Diverse, sometimes even contradictory concepts and practices of resilience have proliferated into a wide range of security policies. In introducing this special issue, we problematize and critically discuss how these forms of resilience change environments, create subjects, link temporalities, and redefine relations of security and insecurity. We show the increased attention -scholarly as well as political -given to resilience in recent times and provide a review of the state of critical security studies literature on resilience. We argue that to advance this discussion, resilience needs to be conceptualized and investigated in plural terms. We use temporalities and subjectivities as key analytical aspects to investigate the plural instantiations of resilience in actual political practice. These two issues -subjectivity and temporality -form the overall context for the special issue and are core themes for all the articles collected here.

It is commonly argued that time is the defining element in modern warfare. Whether one looks to military strategy, or to critical academia, the analysis is often the same: time and speed, not mass and space, are the essentials of warfare. In the 'Global War on Terror' this is the case for both the Western high-tech militaries and their asymmetrical terrorist opponents. This article attempts to qualify the current relation between time and space in war. By heuristically applying Zygmunt Baumann's concepts of the tourist and the vagabond, this article claims that, although new technologies of time have changed the relationship between space and time, space has not lost its importance. Paradoxically, by employing new temporal means, the making of space becomes the central issue in current globalized warfare.

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Vagabond and tourist are two metaphors introduced to sociology by Zygmunt Bauman to analyze the human condition in globalization. The metaphorical pair highlights key aspects of an increasingly globalized and polarized human life in a world moving into what Zygmunt Bauman famously coined as liquid modernity. In a liquid modern and globalizing world, mobility is the main stratifying factor. Both tourists and vagabonds move, but they do so in a highly uneven fashion and under starkly different conditions. Movement for the tourist is effortless and desirable, but for the vagabond it is burdensome and forced. The tourist metaphorically stands for the globalized elite and the vagabond for the precarious poor. The two metaphors are key examples of Bauman's methodological application of metaphors and are put effectively to use in his widely influential and critical sociology.

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