More than Fashionable Concepts? Risk, Security and Resilience in Modern History

Abstract

For a long time, historians have written about topics that include questions relating to a given society’s management of threats and risks. However, they did not use ‘risk’ as a category of analysis. Similarly, historians have extensively researched revolutions, social conflicts and disruptive events without elaborating a conceptual framework for security or resilience, and without historicizing these concepts. Since the turn of the millennium, the situation has changed fundamentally and risk, security and resilience have become new buzz words in historical research. These elastic concepts seem to provide the right degree of abstraction, interdisciplinary theory and contemporary relevance that historians need for their work. This article sheds light on how the notions of risk, security and resilience emerged, spread and influenced our present understanding of history and historiography. To what extent does this indicate a changing perspective in historiography? Or do recent developments in the field point to the reinvention of interpretative traditions using more fashionable concepts?