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Resilience, Security, and the Politics of Processes

Tapio Juntunenᵃ and Ari-Elmeri Hyvönenᵇ

ᵃ School of Management, University of Tampere, Finland

ᵇ Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

[FINAL DRAFT VERSION: published in

Resilience: International Policies, Practices, and Discourses 2(3), pp. 195-209 (2014).

DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2014.948323 / http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2014.948323 ]

Abstract

The prominence of resilience thinking in contemporary governance and security policies has

received increasing critical attention. By engaging in dialogue with some of these recent

critiques, predominantly leaning on biopolitics or neoliberal governmentality, this article

develops an Arendtian reading of resilience as a temporal regime of processuality.

Originating from life sciences such as ecology and complexity thinking, the increasingly

malleable resilience discourse privileges the functioning of societal life processes over

political action and human artifice. The article argues that this ‘rule of nobody’ is in danger

of suffocating the concept of public space so crucial for politics proper. As a necessary step

out of this predicament, it is suggested that instead of settling for a mere cultivation of

societal and individual adaptive capacities, as the popular necessitarian-processual

sentiment proposes, the sense of being able to change the world and its structures through

collective political action should be revitalized.

Keywords: resilience; security; process; social; Hannah Arendt; politics

Introduction

This article presents a rereading of the political consequences of resilience as a security discourse.

A growing body of literature analyses resilience as a form of neoliberal or post-liberal

governmentality, and demonstrates how resilience thinking invites us to give up on the

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possibilities of political transformation, displacing this with post-political adaptability.1 We argue

that it is important to interrogate further the consequences of resilience thinking, especially

focusing on the rising concern with the maintenance of uninterrupted social processes. If, as some

scholars have claimed, ‘resilience is fast becoming the organizing principle in contemporary

political life’,2 it is crucial that the consequences of this are fully drawn out. Resilience, as it is

presently marketed by government organizations and think-tanks, we argue, has detrimental

effects for democratic politics, firstly, because it discourages active citizenship and, secondly, and

even more importantly, because it puts into jeopardy the concept of public space, so crucial for

politics proper.

Building on Hannah Arendt’s political theorizing, this article contributes to the existing

critical literature by offering a reading of resilience as a ‘temporal regime of processuality’. While

other resilience scholars, like David Chandler and Claudia Aradau, have also turned to Arendt,3 we

argue that there is a need for a more systematic engagement with her thinking in order to bring

forth its full analytic power. With this task in mind, we broaden the discussion beyond the sporadic

1 For example, James Brassett, Stuart Croft, and Nick Vaughan-Williams, “Introduction: An

Agenda for Resilience Research in Politics and International Relations,” Politics 33, no.4 (2013):

221–228; Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life. The Art of Living Dangerously (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2014), 38–44; David Chandler, “Beyond Neoliberalism: Resilience, the New Art of

Governing Complexity,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 2, no.1, 47–

63; Jonathan Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach,”

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1, no. 1 (2013).

2 Brassett, Croft, and Vaughan-Williams, “Introduction”. See also Jonathan Joseph, ”Resilience in

UK and French Security Strategy: An Anglo-Saxon Bias?,” Politics 33, no.4 (2013): 253–264. See

further, Cabinet Office, A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The National Security Strategy

(London: Cabinet Office, 2010).

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/61936/natio

nal-security-strategy.pdf (accessed May 5, 2014).

3 Chandler, “Resilience and the Autotelic Subject: Toward a Critique of the Socialization of

Security,” International Political Sociology 7, (2013): 221; Claudia Aradau, “The Promise of

Security: Resilience, Surprise and Epistemic Politics,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices

and Discourses 2, no. 2 (2014): 73–87.

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references made by Chandler in his recent works.4 Utilising Arendt’s writings on ‘the social’, we

will emphasize the role of uninterrupted processes in resilience thinking – that is, a tendency

migrating from life sciences such as ecology and complexity thinking to perceive process as

overriding individual events or entities taking part in the process – and demonstrate the injurious

effects of this kind of time-imaginary for political practices of freedom. Thereby we present an

alternative reading of the temporalities of resilience to that of Brad Evans, who has emphasized

the centrality of events in resilience thinking.5 For us, resilience indicates that events as new

beginnings, as proper interruptions of ongoing processes, are being downplayed. We interpret

resilience as a ‘temporal regime of processuality’ that relates even the most traumatic events to

the continuing functioning of the societal life process.6

The Arendt-inspired processual conceptualization of resilience offered here resonates with

the Foucauldian analytics of biopolitics.7 As Chandler has also argued:

Arendt’s critical understanding of making life the problematic of government, and

warnings of the reduction of politics to the administration of ‘behavioral change,’

speaks powerfully to us today, particularly when read in conjunction with Foucault’s

exploration of the rationalities of biopolitical governance.8

Hence, we develop our approach throughout this article in critical dialogue with the

biopolitical interpretations of resilience, which to us seem to capture many of the essential

features of this mode of governance, hinting at the processual reading offered here. If liberal

modernity is defined by the biopolitical commitment to ‘make life live’, then resilience, analysed 4 Chandler, “Resilience and the Autotelic Subject,” 221; Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity in

International Relations. Human-centred Approaches to Security and Development (London: Zed,

2013), 30–31, passim.

5 Evans, Liberal Terror (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 39–40.

6 C.f. Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen, “From Event to Process: The EU and the Arab Spring”. In Donatella

della Porta and Alice Mattoni (eds.), Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis

(Essex: ECPR Press, 2014), 91–117.

7 See Kathrin Braun, “Biopolitics and Temporality in Arendt and Foucault,” Time & Society 16, no.

1 (2007): 5–23.

8 Chandler, “Resilience and the Autotelic Subject,” 221.

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as ‘a permanent process of continual adaptation to dangers said to be outside our control’9, is the

flipside of this politics. It emerges from the understanding of the self-organizing potentialities and

immanent dangers of life processes where the ‘pursuit of the infinitely possible becomes the basis

for conceptualisation of threats to the finitude of existence’.10 Drawing from Arendt, we

supplement these analyses by situating them in the broader historical context of the ‘rise of the

social’. By way of this historical contextualisation, we question the almost taken-for-granted

presupposition in critical studies on resilience, according to which resilience presents a radical

break or novelty within the liberal modernity. While appreciative of Chandler’s analysis of the

differences between liberalism, neoliberalism and post-liberalism (resilience), we argue that, when

put in its context of capitalist-modernist practices – instead of liberal philosophies – resilience is

disclosed as a consistent endpoint of a long trajectory.

In the first part of the article we argue that the strongly processual nature of resilience

thinking is due to its origins in the life sciences, ecology, system theory, and complexity thinking.

We go through the basic tenets of the conceptualization of resilience, influenced by the above-

mentioned sciences, with a view to the political consequences to be explicated in the later parts of

the article. As resilience migrates to the political field and to the applications of security policies,

societal processes become increasingly conceived similarly to those of ecological systems. In the

second part of the article we then turn more explicitly to Arendt’s political theory, and her

discussion of ‘the social’ as ‘the rule of nobody’. Building on the analysis of the processual nature

of resilience thinking presented in the first part, we argue that resilience promotes an

understanding of politics as – in Arendt’s terms – ‘the undisturbed maintenance and development

9 Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed: The Life and Death of the Resilient Subject,” Resilience:

International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1, no. 2 (2013): 83.

10 Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed,” 91. See also Reid, “The Disastrous and Politically

Debased Subject of Resilience,” Development Dialogue, April 2012: 66–79; and Reid,

“Interrogating the Neoliberal Biopolitics of the Sustainable Development-Resilience Nexus,”

International Political Sociology 7, (2013): 353–367. For the importance of process-thinking in

resilience, see also Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 6.

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of the life process of society’.11 It is argued that this conceptualization is highly detrimental for

democratic politics as it minimizes the role of public space. We also trace the long history of this

processual temporality, arguing that resilience merely accelerates and intensifies certain

longstanding tendencies in modern politics. Finally, towards the end of the article, after

considering the political implications of resilience, we broaden our discussion to the possibilities of

‘going beyond’ resilience. In particular, we critically scrutinize Chandler’s ‘reluctant Kantianism’

and Evans’s and Reid’s recent work on the ‘poetic subject’, and present an Arendtian alternative to

these approaches. By the same token, it is not our intention to claim that Arendt provides all the

theoretical tools necessary for making sense of contemporary realities. On the contrary, we hold

that there is a productive mutual feedback loop between theory and reality. Thus, analysing

resilience through Arendt’s thinking also allows us to update, reconsider and rediscover her

approach in a way that makes it better suited for the analysis of contemporary realities.

Tracing the processual temporality of the resilience-security nexus

The origins of contemporary resilience thinking, as has been documented in detail by Jeremy

Walker and Melinda Cooper, can be traced back to the ‘tacit union’ between systems ecology and

complexity science in the 1970’s.12 Originally the concept was modelled on the basis of linear

understanding of causality to describe the dynamics and capacity of ecosystems to preserve their

stability in the face of external disturbances. Since the last decade or so resilience has witnessed a

considerable normative turn as it has been increasingly applied to social systems with an explicit

ambition to enforce the capacity of societies, communities and, finally, individuals to absorb

external disturbances and thrive through potential exigencies, originating either from manmade or

natural sources.13 Several scholars have suggested that the displacement of resilience from

11 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York:

Penguin, 2006 [1962]), 149.

12 Walker and Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy

of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2011): 143–160.

13 Andreas Duit et al., “Governance, Complexity and Resilience,” Global Environmental Change

20, no. 3 (2010): 363–368. See also W. Neil Adger, “Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They

Related?,” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 3 (2000): 347–364.

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ecology to its more recent socio-ecological understandings in fields like human geography,

psychology and criminology has made resilience increasingly malleable concept.14

As Philippe Bourbeau has argued, despite its increasing use as an influential strategic

concept in relation to a wide range of policy issues - like counterterrorism, urban planning, social

work and sustainable development, covering both national and global level agendas - International

Relations and security studies have only recently started to take concern themselves more

prominently with the political repercussions of resilience.15 However, this focus has already

produced promising results, tracing the underlying character and purpose of the politics concealed

within the ascendant resilience-security nexus. Chandler has, for example, linked contemporary

resilience discourse with the ‘societalization’ of security, a broader movement away from state-

centred security conceptualisations towards the security of the ‘everyday’ that has its roots in

Giddens’ theory of life politics and Hayekian new institutionalist economics.16 On the other hand,

increasing attention has also been paid to the interrelationship between resilience and

neoliberalism, either interpreting the prominence of resilience as a move to securitize the

biosphere through the economization of security or examining resilience influenced security

practices and discourses as an example of Foucauldian governmentality.17 Moreover, leaning also

on Arendt’s political philosophy, Claudia Aradau has recently examined how resilience discourses

are reconfiguring the epistemic premises of contemporary security thinking by replacing the

promise of open political futures with an ‘episteme of surprises’.18

14 Walker and Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience,” 144; Matthew Turner, “Political Ecology I: An

Alliance with Resilience,” Progress in Human Geography, progress report, 17 September 2013:

1–8; and Katrina Brown: “Global Environmental Change I: A Social Turn For Resilience?,”

Progress in Human Geography, progress report, 1 August 2013: 1–11.

15 Philippe Bourbeau, “Resiliencism: Premises and Promises in Securitisation Research,”

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1, no. 2 (2013): 10.

16 Chandler, “Autotelic Subject”.

17 Evans and Reid, Resilient Life. The Art of Living Dangerously, ch. 3; Joseph, “Resilience as

Embedded Neoliberalism”.

18 Claudia Aradau, “The Promise of Security: Resilience, Surprise and Epistemic Politics,”

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 2, no. 2 (2014): 73–87.

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We aim to build on the aforementioned work by suggesting a further step to unveil the

processual conceptualization of politics behind resilience-influenced security thinking so that the

effects of resilience discourse on the preconditions of political life as such can be tackled in full.

We conduct our analysis by relying on Arendt’s concept of ‘the social’, understood as a realm

where the life process of society has become a public concern, diminishing the space available for

purely political activities.19 The social emerges in the wake of modern capitalism and the nation-

state system in order to manage the insecurities inherent in the system of wage labour.20 Another

name given by Arendt to the life process of society is the ‘unnatural growth of the natural’ – in

other words, the directing of the biological needs of individual and species reproduction into

public concerns, thus separating them from the cyclical movement of nature and transforming

them into open-ended, ever-growing processes of societal existence.21

This centrality of processual temporality springs directly from the modern sciences. Arendt

pointed out that the concept of process – virtually unknown before the modern age – is

fundamental to all modern sciences (for example, history, biology, and statistics).22 Process-

thinking is, furthermore, an important aspect in the analysis of population – the primary object of

biopolitics.23 Ecology and complexity theory, the focal sciences behind resilience thinking, are no

exceptions – they also operate with a processual conception of temporality. Hence, the relevance

of the ongoing life process of society in normative resilience thinking is based on the ontological

commitments in the socio-ecological conceptions of resilience, that is, in the ideas of nonlinearity

19 The applicability of Arendt’s theorizations on the dangers of societalization has not gone

unnoticed by the theorists of resilience. See especially Chandler, ”Autotelic Subject,” 221; also

see Aradau, “The Promise of Security”.

20 Patricia Owens, “The Supreme Social Concept: The Un-worldliness of Modern Security,” New

Formations 71, no. 2 (2011): 17; Hyvönen, “Tentative Lessons of Experience: Arendt, Essayism,

and ‘the Social’ Reconsidered,” Political Theory 42, no.5 (2014).

21 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 47.

22 Arendt, The Human Condition, 116, 232.

23 E.g. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London/New

York: Routledge, 2002); Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the Collége de

France 1977/1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 98.

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and emergent causality derived from complexity theory.24 The constant flux of socio-ecological

processes, it is proposed, creates the need for individuals and societies to cultivate the sensibilities

necessary to encounter the exigencies of non-deterministic complexity – unexpected yet

inevitable natural hazards for example – on a temporal and situational basis.25 Because of the

complexity of globalized and vulnerable life, and the emergent causality that provides the

ontological basis for this predicament, it is becoming increasingly an unfeasible task to govern,

control or police security with traditional top-down practices.26

It can be therefore proposed that resilience refers to a latent attribute, concealed within the

life process itself and is activated during major disruptions. Indeed, in conjunction with its

normative turn and displacement from ecology, resilience theorizing has evolved from a static

understanding of maintaining equilibrium and preserving functionality towards dynamic

conceptions of ‘renewal, re-organization and development’ in the face of disruptions and crises.27

The transition to a dynamic socio-ecological conception of resilience has facilitated a shift away

from maintaining stability towards emphasizing the necessity of any system to ‘learn to manage by

change’ amidst the nonlinear dynamics between and within complex systems.28 Complexity theory

thus separates the dynamic and process-based nature of resilience from the static concepts of

robustness and recovery.29

24 See for example Holling, “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social

Systems,” Ecosystems 4, no. 5 (2001): 390–405; see also Chandler, “Beyond neoliberalism,” 50.

25 Bourbeau, “Resiliencism,” 7; Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed,” 85.

26 Chandler, “Beyond neoliberalism,” 52. See also Chandler, “Resilience and the ‘Everyday’:

Beyond the Paradox of ‘Liberal Peace’,” Review of International Studies 40, (forthcoming).

27 C.S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and

Systematics 4, (1973): 1–23.

28 Carl Folke, “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–ecological Systems

Analyses,” Global Environmental Change 16, no. 3 (2006): 253–4; see also Bourbeau,

“Resiliencism,” 7–8.

29 Walker and Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience,” 146. A distinct, but nevertheless related and

compatible security discourse focusing on the “global commons” has emerged simultaneously

with resilience. The global commons discourse can be characterized as ‘flow security’, an idea

closely related to the process-thinking behind resilience discourses. See Mika Aaltola, Juha

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As in Arendt’s conceptualization of the social realm and modern sciences, the idea of process

plays a salient role in the way the evolution and behaviour of complex adaptive systems are

modelled in socio-ecological theorizing. According to C.S. Holling, one of the pioneers of ecological

resilience studies, systems of nature and humans ‘are interlinked in never-ending adaptive cycles

of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.’30 Automatic interactions between and

within systems are subsequently understood as involuntary and evolutionary processes: ‘[the

complex living systems of people and nature] are self-organized, and a small set of critical

processes create and maintain this self-organization’31. The reference point for the possible

futures and states of wealth of living systems is thus already concealed in the automatic and

ahistorical logic of interactions and processes proposed by complexity thinking.

Moreover, the combination of resilience as the ability to maintain functioning as well as

adapt to the never-ending cycles of renewal paves the way for a security discourse that is based

on the primacy of uncertainty, surprise and vulnerability, thus reinforcing a reactive conception of

politics as an adaptation to the inexorable processes of socio-biological life.32 This tendency is

clearly present in British national security strategy33 that stresses the need to build a more

resilient nation to face the upcoming age of uncertainty and its manmade or natural hazards – an

aspiration that seems to fit neatly into the ‘Big Society’ agenda, advocated by the coalition

Käpylä and Valtteri Vuorisalo, The Challenge of Global Commons and Flows for US Power: The

Perils of Missing the Human Domain (London: Ashgate, 2014).

30 Holling, “Understanding the Complexity,” 392 (our italics).

31 Holling, “Understanding the Complexity,” 391. See also Turner, “Political Ecology,” 6.

32 Cf. Evans and Reid, Resilient life, 116–119; “Dangerously Exposed,” 91–93; Aradau, “Promise of

Security,” 78.

33 The centrality of resilience is evident in several security related government documents,

strategies and sub-strategies. See especially Cabinet Office, National Security Strategy; Cabinet

Office, Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience (London: Cabinet Office, 2011),

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/60922/Strate

gic-National-Framework-on-Community-Resilience_0.pdf (accessed May 5, 2014). See also Dan

Bulley, “Producing and Governing Community (through) Resilience,” Politics 33, no. 4 (2013):

265–275; Joseph, “Anglo-Saxon Bias?,” 253–256.

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government, and its tendency to emphasize the responsibilities and self-securing agency of

individual citizens and their local communities.34

To sum up the discussion thus far, the doctrine of resilience and its processual ontology

implies drastic alterations to the topology of security, its political conditions and societal

subjectivity. Firstly, individuals – and security politics in general – are conceived as reactive objects

in relation to the external threat environment. Secondly, the doctrine of resilience necessitates an

ethos where vulnerability and crises can be seen, not as something to be avoided by, for example,

structural reforms and centralized social planning, but as golden opportunities to reorganize

oneself or one’s community and, thus, to contribute to the overall resilience of the society. In

other words, society is increasingly conceived of as a self-organizing process.

As the focus has shifted to post-crisis adaptation rather than prevention, it has become clear

that the principal aim of security policies is to guarantee the undisturbed continuation and growth

of societal functions. This is usefully highlighted by the recent speeches of President Barack

Obama, at Ground Zero ten years after 9/11, and by the Boston Mayor, Thomas Menino, after the

attacks that occurred during the Boston marathon in 2013:

These past ten years tell a story of resilience. The Pentagon is repaired, and filled with

patriots working in common purpose […] Our people still work in skyscrapers. Our

34 Brasset, Croft, and Vaughan-Williams, “Agenda for Resilience Research,” 222–223; Chandler,

“Autotelic Subject,” 212–213. Similar reasoning is gaining momentum in humanitarianism and

state building practices. Mark Duffield, for example, asserts that resilience thinking has driven

liberal interventionism into a paradox: whilst the awareness of the need to protect and support

the vulnerable is increasing along with the resources to tackle these risks, the postmodern

ethos of resilience is forcing the aid industry to withdraw themselves to enable vulnerable

communities and populations to learn how to adapt themselves and thereby increase their

resilience and ability to thrive, despite their problematic condition; Duffield, “Challenging

environments: Danger, resilience and the aid industry,” Security Dialogue 43, no. 5 (2012): 478,

487; see also Chandler: “International Statebuilding and the Ideology of Resilience,” Politics 33,

no. 4 (2013): 276–286.

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stadiums are filled with fans, and our parks full of children playing ball. Our airports

hum with travel, and our buses and subways take millions where they need to go.35

Good morning. And it is a good morning because we are together. We are one Boston.

No adversity, no challenge – nothing – can tear down the resilience of this city and its

people. […] Nothing can defeat the heart of this city. Nothing. Nothing will take us

down because we take care of one another. Even with the smell of smoke in the air…

blood on the streets… tears in our eyes… we triumphed over that hateful act on

Monday afternoon.36

What we can discern here is a strong focus on the uninterrupted continuation of societal –

economic, social, political – processes and functions, and the feel of social cohesion and

togetherness that is needed to maintain the functionality of the social sphere. If we compare this –

and President Obama’s statement in particular – to the description of the social in Arendt’s

theorization, it is easy to see that what Arendt terms the ‘undisturbed maintenance and

development of the life process of society’37 occupies a central place in resilience discourses.

The next section will delve deeper into Arendt’s theorizations in order to bring forth the full

political stakes involved in the increasing emphasis on the societal life process. Our objective in

this discussion is to point out Arendt’s analytical value for the study of resilience as well as the

strength of her ethico-political position in pointing out what we might lose while gaining resilience

capabilities. For Arendt, the ultimate danger of perceiving the political world processually is that it

can reduce politics into a single-track logic, where the semi-automatic unfolding of the process

itself replaces all meaningful human action. In other words, what we have here referred to as

resilience’s ‘temporal regime of processuality’, deriving from systems ecology and complexity

35 “President Obama speech on 9/11 anniversary: ‘Let us honor those who have been lost’”, Daily

News, (September 11, 2011), http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/president-obama-

speech-9-11-anniversary-honor-lost-article-1.955512#ixzz317UQcmk0 (accessed May 8, 2014).

36 ”’Nothing Will Take Us Down’: Video of Menino’s Speech at Interfaith Healing Service”,

BostInno (April 18, 2013), http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2013/04/18/nothing-will-take-us-

down-video-of-meninos-speech-at-interfaith-healing-service/ (accessed May 8, 2014).

37 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 149.

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science, is effectively diminishing the capacity of meaningfully changing the world of and through

structures and institutions. Simultaneously, as we will point out below, it also eliminates one of

the most crucial human experiences – that of public freedom.

Resilience and the Efficacy of the Social

From an Arendtian perspective, rather than being a new or original doctrine, resilience and its

socio-ecological roots can be seen as an acceleration and intensification of certain tendencies

inherent in modern politics and the modern concept of security in particular. As Patricia Owens

has argued, modern conceptions of security have always been social, not political. The reference

point for security has been neither the individual nor the sovereign, but instead the undisturbed

maintenance of the life process of society.38 One of the consequences of this conjunction is that it

becomes quite irrelevant whether we call resilience-based governance liberal or post-liberal. If

modernity, described by Arendt as the ‘rise of the social’, has indeed been a liberal modernity,

then the liberal idea of governance limited by free subjects has never been anything but a

theoretical abstraction.39 The biggest difference between the modern concept of security and

contemporary resilience thinking concerns the role of government. Under the modern conception

of security, the role of state was ‘to maintain military and economic order, to provide the secure

conditions for the accumulation of wealth’.40 In contrast, from the perspective of resilience

discourse, we cannot expect the state to maintain order and keep us secure. Instead, what is

needed is a self-organizing society with such behavioural patterns that it is able to adapt, thrive

and to ‘bounce back’ when the unexpected accident or crisis occurs.

The political consequences of this kind of processual behaviouralism were critically engaged

with by Arendt throughout her works. It is worthwhile going through these ‘trains of thought’ (as

Arendt might have called them) in some detail. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she traced the

birth of modern bureaucracy to imperial administration, and the self-identification of imperial

agents with the ‘irresistible processes’ of economic development. This model of economic

processes then formed the basis of the liberal philosophy of history as an endless process.41 While 38 Owens, ”The Supreme Social Concept”.

39 See also Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 39.

40 Owens, ”The Supreme Social Concept,” 20.

41 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Hartcourt Brace & Co., 1973 [1951]), 144.

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liberal political philosophy has emphasized the role of private property and individual

entrepreneurship, it has simultaneously transcended the individual in favour of ‘an automatic

continuous growth of wealth beyond all personal needs and possibilities of consumption’.42

Modern liberal societies have tended to strive beyond private interest and individual life spans by

blurring the line between public and private activities in order to create a society ‘very similar to

that of the ants and bees’ where common and private good are fused.43 In this sense, the

processual thinking derived from the socio-ecological tradition fits rather well with the bigger

picture of the development of modern societies, Arendt’s focus in The Human Condition and

subsequent essays. In the last stage of their development, these societies demand of their

members a ‘sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in

the over-all life process of the species’.44

This automatism poses immediate dangers for politics because, in Arendt’s view, the life

process of society, when raised to the position of the foremost public concern, begins to define

the direction and limits of all politics – as though it was an active force on its own accord. This

implies the closing down of political spaces, as less and less issues are considered as something to

be meaningfully addressed through public policy debate. Instead, we have the administrative

processes of governance over societal (and quasi-natural) processes. The resulting system is

reified as a natural process, as multifaceted, habitual and irresistible and, indeed, so complex as to

defy any major political interruptions, novelties and deliberative procedures. Indeed, for Arendt,

the ultimate processual society would eventually become world-less. For her, the world is

composed through ‘human artifice’ – the human in-between of relational constructions, of

meanings, institutions, and structures – and thereby more stable and permanent than its

individual inhabitants, and hence capable of outliving them. Without the human construction of

such a relatively permanent structure human beings cannot be plural individuals since it is the

function of the world – analogously to a table – to bring people together and separate them at the

same time. The existence of a public space is particularly crucial in Arendt’s understanding of

proper politics. It is only in the public sphere that human beings can address the issues of the

common, shared world from different perspectives while simultaneously appearing in their

42 Arendt, The Origins, 145.

43 Ibid., 145.

44 Arendt, The Human Condition, 322.

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singular plurality to their equals. If citizens are, instead, suborned to an all-embracing process, the

possibility of such a perspectival debate on shared purposes inevitably disappears. And together

with it, we lose sight of political action as an activity that changes the world, something which for

Arendt is an essential manifestation of our freedom: ‘We are free to change the world and to start

something new in it.’45 If it becomes impossible to say ‘no’ to the on-going societal process in

order to begin anew, both action and public freedom are lost. In this sense, change and stability,

individual freedom and public structures, are co-constitutive, not opposed.

One of the paradoxes of resilience discourses is that while they put more emphasis on the

self-responsibility of individual citizens than modern security policies built on political realism, in

fact, the individual is always subordinate to the societal life process itself. Human beings are

increasingly seen functionally, as ‘servants’ whose task it is to keep the societal process in

motion.46 As state institutions have been increasingly conceived as the guardians of the societal

life process, their representatives have lost the ability to appear as acting persons – as

‘somebodies’ instead of ‘anybodies’ or ‘nobodies’. The problem here is that the ‘rule by nobody is

not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its

cruellest and most tyrannical versions’.47 Through this rule, we lose sight of humans as acting

beings, and become exclusively concerned about the regulation and ‘normalization’ of the

behaviour of individuals as objects of governance.48

It is important to note that – the processual aggregation of individuals into the social whole

notwithstanding – the individual occupies a central position in this mode of bureaucratic ‘rule of

nobody’. Through resilience, the individual is increasingly being ‘securitized’ at the expense of

structural and material considerations, thereby reducing questions of security and politics to

problems of behavioural choices and the prerequisites of adaptation processes.49 Unlike the

behavioural sciences that were the primary targets of Arendt’s criticism, however, contemporary

45 Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972), 5.

46 Ibid., 215.

47 Arendt, The Human Condition, 40.

48 Ibid., 39–41.

49 E.g. Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 94; Cf. Martha Höfler, “Strengthening Psychological

Resilience in Humanitarian Practice: Resourcecentred and Risk-centred Approaches,”

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 2, no. 1 (2014): 34.

15

governance sees this behaviour as complex, and therefore not fully controllable. Individuals are

increasingly understood as embedded, emotional, and rational only up to a point. Nevertheless, it

is believed that by providing proper ‘choice-making milieus’, individuals can be guided towards

self-practices that boost resiliency capacities and enterprising mindsets – producing subjects that

are self-consciously vulnerable, reactive rather than pro-active, self-reliant, self-governing, and

‘autotelic’.50 This ‘rule of nobody’ behind resilience thinking clearly echoes what Jonathan Joseph

has depicted as embedded neoliberal governmentality, where individuals are guided from a

distance to internalize their natural freedom ‘to be enterprising, active and responsible citizens’

without relying on traditional forms of visible and authoritative power.51

As we implied, the ultimate goal of this ‘responsibilization’ lies not so much in the well-being

of the individuals per se, but in the fact that the societal life process can only be governed through

individuals. Individual freedom, then - rather than being tied to the opening of further political

spaces that could challenge the structural factors that reinforce the impact of complexity and

nonlinear threats - is subordinated to the overall resilience and cohesion of the society.52 The

actor or political agent in the emergent security discourse is, in fact, the society itself. But societal

agency is an outcome of a reification process and ultimately becomes understood in terms of self-

governing subjects that use their agency in their mundane, ‘everyday’ lifestyle choices.53 In short,

the proper site for promoting active citizenship is now understood to be the ‘private’ life of the

individual – which, of course, thereby becomes a public concern and susceptible to direct or

indirect public regulation.54 Consequently, as Chandler argues, ‘the human is continually being

reduced to the product of its societal environment and, at the same time and in the same process,

the political is reduced to the social’.55 As in the logic of complex adaptive systems, individual

50 Chandler, ”Autotelic Subject,” 212. See also C. Edwards, Resilient Nation (London: Demos,

2009); Rachel Briggs, “Community engagement for counterterrorism: lessons from the United

Kingdom,” International Affairs 86, no. 4 (2012): 971–81; Bulley, “Producing and Governing”;

Evans and Reid, ”Dangerously Exposed,” 83.

51 Joseph, ”Resilience as embedded neoliberalism,” 42.

52 Chandler, ”Autotelic Subject,” 214.

53 Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 1–6, passim. Chandler, “Resilience and the ‘everyday’,” 3.

54 Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 42.

55 Ibid., 139.

16

subjects become subsumed to the totality of overlapping and nonlinearly working societal life

processes.

While there is an important intersubjective element in resilience, this element is not a public space

in any meaningful sense. Resilience-based discourses exclude the fundamental requirement of

active citizenship, the idea of the human being as an ‘active agent, the author of demonstrable

events in the world, and demotes him to a creature who merely behaves differently in different

situations’.56 In addition, as Aradau has recently argued, the traditional promise of security – the

idea of taming contingency and unpredictability through human capacity to conduct novel political

action – is in danger of disappearing in the face of the ‘non-promise of resilience’ and its epistemic

regime of surprise.57 However, what is even more worrying than the perception of the capacities

and capabilities of human beings is the shift of interest away from the world and towards the

private life of the individual. This move, for Arendt, is a move beyond the realm of politics,

because ‘at the centre of politics lies concern for the world, not for man’.58 Within our psyche and

individual subjectivity, action and change are not possible, only reflection.59 This brings us to the

final part of the article, where we turn to the question: how to overcome the ‘anti-politics’ of

resilience?

Looking for alternatives

Alongside the critical studies of resilience, arises the increasingly urgent question of possible ways

of going beyond the predicament of politics being reduced to the maintenance of life process of

society. We believe that there is an important Arendtian contribution to be made to this

discussion. Let us begin with Chandler, who shares the basic tenets of our approach. He has

correctly insisted that Arendt helps us understand, against resilience thinking, that human

freedom essentially requires the construction of a common world of meaningful structures.

However, Chandler’s analysis takes some problematic turns that we think should be avoided.

More precisely, he has argued for a ‘reluctant return to Kant’, to a priori assumptions about the

56 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 105.

57 Aradau, ”Promise of Security,” 77, 86; See also Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed,” 87.

58 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 106.

59 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 106–107.

17

universal and rational capabilities of the human subject.60 In other words, he has suggested at

least a partial ‘return’ to the classical liberal conceptions of the subject, world, and the freedom of

will. For us, this is problematic for multiple reasons.

First, there are problems with the specific political subject Chandler wants to construct. If

resilience is part of the same continuum of the rise of the social (inherent in capitalist modernity)

as we have argued, this classical conception is essentially unable to form an opposition to it.

Further, even if contemporary governance has moved away from the liberal, rational and

autonomous subject, have we not repeatedly seen the problems inherent in this conception

before? Is it really that there are only two options, either the classical liberal subject or the

resilient subject?61 From Arendt’s perspective, the idea of universal rationality presents a

particular problem. Rationality is an apolitical capability of the human being. What is needed in

politics is not rationality, but phronesis.62 While rationality is based on rules, phronesis – or

reflective judgment – works through analysis of concrete situations, and the imagination’s ability

to ‘go travelling’ and to see issues from a plurality of perspectives. Hence, it is better able to foster

political plurality and deal with particularity, which after all is the very stuff of politics. The task of

an active being is, to quote Gadamer, is to be ‘[…] concerned with what is not always the same but

can also be different’.63 Thus the purpose of practical knowledge and reflective judgement based

on experience is to inspire and guide action. And when it comes to resilience thinking it seems

obvious that the primacy of action in any meaningful sense is being replaced by reaction, thus

subordinating the individual to reified and ahistorical socio-natural processes.

Further problems are related to the way the political subject is constructed, and finally to

the question of whether we need a philosophical construction of the subject in the first place.

What the return to an a priori conception of the political subject essentially entails is a step back

to modern metaphysics. Even though taken in good faith, this step towards a philosophical

60 Particularly in Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 151–153.

61 For a related criticism, see Suvi Alt, “Beyond the Biopolitics of Capability and Choice in Human

Development: Being, Decision and World,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43

(forthcoming).

62 See for example, Arendt, Between Past and Future, 218; Arendt, Promise of Politics, 168.

63 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.

Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 312.

18

construction of the human subject cannot be anything but a step away from the worldliness of

politics. Her usual gender-biased terminology notwithstanding, Arendt formulated this argument

in vibrant fashion:

There are […] good reasons why philosophy has never found a place where politics can

take shape. The first is the assumption that there is something political in man that

belongs to his essence. This simply is not so; man is apolitical. Politics arises between

men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance.

Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.64

The fact that the human subject is constructed as collective instead of individual does not

fundamentally change the issue. The point is that what is needed, first and foremost, are people

willing to assume responsibility for the common world, creating public venues where action and

freedom can be exercised. To the extent that we need assumptions about the political possibilities

available for human beings, we need not look for a prioris or develop philosophical ideas of the

subject in the Kantian sense. Instead, moving between the past and the future, it is more fruitful

to produce historical understanding by going ‘pearl diving’ for the treasures of the past. Placed in a

tentative constellation with present experiences and future anticipations, the experiences and the

ideas derived from the past are enough to feed the critical imagination in the present. This would

imply the need to turn attention to the ideas of situational and hermeneutical awareness, to the

importance of ‘working out the hermeneutical situation’ for ‘acquiring the right horizon of inquiry

for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition’.65

For Arendt, probably the most important aspect of the tradition was what she referred to as

‘our lost treasure’ of ‘the revolutionary spirit’.66 From summer of 1776 in Philadelphia, autumn of

1956 in Budapest to spring 2011 in Cairo or Athens, the revolutionary tradition has repeatedly

revived the ideas of public freedom. It is these practices that effectively question the dominant

model of politics throughout capitalist modernity, and function as a much more powerful criticism

of resilience as anti-politics than the classical liberal model of the subject, or a related exercise of

64 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 95.

65 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302.

66 For example, Arendt, On Revolution, 212–213; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 4–5.

19

nostalgia towards the idea of human beings as ‘free-willed, choice-bearing actors’67 within the

context of modern parliamentary politics.

Arendt’s emphasis on the public and collective nature of political action also sets our

approach somewhat apart from the tentative suggestions made by Evans and Reid on the topic of

going beyond the resilient subject. Their approach builds on the idea of the ‘poetic subject’,

capable of ‘thinking the atmospheric-aesthetic-affective register differently’.68 As with Chandler

above, we tend to agree with the general lines of their argument, such as the call for

‘reintroducing political meaning back into the world’.69 However, when it comes to Evans and

Reid’s notion of the poetic subject, the above reservations apply here as well. Furthermore, our

worry is that the Nietzschean–Foucauldian ‘art of the self’ promoted by them is not adequate to

the task of rescuing politics proper from the perils of resilience.70 We fail to see how the politics of

the ‘art of the self’ manages to overcome an individualistic bias in order to take the necessary step

towards changing the structures and political institutions of the world. While it is important to

resist resilience on the same ground where it makes its principal interventions – on the

construction of the individual subject – it is even more crucial to act against the undoing of

political structures and institutions – the processualization of everything – by resilience policies. It

is in the safeguarding of these shared structures of meaning that the Arendtian approach can

make its foremost contribution.

This brings us to the assessment made by Evans and Reid according to which resilience can

be seen as an anti-politics of nihilism, a political will to nothingness. To us, this seems to hit the

mark. From an Arendtian perspective, this is because practices of resilience intensify the process

whereby public spaces and the shared world of meaningful structures disappears. Arendt argued

that ours is the ‘objective situation of nihilism where nothingness and nobodyness threaten to

destroy the world’.71 However, the problem of resilience is thus not so much that it ‘cheats us of

the notion of learning to die’,72 as it is that resilience is the latest phase in the long process steadily

67 Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 38.

68 Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 136–137, passim.

69 Ibid., 119.

70 Cf. Ibid., 172.

71 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 204.

72 Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 13.

20

depriving us of the possibility of a second birth, the birth of the public self. This loss is not

unrelated to our conceptions of life, death, and immortality, however. Resilience-centred

liberalism is able to go on ‘living without death’ because the societal life process has taken the

part of the individual, whose life span is limited. In our society, the only thing that can be

‘potentially immortal, as immortal as the body politic in antiquity and as individual life during the

Middle Ages, [is] life itself, that is, the possibly everlasting life process of the species mankind’.73

However, for Arendt, ‘learning how to die’ is not the solution. Neither care for life (or ‘making life

live’74) nor coming to terms with death is in itself political. What matters is the establishment of a

public space where neither of these concerns constitutes the focal point of attention. In

Heidegger’s and Arendt’s footsteps, we argue that death is always mine individually. In other

words, there is no political potential in coming to terms with death. While fostering the life

process surrenders politics to necessitarian-processual attitudes, the care for death is a question

of the existential (Arendt says metaphysical), rather than the political, since it is essentially a

question of the self and not of the world.75

Nihilism, then, derives from a deterioration of a meaningful common world and politics. As

Arendt put it in a powerful passage:

The answer to the question of the meaning of politics is so simple and so conclusive

that one might think all other answers are utterly beside the point. The answer is: The

meaning of politics is freedom […] Today this answer is in fact neither self-evident nor

immediately plausible […] Our question is thus far more radical, more aggressive, and

more desperate: Does politics still have any meaning at all?76

While such questions as free will and choice are no doubt important for human liberty,

Arendt is steadfast in holding that the experience of freedom proper is only possible among equals

in a public space. As she puts it in another succinct statement about the theme: ‘the raison d’être

73 Arendt, The Human Condition, 321. See also pages 318–320.

74 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London:

Routledge, 2009).

75 Arendt, The Human Condition, 9.

76 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 108.

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of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action’.77 Without the human artifice, human

institutions – public space in particular – any meaningful action is not possible. As Chandler has

also pointed out, the exercise of freedom is only possible, if we can ‘conceive of ourselves as

acting meaningfully in the world – i.e. in relation to temporal and spatial structures’.78 As we

already pointed out above, the public world, like every relationally constituted in-between, has

the double function of bringing people together and separating them simultaneously; it gathers us

together, and ‘prevents our falling over each other’.79 Consequently, as Margaret Canovan

explains, without the world, human beings cannot be plural individuals but merely

interchangeable members of a species.80 Since the world is seen as a product of meaningful

human interaction, it is also possible to change it. By acting together as a collective, human beings

can change the structures of this world and start new endeavours within it.81 This Arendt-inspired

conceptualization is in stark contradiction to the image of human capabilities painted by the

resilience-based security discourses, one of the key tenets of which is the belief that, amidst the

demand to cultivate individual adaptive capacities and social cohesion, we cannot change the

world in any meaningful sense. No radical departures from the societal life process are possible.

Yet, if we consider humans as acting, instead of behaving beings, it is exactly the disruptions of

processes that matter. Each political act, as Arendt explains:

…bursts into the context of predictable processes as something unexpected,

unpredictable, and ultimately causally inexplicable—just like a miracle. In other words

every new beginning is by nature a miracle when seen and experienced from the

standpoint of the processes it necessarily interrupts.82

77 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 145.

78 Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 6.

79 Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.

80 Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambrige

University Press, 1994), 106.

81 See, for example, Arendt, The Human Condition, 200–202; Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 5.

82 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 111–112.

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Conclusion

In this article, we have traced the emergence of the resilience discourse from ecology and

complexity thinking to politics, and the area of security policy and governance in particular. We

have noted that the modes of thinking derived from these sciences, when brought to the realm of

politics, have detrimental consequences for the basic activities of politics as acting and for the

exercise of public freedom. In ecology, resilience is understood as a capacity of a system to absorb

disruptions and not only maintain its functions, but to renew and re-organize as a result. In this

kind of thinking, the processual nature of living systems becomes an all-embracing fact of life. We

then moved to the analysis of the consequences of this kind of thinking for the concepts of

security, public freedom and political action itself, emphasizing the problematic nature of

reactivity and vulnerability implied in resilience thinking.

Towards the end of the paper, we provided preliminary thoughts on the possibility of

surpassing this predicament. We argued that what is needed is not another philosophical idea, or

even a return to a previously articulated idea. As Chandler notes, we need to develop a ‘practical

political approach’.83 Resilience invites us to accept that we are fundamentally vulnerable and that

the world is a complex bundle of emergent and overlapping socio-ecological processes to which

we can only respond by societal adaptation and assimilation, not through political structures in a

traditional manner. We see this as an indication of actively promoted, self-imposed

powerlessness. This is detrimental for a plurality of reasons, beginning with the fact that it

prevents us from effectively tackling the political issues behind the insecurities we face. Our wager

is that what is needed in today’s global and seemingly complex world is keeping open the agonistic

spaces of political contestation, of public spaces where problems, challenges, and threats to the

83 Chandler, Freedom versus Necessity, 150.