7,776 wordsChris Zebrowski received his PhD from Keele University. His research has sought to trace a genealogy of resilience and investigate the implications of this new paradigm for liberal security governance. 1 The Nature of ResilienceThe 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 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 possibility for 'resilient populations' to emerge as a referent of governance

Emergency responses are premised on the hope that, even when events cannot be wholly predicted and prevented, 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 informing the design of UK emergency responses, organized through the Integrated Emergency Management framework. Integrated Emergency Management 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.

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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.

Kettling has emerged in recent decades as an established, if controversial, tactic of public order policing. Departing from a historical emphasis on dispersal, kettling instead acts to contain protesters within a police cordon for sustained periods of time. In this article, we seek to elaborate upon the spatial and temporal logics of kettling by investigating the conditions of is historical emergence. We argue that 'kettling' has to be understood as a territorial strategy that co-evolved in relation to new forms of disruptive protest. Whereas older techniques of crowd dispersal serve to diffuse a unified collective, 'kettling' aims at capturing the highly volatile and 'swarming' movements characteristic of contemporary choreographies of dissent. Drawing on police manuals, media coverage, accounts from activists and expert interviews, we show how the 'kettle' re-territorializes protest by acting on its spatio-temporal and affective constitution. By fabricating an inner outside of the urban milieu, freezing the time of collective mobilization and inducing debilitating affects such as fear and boredom kettling intervenes into the scene of political subjectification that each congregation of protesting bodies seeks to fashion.