The Value of Resilience

Zebrowski, Chris R.

doi:10.4324/9781315681924

Cited by 30 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…Resilience has been advanced as a solution to the problem of the rapid and unpredictable emergence of contemporary emergencies (Chandler, 2014; Walker and Cooper, 2011). Resilience refers to the capacity of a broad array of complex adaptive systems to absorb, withstand and ‘bounce-back’ quickly and efficiently from a perturbation by exercising their own inherent capacities of emergent self-organization (Zebrowski, 2016). In other words, resilience promises to secure life lived under a ‘perpetual state of potential emergence(y)’ (Massumi, 2007) by activating ‘a system’s emergent response to emergencies’ (Kaufmann, 2013: 55).…”

Section: The Speed Of Emergent Emergenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent emergency response: Speed, event suppression and the chronopolitics of resilience

Zebrowski

2019

Security Dialogue

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Emergency responses are premised on the hope that, even when events cannot be wholly predicted and prevented, timely action in the present can be exercised to strip an emergent event of its disruptive potential. Yet, while the speed of emergency responses plays a critical role in underpinning UK resilience, it has been a relatively neglected subject in studies of resilience advanced through the paradigm of preparedness. This article aims to contribute to and extend work in the field of emergency governance by arguing that concerns surrounding the speed of response contribute to a distinct form of security enacted in contemporary emergency response strategies, which I term ‘event suppression’. Drawing on policy analysis, preparedness exercise observations and practitioner interviews, this article investigates how speed operates as a core problematic informing the design of UK emergency responses, organized through the Integrated Emergency Management framework. Integrated Emergency Management promises to accelerate emergency response operations by utilizing advances in communications technologies to drive the bottom-up emergent self-organization of emergency responses. Event suppression ensures security not by preventing an event from happening, but by quickly closing down the ‘disruptive’ time of the emergency event and restoring the linear historical time of standard political processes.

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Section: The Speed Of Emergent Emergenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent emergency response: Speed, event suppression and the chronopolitics of resilience

Zebrowski

2019

Security Dialogue

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“…For critics of resilience, the absorption of the language of capital and finance into resilience discourses is indicative of deeper discursive affinities between resilience and neoliberalism. Discourses of resilience have been critiqued as promoting programmes of neoliberal responsibilization in which individuals and groups are compelled to develop the entrepreneurial capacities required to manage their own individual risks (Chandler, 2014; Evans and Reid, 2014; Neocleous, 2013; Walker and Cooper, 2011; Zebrowski, 2016). Despite the importance of such critiques in highlighting the mutual imbrication of resilience and neoliberalism as governmental projects, critiques of resilience have given less attention to the particular logic of capital that is being reiterated across these varied discourses and applications of resilience.…”

Section: Connectivity and Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

Acting local, thinking global: Globalizing resilience through 100 Resilient Cities

Zebrowski

2020

New Perspectives

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This article investigates the globalization of resilience by examining a particular and prominent vehicle for the dissemination of resilience ideas: the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative. As a philanthropic initiative organized through a network of international cities, 100RC demonstrates how the spread of resilience thinking has been facilitated by exploiting changes in the structures and processes of global governance afforded by neoliberal globalization. The analysis focuses on explicating100RC’s animating logic of governance, which is committed to the cultivation of network connectivity. Rather than directly fostering resilience, connectivity is established as a condition under which resilience solutions can be immanently surfaced from the interactions of a diverse selection of stakeholders brought together through these networks. The article situates this governmental logic within broader changes associated with neoliberal globalization, namely the emergence of multi-scalar governance networks, the rise of philanthrocapitalism and the inception of platform capitalism. The conclusion discusses the implications of this analysis for further study of the relation between connectivity, danger, knowledge and value contained within resilience discourses.

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“…Just as Christian eschatology made the Christian subject accept their original sin as the basis of a 'political economy of salvation', the secular eschatology of planetary realism forces homo adaptivus to accept their vulnerability as the basis of a political economy of resilience, in which adaptability becomes the core value. 123 As lifeforms at risk from environmental change can neither turn to an omniscient god nor to modern science in the hope of salvation, resilient life becomes itself the key katechontic power in the struggle with the eschaton. The everyday lives of racialised communities and marginalised people in the Majority World become the primary battleground of this struggle.…”

Section: The End Is Here: Resilience and Its Eschatology Of 'Facticalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene

Rothe

2019

Millennium

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This article furthers the debate on the political implications of the Anthropocene – the most recent geological epoch marked by catastrophic environmental change – by engaging it through the lens of political theology. The article starts from the observation that discourses on the Anthropocene and related political projects are deeply influenced by a linear temporality and a common orientation towards the threat of the end of time. It distinguishes three competing discourses of the Anthropocene, eco-catastrophism, eco-modernism and planetary realism. The article analyses how these discourses invoke and update key symbols, images, and storylines of Christian political theology. Furthermore, it studies how each discourse mobilises these secularised Christian motifs to promote competing planet political projects. Each of these projects develops a different position towards the unfolding planetary crisis and the related threat of the end of time. Eco-catastrophism calls for a planetary emergency management, eco-modernism promotes ongoing experimentation with the planet, whereas planetary realism translates into what could be called a ‘realpolitik of resilience’. Revealing the Western theological roots of the Anthropocene and planet politics is essential if the emerging literature on the Anthropocene wants to live up to its promise of pluralising and decolonising IR.

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The Value of Resilience

Cited by 30 publications

References 0 publications

Emergent emergency response: Speed, event suppression and the chronopolitics of resilience

Emergent emergency response: Speed, event suppression and the chronopolitics of resilience

Acting local, thinking global: Globalizing resilience through 100 Resilient Cities

Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene

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