Resilience and (in)security: Practices, subjects, temporalities

Cavelty, Myriam Dunn; Kaufmann, Mareile; Kristensen, Kristian Søby

doi:10.1177/0967010614559637

Cited by 124 publications

(71 citation statements)

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“…25 Resilience as a focal point within the EU Global Strategy comes at a time when it is increasingly adopted by various actors in a wide range of international policies concerning security, humanitarian aid, and development.…”

Section: Resilience-promises and Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…40 Exactly because resilience assumes that we are no longer in control, it has a profoundly depoliticizing effect. 41 Understanding risks and crises as opportunities to develop ourselves, and by implication, a necessity to wilfully expose oneself to dangers upon which no control can be exerted, constitutes a debasement of the political subject-reducing politics to a 'purely technical practice'. 42 As it is repeatedly asserted that we must give up our illusion of controlling the external environment, we are tasked with achieving resilience: a learnable skill rather than a natural characteristic.…”

Section: Key Criticismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…49 This clashes with resilience as a process of assigning responsibilities to citizens and communities rather than the institutions of the state: 50 on the one hand, society is supposed to be the 'active and responsible contributor to security' while at the same time, society is problematized and understood as the architect of its own risks and crises. 51 As a consequence, the foundations on which the division between internal and external security rest, become shaky, 52 best illustrated by an excerpt from Frederica Mogherini's foreword to the Global Strategy: 'my neighbour's and my partner's weaknesses are my own weaknesses'. 53 Moreover, in creating micro-vigilantes of all of us, Evans and Reid 54 argue, we are tasked to 'police our locales in a manner which complements the outsourcing logic of neoliberal governance'.…”

Section: Key Criticismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Resilience as the EU Global Strategy’s new leitmotif: pragmatic, problematic or promising?

Wagner

Anholt

2016

Contemporary Security Policy

104

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Section: Resilience-promises and Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Key Criticismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Key Criticismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Resilience as the EU Global Strategy’s new leitmotif: pragmatic, problematic or promising?

Wagner

Anholt

2016

Contemporary Security Policy

104

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“…Thus, this paper ties in with existing critical discussions of resilience (Chandler, 2014;Evans and Reid, 2014;Joseph, 2013;Kaufmann, 2013;Zebrowski, 2009). However, it shifts the focus from the resilient subject (Dunn Cavelty et al, 2015;Joseph, 2013;Reid, 2012) to spatial arrangements and the resilience politics they constitute.…”

Section: The Rise Of the 'Internet Interconnection Ecosystem'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience governance and ecosystemic space: a critical perspective on the EU approach to Internet security

Kaufmann

2015

Environ Plan D

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Abstract. Since the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) promoted the image of the Internet as 'interconnection ecosystem', Internet security has been increasingly conceptualised through the language of resilience-the capacity to selfrepair. This paper uses performativity and relational space as theoretical lenses to analyse the political effects that ENISA's redefinition of the Internet entails. It argues that the Internet ecosystem is not only used to conceptualise the Internet as a heterogeneous, complex space, but also to legitimise resilience as a new security practice. The first section traces the trajectory of different discursive framings of the Internet as space and introduces the premise of understanding the Internet ecosystem through performativity and relational space. The paper then utilises this framework to conduct an analysis of the Internet ecosystem on the basis of a selection of ENISA's technical and policy documents. It explores infrastructural and political dimensions and discusses their correlated forms of resilience governance. It concludes that the reconceptualisation of the Internet as ecosystem is a highly political move, which also changes the notion of security. If security governance becomes a matter of facilitating distributed self-repair, security is not a state of being protected, which is how we often think about cyberspace, but it is self-made, processual, emergent, and strictly temporal.

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“…As significant as these insights are, there have been calls to investigate the pluralities of resilience (Brassett et al, 2013;Dunn Cavelty et al, 2015). Asking whether the resilient subject is only ever 'programmed', this article offers a closer, empirical look at how the supposed self-organization comes about.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exercising emergencies: Resilience, affect and acting out security

Kaufmann

2015

Security Dialogue

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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.

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Resilience and (in)security: Practices, subjects, temporalities

Cited by 124 publications

References 50 publications

Resilience as the EU Global Strategy’s new leitmotif: pragmatic, problematic or promising?

Resilience as the EU Global Strategy’s new leitmotif: pragmatic, problematic or promising?

Resilience governance and ecosystemic space: a critical perspective on the EU approach to Internet security

Exercising emergencies: Resilience, affect and acting out security

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