The politics of security-driven resilience

Abstract

This chapter illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices whilst seeming to focus upon the everyday needs of populations. Since the early 2000s, the so-called ‘resilience turn’ (Coaffee, 2013) has seen ideas, discourses and logics of resilience embedded within an array of social and urban policy and practice at a range of spatial scales, driven by an overarching requirement to secure the future from an array of disruptive challenges, threats and events or, more broadly, a general sense of uncertainty about the future (Coaffee, 2010; Walker and Cooper, 2011). In this chapter we argue that practices of security have become the most potent driver and shaper of contemporary resilience practices. In turn, these have served to generate multiple competing ‘logics of resilience’ identified and explored in this chapter through the concept of ‘security-driven resilience’ that captures the multi-directional process, where resilience policy becomes increasingly driven by security concerns and, at the same time, security policy adopts the more palatable language of resilience. Such processes hold a range of implications including the narrowing of formerly diverse resilience concerns towards very specific forms of security and, at the same time, generating multiple governmental, scaling and coercive implications.