Exercising emergencies: Resilience, affect and acting out security

Abstract

The idea of the complex emergency has given rise to the notion of resilience as a form of acting out security. While security policies largely embrace the concept of resilience, critical scholarship points to the 'responsibilization' of the threatened subject, who is 'programmed' to act out security in a fashion that internalizes neoliberal values. This behaviour is trained through disciplinary practices, such as exercises, that seek to conduct the conduct of disaster populations. However, is the resilient subject only ever an instance of programmes and disciplinary power? This article takes a look at how self-organization comes about and how this process can be conceptualized through affect. It uses the setting of a cyber-security exercise to describe the dynamic interplay between affect and re/action. Building on Spinoza's understanding of affect as the onset for action, the article discusses what affect theory contributes to resilience theory. It concludes that, as a form of acting out security, resilience incorporates both 'programmed' and 'self-determined' actions. Both forms of acting, however, imply that the resilient subject has no choice but to act out security. Given this fundamental restraint, powerlessness as the incapacity to act appears as one of the few instances that escape the governmental logic of resilience.

A proposal for unpacking the politics of knowledge production in disaster reduction education

“…Environmental disasters highlight the capacities of a region or the lack of necessary capacities therein to withstand each occurrence (Gaillard & Mercer, ; UNISDR, ). This again ties into discourses of resilience, for resilience is the “capacity to self‐organize, to learn from, and to adapt to disruption” (Kaufmann, , p. 2). Resilience relies on the self‐organization of an actor to deal with whatever type of rupture occurs and to return to “normal” (Kaufmann, ).…”

“…This again ties into discourses of resilience, for resilience is the "capacity to self-organize, to learn from, and to adapt to disruption" (Kaufmann, 2015, p. 2). Resilience relies on the self-organization of an actor to deal with whatever type of rupture occurs and to return to "normal" (Kaufmann, 2015). However, whether the return to "normal" should be the goal is another question (Grove & Chandler, 2016).…”

Hacking Humans? Social Engineering and the Construction of the “Deficient User” in Cybersecurity Discourses

“…Both concepts, the deficit model and resilience, entail a normative assumption of shifting from collective to individual responsibility: They depart from an understanding of the individual subject as "lacking"either of sufficient education and knowledge to arrive at informed decisions in the case of the deficit model or the capacity to respond to crisis and disruption with adequate self-protection in the case of the resilience paradigm. What is more, both conceptualizations are future-oriented in the sense that they argue for the empowering potential of transformation as the "productive engagement of failure" (Kaufmann 2016(Kaufmann , 2012. Finally, deficit constructions and the resilience paradigm intend to activate the subject to act out security as well as innovation, with responsibility for both secure and innovative societies being firmly placed in neoliberal logic of governance in which problems and solutions alike center around the individual (Walker and Cooper 2011;Methmann and Oels 2015).…”

Resilience unwanted: Between control and cooperation in disaster response

“…A related reading of resilience, emphasizing the proximity between resilience and neoliberal thinking, has provoked various critiques (Evans and Reid, 2014;Joseph, 2013Joseph, , 2016Neocleous, 2013). One central argument is that policies promoting resilience legitimize the devolvement of collective social responsibility and thus delegate responsibility for security and well-being to the individual and/or local communities (Kaufmann, 2013(Kaufmann, , 2016. Resilience, it is argued, fosters the de-politicization of protection, since '[r]esilient subjects, in other words, have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the dangers they face' (Evans and Reid, 2014: 42).…”