IntroductionDuring the fallout from the Boston bombings in April 2013, the city's mayor highlighted the resilience shown by the people of Boston. He celebrated the fact that Boston was a 'resilient city' that would bounce back (Menino, 2013). Numerous media commentaries, blog posts and online memorials picked up this theme of resilience to articulate a range of positive attributes that individuals/Boston/America had exhibited. They had been brave, quick thinking, a strong community and yet, at the same time, calm and able to follow instructions from the security forces that amassed and co-operated. Resilience, it seems, carried both popular appeal and policy relevance in a manner that allowed security objectives to shift, adapt, andaccording to media narrative -move quickly in relation to the event, the perpetrators and the political challenges that were arising.Much like the concept of globalisation that rose to popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, resilience seems to carry a productive ambiguity that both resists exact definition and allows for a spectrum of interactions and engagements between policy and the everyday which are as (seemingly) effective as they are (apparently) apolitical.What is resilience? How did it emerge? What are the political effects of this emergence? The ambition of this special issue is to outline an agenda for research into resilience that emphasises how we might address the status of politics and the political in relation to this discourse of security. In many ways, this is a highly unconventional and therefore distinctive collection of articles. For a start, it is unusual in combining both academic and practitioner perspectives, a quality that we believe to be increasingly important in order to understand the complexity of issues at stake in the rise of resilience. The special issue is also marked by a deliberate eclecticism in terms of authors' theoretical and methodological approaches, the type of sources they use and ultimately their normative attitudes towards resilience, per se. As is to be expected, we find moments of tension as well as agreement between the pieces assembled here but, for us, this only enhances the collection as a whole by openly exploring the multifaceted -and highly political -nature of resilience.Some of the articles contribute to existing debates by diversifying the policy contexts in which the politics of resilience can be analysed, including: international peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention and human security (Chandler, 2013;Williams, 2013); the maintenance and bs_bs_banner