States of Resilience and the Resilient State

Terror, Trauma, Memory: Reflections on the Oklahoma City Bombing—An Introduction

“…But scholars like Sandra Walklate, Gabe Mythen, and Ross McGarry have asked whether this means that the postdisaster and preemptive coping mechanisms being put forward in good faith are, in fact, serving something else:

Is resilience a tool for putting people and communities to work on security?…This search for resilience, and the exhortations for citizens and communities to be resilient, in Althusserian terms, makes appeals to individuals who are “always‐already” exposed to dominant ideas and impacted by ideological forces. (Walklate et al., :187, 196)

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“…Is resilience a tool for putting people and communities to work on security?…This search for resilience, and the exhortations for citizens and communities to be resilient, in Althusserian terms, makes appeals to individuals who are “always‐already” exposed to dominant ideas and impacted by ideological forces. (Walklate et al., :187, 196)…”

“…Disaster management studies arose in the United States as a resilience‐building response first to the Oklahoma City bombing and then, more urgently, to the calamity of September 11, 2001. Not surprisingly, after 9/11 there was a “spike in activity around emergency advice, disaster planning, and preparedness” that in turn built up a sense of citizen resilience (Walklate et al., :186). Scholars who doubt the unquestioning acceptance of this “whole‐life” policy‐oriented approach of trauma/disaster studies have wondered: “[R]esilience to what, for what, and from what?” (Walklate et al., :187, 189).…”

“…Not surprisingly, after 9/11 there was a “spike in activity around emergency advice, disaster planning, and preparedness” that in turn built up a sense of citizen resilience (Walklate et al., :186). Scholars who doubt the unquestioning acceptance of this “whole‐life” policy‐oriented approach of trauma/disaster studies have wondered: “[R]esilience to what, for what, and from what?” (Walklate et al., :187, 189). According to evaluations of communities based on such measures, Hurricane Katrina survivors initially “failed” while OKC survivors “passed” the posttrauma social resilience test, with similar judgments also made about their respective cities’ early recovery abilities based on pretrauma trajectories of urban/social rise or fall (North, ; Vale and Campanella, ).…”

“…Resilience can thus too easily become a neoliberal training ground for Western democracies in their responses to terror attacks like that in Paris in November 2015. The risk is that of adopting resilience as an “organizing principle and a mode of harnessing and maintaining social order and control” (Walklate et al., :197). Moreover, as Marita Sturken has argued, the call to prepare for manmade and natural disasters has fostered a “consumerism of preparedness”—marked most visibly by the popularity of Hummers.…”