Resilience in EU and international institutions: Redefining local ownership in a new global governance agenda

Elena A Korosteleva,Trine Flockhart

doi:10.1080/13523260.2020.1723973

Elena A Korosteleva, Trine Flockhart

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2020.1723973

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Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article introduces the special issue by exploring the full potential of “resilience” as a governing regime of the European Union and other international institutions. Developing a more comprehensive understanding of the concept is important for three reasons. One, it gives an opportunity to see resilience not only as a quality of a system, but also as a way of thinking, and a process inherent to “the local” that cannot be externally engineered. Two, as an analytic of governance, resilience challenges the current fundamentals of top-down global governance and refocuses it on the role of “the local” and “the person” to make it more responsive to people’s needs. Three, resilience cannot be understood without exploring where and how it is constituted—that is, without unpacking “the local” ordering domain to see how ontological insecurity and a sense of “good life” could contribute to the emergence of more adaptive governing systems.

Highlights

2015) and several European Union (EU) foreign policy subfields such as the state- and peace-building processes (de Coning, 2016, 2018; Juncos, 2018), conflict recovery (Aldrich, 2012), crisis- and disaster management (Matyas & Pelling, 2015), and development and humanitarian aid (Duffield, 2012)
We are concerned with how the VUCA world might best be governed through resilience building and how resilience might be understood as an art of governance and not just as a quality of a system that can absorb and bounce back from shocks and crises
The question arises as to how we can and should govern through resilience today to make complex systems more responsive to the inevitability of change and more congruent with each other in their interaction? These concerns have already prompted a rush of articles on the EU and resilience—many of them by the authors contributing to this special issue, with several of these articles published in Contemporary Security Policy

Summary

Introduction

2015) and several European Union (EU) foreign policy subfields such as the state- and peace-building processes (de Coning, 2016, 2018; Juncos, 2018), conflict recovery (Aldrich, 2012), crisis- and disaster management (Matyas & Pelling, 2015), and development and humanitarian aid (Duffield, 2012).

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