an uncertain world
MARK DUFFIELD
British Academy Review, issue 21 (January 2013). © The British Academy
56
humanitarian rescue was to separate, to quarantine, or
otherwise to place a protective barrier between the disaster,
including its victims, and normal society.
The modernist approach to emergency had three main
assumptions. First, geo-physical processes and their
human impacts could be predicted by science; huge
amounts were consequently spent on prediction and large-
scale responses. Second, it was possible to plan
comprehensively and respond managerially to contain or
minimise these impacts. This included the relocation of
populations; redirecting rivers; the building of flood or
avalanche defences; cloud seeding; the quarantine of
cities; and camp-based refugee regimes. Finally, you could
create a centralised rescue capacity based on a hierarchy of
relief organisations, including the logistical and
managerial capacities of the military. 
This modernist approach was reflected in the
organisation of civil defence against nuclear attack,
especially in the Soviet Union, together with the
emergence of comprehensive all-hazard command and
control institutions from the 1970s in America and
Europe. In the Third World, the main modernist
technology of rescue and protection was the refugee camp.
The refugee camp operated to wall-off the disaster,
including its victims, from society and its politics. 
During the 1970s, however, the modernist belief that
disaster lay outside normal society began to break down.
Rather than random Acts of God, the socio-economic
context in which disaster occurred became increasingly
significant. Importantly, ideas of vulnerability emerged to
explain why some societies or communities were more
prone to disasters than others. For illustration, I will say a
few words on how our understanding of famine has
shifted. 
Famine
Until the end of the 1970s, it was still common to regard
famine as a macro-economic phenomenon, as an absolute
shortage of food. The work of Amartya Sen helped change
this view. Sen shifted attention towards micro-economic
questions of unequal social capacities and differing degrees
of market inclusion, factors which define an individual’s
ability to access the food that, invariably, is available in the
market place. Vulnerability to famine was redefined in
relation to an individual’s choice-making abilities, social
capital and degree of market inclusion. 
From the end of the 1970s, the refugee camp also
attracted increasing criticism: they created dependency,
prevented refugees using their skills, undermined
government capacity, and made market integration
difficult. The discovery that cultivating individual choice
was important justified the emptying of the refugee
camps. The camps that inevitably remain have been
progressively securitised and militarised. 
Disaster management shifted from saving lives to
supporting livelihoods. Rather than providing relief as
such, it privileged the promotion of coping strategies and
improving market access; it shifted to supporting
individual choice and collective self-help. Rather than
calling-forth traditional security-based – freedom from –
technologies of protection, the direction of travel favours
more – freedom to – approaches, which involve accepting
the inevitability of disaster. Rather than disaster and its
victims being removed from society, since the 1980s they
have been effectively (re)absorbed within it. 
Adapt to survive
Within the past decade, resilience-thinking has colonised
and expanded this, essentially, neoliberal turn within
disaster management, indeed, within social policy
generally. The recent discovery of the Anthropocene as a
new geological age, for example, takes the (re)absorption
of disaster within society a step further; humanity itself
has blurred into the environment as the author of its own
permanent emergency. Humanity has exchanged its
subjectivity to become a bio-human force of nature.
Drawing on departures within ecology, especially the
finding that non-human species exist dynamically on the
edge of extinction, resilience-thinking regards landscapes
of uncertainty and surprise as an intrinsic part of the bio-
human condition. History from the Ice Age to Climate
Change has become a series of catastrophic and violent
events to which humanity, as a force of nature,
continuously adapts and evolves in order to survive. I’m
thinking here of Andrew Marr’s 2012 television series, The
History of the World, which took just this line. 
Within the Obama administration, rather than try to
make major cities disaster-proof, some security advisers
argue it is better to accept that they are ‘built to be
vulnerable’ – the proviso being to stop demanding
protection and just learn to adapt. Within the gaze of
national security, the global debt crisis is now comparable
to a hurricane or earthquake; they blur together as
different examples of the same permanent emergency. If
politics can be defined as the ability to solve root
problems, post-security landscapes are also post-political.
Rather than solve root problems, taking our lead from
nature and the behaviour of non-human species, we must
now endlessly and uncritically adapt to survive. 
Neoliberalism
When one sees the global debt crisis being compared to a
natural disaster, as a force of nature made worse by human
folly, it is perhaps time to begin questioning the political
agenda underlying the conversation between resilience
and neoliberalism. In particular, while resilience-thinking
has called forth disaster as a new ontology of life, the
policy implications of this are far from being applied
equally or fairly across society. 
Resilience underpins a new biopolitics that differs from
what shaped the great modernist project of the Welfare
and New Deal states. In order to work, resilience needs
populations, communities and people that are free of any
interposing historical, institutional or cultural legacies of
social protection. Resilience requires a pre-existing state of
exposure. Closed, protected, or even reluctant,
communities have to be opened-up to risk and
HOW DID WE BECOME UNPREPARED? EMERGENCY AND RESILIENCE IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD
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contingency, so that they are free to reinvent themselves
anew as leaner and more agile versions of their bloated
selves. 
Examples of this opening-up or social abandonment are
clearly evident in current policy responses to austerity in
Europe. However, we should not forget that, in the shape
of structural adjustment, the global-South has been
undergoing its own austerity-based shock-therapy for
decades. From the modernist plateau of the Welfare State,
our collective direction of travel, in the name of economy
and freedom itself, has been one of deregulation,
privatisation and, not least, that well known force of nature,
globalisation. 
However, the populations that are being politically
exposed to disaster in order to become resilient are not
elites; they are those hapless groups now revealed as
especially vulnerable to uncertainty; in particular, the
global poor and, in the North, those people and
occupations that find themselves surplus to requirements. 
Elite bunkers
Elites themselves are moving in a different direction. They
are withdrawing from the post-security and post-political
landscapes of permanent emergency; they are occupying
and staking-out the world’s proliferating privately secured
gated-complexes and cultural walled-gardens. Elites are
withdrawing from degraded and dangerous public spaces
to the safety of private spaces. While the squeezed middle
and working poor are expected to be resilient, urban
environments are fragmenting as elites bunker themselves.
Unsurprisingly, the international aid industry is not only a
good example of this wider spatial and logistical diagram,
it is also an important site of experimentation and
innovation. 
Resilience-thinking has blurred the boundary between
those requiring short-term emergency relief, and those
needing long-term development assistance. Since
emergency is now permanent, teaching the global poor to
be resilient in the face of uncertainty presents itself as an
essentially developmental act. For policy makers, the
developmental properties of disaster mean that
communities are not only expected to be able to bounce
back from disaster, in the words of the Department for
International Development, the aim now is to enable
them to ‘... bounce back better’. 
When one looks at the behaviour of international aid
workers and donor representatives, however, one sees
something different; rather than practising what is
preached, there is a widespread retreat from risk and
uncertainty. Since the 1990s, in response to the belief that
aid work is becoming more dangerous, international aid
managers have retreated into the aid world’s proliferating
Green Zones, the iconic image of which is the fortified aid
compound (Figure 1). The result has been a deepening
paradox of presence. While aid agencies have declared
themselves willing to continue expanding within
challenging environments, international managers
themselves are becoming increasingly remote from the
societies in which they work, presence is becoming
progressively virtual.
Among international aid workers, ideas of resilience are
associated with the therapeutic psycho-social and care-of-
the-self aspects. Faced with landscapes of uncertainty and
Figure 1. UNHCR security-compliant compound, Yei, South Sudan. Photo: Mark Duffield.
HOW DID WE BECOME UNPREPARED? EMERGENCY AND RESILIENCE IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD
58
surprise, the basic argument among aid managers is that
you cannot maintain constant vigilance and preparedness
without taking care of the inner-self. Subjective resilience
training, which is spreading from the military and
emergency responders to international aid workers, has
been likened to putting on mental armour. It tends to be
formulaic, placing emphasis on things like healthy living,
learning to recognise stress, the need for supportive social
networks, and, importantly, developing emotional
distance.
From this perspective, the fortified aid compound is
more than a defensive structure; it is a therapeutic refuge
that both separates international aid managers from
outside uncertainty, and encloses the supportive social
networks and cultural props that allow for narcissistic
forms of care-of-the-self. 
Dystopias
It is in relation to the bunker as a therapeutic refuge, that
one can see another attribute of resilience-thinking – its
basic post-Utopian credentials. In seeking refuge from
uncertainty, today’s social and economic elites are unlikely
to imagine Utopias that involve a better future for all.
Futures are more likely to be imagined in terms of the
exclusivity that bunkered-life vainly promises. The post-
political is matched by the replacement of Utopianism
with the dismal ability to imagine only social Dystopias
and the frightening future threat landscapes to come.  
If we are to extract something useful from the ability
that resilience provides to talk across the sciences and
disciplines, we must first dare to dream of a better
collective future for humanity than the nihilistic prospect
of permanent emergency; we must have the courage to
demand protection for all.
Mark Duffield is Professor Emeritus, Global Insecurities
Centre, University of Bristol. He is currently heading a
research project on risk management among aid agencies
working in the challenging environments of Southern 
Sudan and Afghanistan.
A panel discussion on ‘How did we become unprepared?
Emergency and resilience in an uncertain world’ was held 
at the British Academy on 7 November 2012. An audio
recording of the discussion can be found via
www.britac.ac.uk/events/2012/
Figure 2. UNHCR residential compound, Juba, South Sudan. Photo: Mark Duffield.


How Did we Become Unprepared? Emergency and Resilience in an Uncertain World

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How Did we Become Unprepared? Emergency and Resilience in an Uncertain World

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