Description
What makes people, societies, organisations or states resilient? Is resilience always beneficial? The proposed paper starts with observations on how we talk about resilience. The British government’s resilience planning and Strategic Defence Review 2025 are aiming to measure societal resilience, but evaluation criteria are ill defined. They seem to assume, like NATO’s resilience policies, that as long as measures which used to be the preserve of so-called ‘prepper’ communities, are in place societal resilience against crises, including military aggression and environmental disasters, would be enhanced. Then unspoken underlying assumption is that resilience is or ought to be fundamentally aimed at preserving the status quo.
The paper calls this assumption into question and seeks to explore the darker sides of the resilience debates. From a biopolitical perspective, resilience can be associated with the exercise of (state or organisational) power over individual lives thereby immediately inviting critical analysis of bout the nature of power, its distribution and its exercise over time and space. The paper also explores where and how we might frame resilience in a much more constructive and democratic manner, if we approach it from the perspective of human capacities (at individual and societal levels) to create conditions of safety, security, dignity and other forms of positive nurture and thus conceptualise resilience as dynamic and empowering from the perspective of an ethic of care and examine what that means in practice through the four pillars of the Women, Peace & Security Agenda.
