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Original citation:
Brassett, James and Vaughan-Williams, Nick. (2015) Security and the performative
politics of resilience : critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian emergency
preparedness. Security Dialogue, Volume 46 (Number 1). pp. 32-50.
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1
Security and the Performative Politics of Resilience:
Critical Infrastructure Protection and Humanitarian Emergency Preparedness
1
Security Dialogue, 46(1) (forthcoming 2015)
James Brassett and Nick Vaughan-Williams (University of Warwick)
Abstract
This article critically examines the performative politics of resilience in the context of the
current UK Civil Contingencies (UKCC) agenda. It places resilience within a wider politics of
(in)security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan
for, pre-empt, and imagine extreme events. Moving beyond existing diagnoses of resilience
based either on ecological adaptation or neoliberal governmentality, we develop a
performative approach that highlights the instability, contingency, and ambiguity within
attempts to govern uncertainties. This performative politics of resilience is investigated via
two case studies that explore 1) Critical National Infrastructure protection and 2)
Humanitarian Emergency Preparedness. By drawing attention to the particularities of how
resilient knowledge is performed and what it does in diverse contexts, we repoliticise
resilience as an ongoing, incomplete, and potentially self-undermining discourse.
Introduction: security politics and the rise of resilience
We must do all we can, within the resources available, to predict,
prevent and mitigate the risks to our security. For those risks that we
can predict, we must act both to reduce the likelihood of their
occurring, and develop the resilience to reduce their impact (Cabinet
Office, 2010: 3).
Resilience is fast becoming a mantra of policy making across a wide range of perceived
security risks including flooding, terrorist attacks, the collapse of virtual and physical
infrastructure, and financial crisis (Brassett, Croft, and Vaughan-Williams, 2013). Such risks
are typically associated with low-probability high-impact ‘extreme events’ necessitating civil
contingency planning to protect, maintain, and even enhance human well-being (Government
Office for Science, 2011). In the UK context, where the discourse of resilience has found
1
An early draft of this article was presented at the ‘Resisting (In)Security, Securing Resistance’ workshop held
in July 2011 at the Open University in London. We would like to thank the organisers, Claudia Aradau and Raia
Prokhovnik, and those in attendance – particularly David Chandler, Jef Huysmans, and Mitchell Dean – for
crucial feedback at an early stage in the development of our argument. Since then the piece has benefited from
discussions with Claire Blencowe, Jon Coaffee, Helen Braithwaite OBE, and Charlotte Heath-Kelly. We are
also grateful to the Editors of Security Dialogue – especially Marieke de Goede – and the four anonymous
reviewers who commented on several versions and helped us to sharpen the analysis.
2
particular traction in recent years (Joseph, 2013), these imperatives are reflected in the 2004
Civil Contingencies Act, the establishment of a Civil Contingencies Secretariat, and
successive National Security Strategies oriented around a resilient, multi-agency, all-hazards
approach to risk management. In short, the UK government’s perceptions of the security
landscape in the early twenty-first century are increasingly orientated around the concept of
resilience.
While there has been a dramatic rise in use of the term ‘resilience’ in discourses of
new security challenges especially since the end of the Cold War, the concept is far from new
and has emerged across a range of academic disciplines (Walker and Cooper, 2011). Derived
from the Latin resilio meaning ‘to jump back’, it is commonly used by engineers to describe
the ability of certain materials to return to their former shape after an external shock (de
Bruijne et al, 2010). In the 1970s the term was adopted in the science of environmental
management to describe flexibility and adaptivity to uncertainty as an emergent system
property (Holling, 1973). Notions of the ‘resilient individual’ were first developed in the
Psychology literature of the 1980s via studies of the relative influence of innate character
traits versus externally learned processes on children’s personalities. More recently, social
scientists Louise Comfort et al (2010) have defined the concept as ‘the capacity of a social
system (for example, an organisation, city, or society) to proactively adapt to and recover
from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and
expected disturbances’ (Comfort et al, 2010: 9, emphasis added).
Only relatively recently has the concept of resilience begun to animate research in
International Relations (IR) and Security Studies. This reflects the broader shifts in policy
and social science above as well as an increased concern in the discipline with the related
concept of risk (Amoore and de Goede, 2005; Aradau et al, 2008; Petersen, 2012). Thinking
in terms of risk diversifies the range of issues brought under the orbit of security and includes
3
referent objects beyond national and human security to include, inter alia: public spaces and
urban environments (Coaffee, Murakami Wood, and Rogers, 2008) populations produced as
‘vulnerable’ (Elbe, 2008); financial architectures (de Goede, 2007); virtual and material
networks and infrastructures (Aradau, 2010; Burgess, 2007; Coward, 2012; Lakoff and
Collier, 2010; Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams, 2011; Zebrowski, 2009); and ways of life
(Dillon and Reid, 2009; Duffield, 2012). Conceptually, risk-based approaches to security
focus not on the attempt to eliminate specific threats per se, but rather strategies to identify
and manage global uncertainties. It is precisely in this context – one concerned with the
question of living with risk – that the discourse of resilience has emerged as a corollary, and
increasingly central component of, the risk management cycle.
In this article, we draw a line through this broad endeavor to identify and ultimately
problematize two dominant approaches to resilience. First, various managerial approaches
have sought to capture the scientific language of early systems theories to think about
resilience as a form of ecological adaptation. This approach – which we call resilience-as-
adaptation – suggests that inter-connected and inter-related eco-systems have the capacity to
change and adapt in relation to shocks, to form a new, stable, equilibrium. On this view,
resilience is a ‘positive’ value that can, and indeed should be, exported to and inculcated
within society in order to help it prepare for, withstand, and ultimately improve when faced
with extreme events. Such attitudes are reflected in our opening quotation from the 2010
National Security Strategy and pervade current thinking about UK security at local, regional,
national, and international levels (see Brassett and Vaughan-Williams, 2013). Likewise, it is a
position that frames much of the literature in social science that seeks to question how
‘levels’ of resilience can be enhanced, become more effective, and applied in an ever-
widening range of settings.
4
Second, it is possible to identify a seemingly more critical approach, typically inspired
by the work of Michel Foucault, which problematizes the role that resilience plays within
wider logics and practices of neoliberal governmentality (Duffield, 2012; O’Malley, 2010;
Reid, 2012; Zebrowski, 2009). On this view, discourses of resilience-as-adaptation are
themselves rendered as a characteristic adaptation of advanced liberal society, whereby
uncertainty has become an organising principle of life and governance (Dillon and Reid,
2009). Resilience is thus cast as a regime of truth whereby neoliberal subjects are enjoined to
take entrepreneurial steps in managing their own risks in lieu of excessive state intervention.
This is because, as Julian Reid puts it, ‘subjects that are capable of securing themselves are
less of a threat to themselves and in being so are not a threat to the governance capacities of
their states nor to the governance of the global order either’ (Reid, 2012: 74). On this view,
resilience is assumed to be a ‘negative’ value because it produces a ‘politically debased’ form
of subjectivity that secures neoliberal governmentality.
Common to both advocates and critics is the suggestion that practices of resilience
can be viewed as a coherent and homogeneous reflexive movement in contemporary
neoliberal society. We would argue that although the second is often posited as a critique of
the first there is a tacit assumption on both sides that resilience ‘works’: that neoliberal logics
– and subjectivities – are fully formed, equally distributed, and inevitably successful. In turn,
this leads to the abstraction and reification of resilience as an emergent structural feature in
contemporary political life. It is this deterministic outlook and its totalising and
homogenising impetus that ultimately we seek to challenge in respect of the two dominant
positions taken together.
While we are sympathetic to aspects of both approaches – especially the latter for its
powerful diagnosis of what is at stake in the relation between resilience and neoliberal
governance – we seek to advance an alternative, albeit complementary approach. On our
