Applications of 'resilience' have stretched it to the point of breaking, yet it still maintains a remarkable capacity to organize relations in diverse fields of geographical concern such as ecological management, development, security, psychology and urban preparedness. Critical takes on resilience have emphasized its neo-liberal roots and utility. Whilst we do not disagree with this stance, our critical intervention argues that there are multiple resiliences invoking differing spatialities, temporalities and political implications and that this multiplicity is an important part of the work that resilience can do. We explore diverse mobilizations of resilience thinking across a wide array of empirical domains drawing out the differing ontological bases of resiliences and the interventions meant to promote them, particularly given the tension between a desire for open, non-linearity on the one hand and a mission to control and manage on the other. Rather than take resilience to be a determinedly new shift in policymaking, we explore how the post-political qualities of 'resilience multiple' can enable changes in behaviours and practices that slide between conflicting and contestable visions of the good life and desirable futures. We argue that the only way to critically interrogate resilience is to force the question of particulars in its diverse articulations, and, thus, geographers should engage in debating the ontological politics of resilience multiple.
Nearly 15 years after 9/11, it is time to grapple with the way in which imperatives of preemption have made their way into routine security practice and bureaucratic operations. As a growing literature in security studies and political geography has argued, preparing for catastrophe, expecting the worst, and scripting disasters are central elements of contemporary, speculative security culture. One of the most-discussed findings of the 9/11 Commission Report was that US security services had insufficiently deployed their imagination to foresee and preempt the attacks. This article introduces a special issue that offers a range of in-depth empirical studies that analyse how the imperative of 'routinizing the imagination' plays out in practice across different policy domains. It deploys the lens of performativity in order to conceptualize and explain the materialization of preemption and its situated entanglements with pre-existing security bureaucracies. We detail the idealized traits of a 'security of the interstice', which include interoperability, emergence, flexibility and analytical foresight that are meant to bridge the perceived gaps of security spaces and the temporal bridges between present and possible futures. The lofty rhetoric of preparing for the worst and bridging the gaps encounters numerous obstacles, challenges and reversals in practice. As becomes clear through the notion of performativity, such obstacles and challenges do not just 'stand in the way' of implementation, but actively shape the materialization of preemption in different sectors.
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