Security and the Politics of Resilience

What is resilience? How did it emerge? What are the political effects of this emergence? The ambition of this special issue is to outline an agenda for research into resilience that emphasises how we might address the status of politics and the political in relation to this discourse of security. In many ways, this is a highly unconventional and therefore distinctive collection of articles. For a start, it is unusual in combining both academic and practitioner perspectives, a quality that we believe to be increasingly important in order to understand the complexity of issues at stake in the rise of resilience. The special issue is also marked by a deliberate eclecticism in terms of authors' theoretical and methodological approaches, the type of sources they use and ultimately their normative attitudes towards resilience, per se. As is to be expected, we find moments of tension as well as agreement between the pieces assembled here but, for us, this only enhances the collection as a whole by openly exploring the multifaceted – and highly political – nature of resilience.