Resilience and the transformation of sovereign security: a look at policy challenges and interests

Abstract

Jan Pospisil currently is a postdoc research fellow at the Political Settlements Research Programme at the University of Edinburgh. He is also senior researcher at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (oiip), where he is currently on leave, and teaches at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on political settlements, fragility and peacebuilding, with a particular interest in Eastern Africa and the Philippines, and on security and resilience.Barbara Gruber is a research at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (oiip) in Vienna, where she works on a research project on resilience governance. Besides security and resilience, her research focuses on peace processes and guerrilla movements, mainly in Colombia. AbstractResilience is on the rise in security policies, at the international as well as at the national level.Current academic research often links resilience with either the neoliberal retreat of the state and the respective attempt of 'governing from a distance', or with an almost totalitarian grasp of 'resilient subjects', or both. Against the background of the application of resilience in UK security policy, this article argues that resilience does neither of these. Instead, it unfolds as a rather mundane endeavour focused on micro-practices of civil emergency response at the local level. In doing so, resilience enables the repackaging of 'unbound security', which was doomed to fail in delivering its promise. It is, however, neither offering another promise nor symbolising a retreat from state responsibility, but engages in a defensive micro-management of potential catastrophe.Resilience hence does not replace security as a practice of the state deriving from its sovereignty, but links up with it to create a nexus between the doable and the undoable, the resilience-securitynexus. ZusammenfassungResilienz hat sich in den letzten Jahren zu einem Schlüsselbegriff in nationalen und internationalen Sicherheitskonzepten entwickelt. Der derzeitige Stand der Forschung verbindet das Konzept vielfach mit einer neoliberalen Politik des staatlichen Rückzugs aus seiner sicherheitspolitischen Verantwortung, oder mit einem nahezu totalitären Zugriff auf "resiliente Subjekte". Anhand einer empirischen Untersuchung der britischen Resilienz-Politik zeigt dieser Artikel, dass keiner dieser Ansätze zutrifft. Vielmehr entpuppt sich Resilienz als ein profaner Ansatz des Katastrophenschutzes auf lokaler Ebene. Allerdings ermöglicht Resilienz damit erst wieder die Sicherheitsverantwortlichkeit des Staates, der an seinem Versprechen der "umfassenden Sicherheit" gescheitert ist. Damit ist Resilienz nicht als Rückzug souveräner Sicherheitspolitik zu verstehen, sondern als staatliches Micro-Management der potenziellen Katastrophen. Resilienz löst daher die Idee einer souveränen Sicherheit auch nicht ab, sondern verbindet das sicherheitspolitisch Mögliche und Unmögliche in einem Resilienz-Sicherheits-Nexus. WaterDpt for Environment, Food and Rural AffairsAs can be seen, each sector has a clear responsibi...

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