Security through societal resilience: Contemporary challenges in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The concept of societal resilience has rapidly spread throughout the policy world, driven by the desire to use systems theories and process understandings to develop new security approaches for coping, bouncing-back, and adaptive improvement in the face of shocks and disturbances. However, this article argues that under the auspices of the Anthropocene, the assumptions and goals of societal resilience become problematic. This is because external interventions often ignore feedback effects, meaning that attempts to resolve problems through focusing upon enabling and capacity-building can be seen as counterproductive “fire-fighting” rather than tackling causation. Even more “alternative” or “community-based” approaches, relying upon interventions to enable so-called “natural” processes, either through an emphasis on local and traditional knowledge or new monitoring technologies, constitute problems for resilience advocacy: firstly, the problem of unrecognized exploitation; and secondly, the problem of continuing to sacrifice others to maintain unsustainable Western modes of consumption and production.

KEYWORDS:

• Societal resilience
• Anthropocene
• security
• adaptation
• European Union
• international intervention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, London. His recent monographs include Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (with Julian Reid) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (Routledge, 2018), International Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997–2017 (Palgrave, 2017), The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (with Julian Reid) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and Resilience: The Governance of Complexity (Routledge, 2014).

ORCID

David Chandler http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2766-7169

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a visiting senior research scholarship at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, October 2018–March 2019.