Searching for Resilience

Individual

John Cacioppo and others ³⁰ define a state of personal resilience as “a person’s capacity for adapting psychologically, emotionally, and physically reasonably well and without lasting detriment to self, relationships or personal development in the face of adversity, threat or challenge.” This suggests that individuals possess different capacities for resilience and parallels the notion of “inherent resilience” discussed by Sandra Walklate. ³¹ Work on individual resilience focuses on variables like age, and developments over an individual’s life course that or may not contribute to their (individual) resilience (see e.g., Kevin Lalor ³² ; Paul Bouvier ³³ ; Michael Ungar ³⁴ ) and implies consequently that some individuals are more resilient than others. Returning to soldiers for a moment, some contemporary challenges exist to the commonsense view of soldiers as being natural harbingers of resilience. While the soldier may be differentiated from other civil servants by their commitment to giving their lives in the course of their duties, ³⁵ somewhat paradoxically, in times of global preoccupations with risk and presumptions around the effectiveness of professional armies, the expectation that soldiers by definition are harmed as a result of warfare has declined. Indeed, Pat O’Malley ³⁶ goes on to suggest that although once understood as being naturally equipped with “fortitude,” especially during the First and Second World Wars, the advent of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the wake of the Vietnam War changed the ways in which the relationship between soldiering and resilience was conceived. Put simply, psychological traumas suffered by soldiers shifted from being seen as an inherently weak/strong trait of the individual, to being seen as a result of the hazardous and psychologically taxing environment in which a soldier operates. This moved the notion of individual resilience from one that is both inherent and/or acquired through discipline (thus equipping soldiers with the willingness to fight for and with fellow soldiers), to one more centered on the scientific assessment of risk factors such as a soldier’s predisposition to psychological trauma during war. In this way, commonsense approaches to a soldiers’ capacity for resilience through “fortitude” have been reshaped. Thus, soldiers are rendered responsible for managing their own risks during war, reducing them, and seeking assistance when needed. Consequently:

Resilience now is neither an innate human characteristic nor what used to be fortitude—resilience is not so much a question of moral absolutes, of knowing instinctively what is right . . . Resilience becomes a scientifically validated and optimized technique of the self. ³⁷

So “bouncebackability” may not see the individual returning to a “previously existing order,” but can instead positively affect change in the individual for the future in the face of their individual capacities for resilience (or otherwise). This encourages us to think about resilience as something above and beyond the individual and allows us to consider a second layer that may often form the crux of an individuals’ resilience.

Familial

The family is an important social network in sustaining and/or undermining people’s ability to cope with life’s adversities. For example, Michael Ungar ³⁸ has registered the important role played by the family and family relationships for the wider coping mechanisms of young people in trouble. However, focusing on soldiers, they also have families, wives, husbands, and children. Therefore, the individual soldier’s capacity for resilience must not be thought of in isolation to the abilities of their family, as much is known about the problems facing military families when their loved ones are away on operations for months at a time. René Moelker and Irene van der Kloet, ³⁹ note, “military families carry a heavy burden, especially when they endure a separation from the military spouse.” Families left behind have to face a complex burden of adaptation, loss, worry, and uncertainty, common to which is a continuum of familial stress that impacts upon the military family pre, during, and post deployment. ⁴⁰ René Moelker and Irene van der Kloet ⁴¹ suggest that regardless of the hardships that military families face, “the resilience of the women” is significant. Their research suggests that during the absence of a spouse on operational deployment not only is the emotional social support of their civilian counterparts the most effective support networks to assist them but also assists them with “bouncebackability” in coping with the next. In a separate longitudinal study, Manon Andres and René Moelker ⁴² found that “adolescents are fairly resilient” in the absence of a parent on military operations too. Moreover, out with military sociology, the role of women has been the focus in a number of studies in understanding the presence/absence of resilience; see for example, Jacqueline Siapno ⁴³ on responses to the tsunami in Aceh, and Medina Haeri and Nadine Puechguirbal ⁴⁴ on women’s capacity for resilience in times of conflict. Thus, much of this work echoes findings found more generally about the importance of the family as a social network in framing responses to adversity. However families, including military families, coexist in communities and it is to the role of community relations in fostering resilience that we shall now turn.

Communal

Returning to the New America Foundation’s symposium, Admiral Thad Allen ⁴⁵ of the US Coast Guard (retired) locates the response to catastrophic events directly within communities, stating, like Darrell Darnell, ⁴⁶ that the preconditions within which communities exist (e.g., with or without socioeconomic deprivation) are fundamental enablers of their capacity for resilience. This chimes with the arguments of Frank Furedi ⁴⁷ who, commenting on the (then) UK’s Civil Contingencies Bill and the US Homeland Security Act, suggests that, contrary to the “command and control model” of dealing with catastrophic events that deem “ordinary people” as being unable to cope and look after themselves, the reality is quite the opposite. Citing incidents such as the Royal Air Force bombing of Hamburg in 1943, the survivors of Chernobyl in 1986, and the aftermath of 9/11 among others, for Frank Furedi ⁴⁸ each of these catastrophes, and many others like them, were (and are) met with resilience at a community level: a level which is often cut out by State-level emergency planning “on the assumption that they (communities) will be incapacitated by fear.” The importance of community relations, especially in economically deprived communities, in fostering the conditions for resilience is highlighted in different ways by Martin Innes and Vanessa Jones ⁴⁹ and by Mark Eggerman and Catherine Panter-Brick. ⁵⁰ This latter work in particular points to the way in which cultural norms and values in highly deprived areas of Afghanistan “function as both an anchor for resilience and an anvil of pain.” ⁵¹ They suggest that “strong religious faith [iman] and individual effort [koshesh] are values that structure a discourse of resilience in the face of adversity” ⁵² (emphasis in the original). Studies such as those cited challenge the deficit model of resilience that is presumed about communities by much policy emanating from the institutional level, the next layer of our typology.

Institutional

As the twenty-first century has unfolded, critical incident planning and management has become a political and policy priority in a number of different countries (e.g., the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia) with much of this “emergency planning” putting particular responsibilities on a diverse range of public, private, and third sector organizations and institutions; from education, health, local government to the armed forces. In the United Kingdom, such directives came in the form of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 that put in place a Civil Contingencies Secretariat as part of the government’s Cabinet Office and looked beyond the emergency services (deemed Category 1 Responders) in coordinating responses to major emergencies. Category 2 Responders (the Environment Agency, hospitals, and other infrastructure suppliers) were brought together under this legislation as “Local Resilience Forums” to coordinate responses to emergency situations. This multiagency “all-hazards” approach has been further endorsed in the production of the National Security Strategy (see below). Jennifer Cole ⁵³ suggests that these developments offered “not only a security guard but a security blanket.” This institutionally led kind of policy development, bringing together as it does all aspects of the disaster cycle: response, recovery, mitigation, and preparedness (see Jon Coaffee and others ⁵⁴ ) exhorts all relevant agencies to prepare in concert their disaster management strategies. At an institutional level, such planning processes have focused on the need for partnership working (between emergency services, the business sector, and local communities) and effective communication systems. In Australia, for example, in December 2011, the Department of Emergency Management issued a DisasterWatch phone application on the presumption that “connected communities are resilient communities.” This initiative was seen as a means of facilitating improved and coordinated responses to events ranging from floods to bush fires to terrorist activities. In the context of the military, institutional resilience is exampled in the UK Armed Forces Covenant, ⁵⁵ which states that:

The Government has a responsibility to promote the health, safety and resilience of Servicemen and women; and to ensure that they are appropriately prepared, in the judgement of the Chain of Command, for the requirements of any training activities or operations on which they are to be engaged.

This newly formed Armed Forces Covenant is designed to foster the taken-for-granted assumption that the military institution will provide soldiers with the individual (and thus group) capacity for resilience in the face of adversity: a requisite skill of all military personnel. However, it offers more than this. It promises that the “nation” will support and foster an accommodating attitude to supporting British soldiers, and their families, during their service and in their time of need. This promise has been further endorsed by the signing of “community covenants” in towns and cities across the United Kingdom to the Armed Forces. So, the Armed Forces Covenant attempts to connect individual, community, and institutional levels of resilience by not just taking the responsibility to promote the resilience of military personnel but also in promoting resilience for both soldiers and the military alike fosters the support of the “nation” from within the community. Consequently, this covenant and the pledges made to it further illustrate some of the interconnections and assumptions that are made by institutional commitments to resilience in relation to individuals and communities. In these examples, the institutionally led, top-down approach to community resilience is self-evident and points to one of the ways in which the levels of resilience within our typology not only overlap but may indeed reflect contradictory assumptions concerning how resilience actually operates at each of those levels (how these levels overlap, interrelate, or nest with each other is discussed more fully below). However, institutional preoccupations are also intimately connected with, and are a reflection of, national strategies and concerns.

National

In a study from the National-Resilience Project at the Israeli National Security Council (NSC), Reuven Gal ⁵⁶ presents a case study on what he terms both social and national resilience in relation to the Al-Aqsa Intifada between 2000 and 2004. His work suggests national resilience is the “ultimate response” to violence and a means by which the functioning of everyday life continues relatively unabated. Measured in terms of both public behavior and public attitude, this study demonstrates that despite reacting initially to the threat of violence, the Israeli public protected themselves and then adapted to their normal condition with the addition of a stronger sense of patriotism and an optimistic view of their future. As Reuven Gal ⁵⁷ notes:

 . . . one may conclude that during the time of the Second Intifada, under a prolonged period of daily suicidal attacks causing hundreds of casualties, the Israeli society demonstrated a relatively high level of national resilience

This kind of national resilience has been generated and enhanced out of long-term experience and threat. Arguably, however, it is the kind of resilience that governmental policy initiatives elsewhere have been concerned to generate over the last decade.

In keeping with this concern, the United Kingdom has, for example, put in place a Strategic National Framework on Resilience (2011). This framework sets the tone for the “hazards, all risks” disaster management approach referenced above that also requires that “communities and individuals harness[ing] local resources and expertise to help themselves in an emergency, in a way that complements the response of the emergency services.” ⁵⁸ Within the National Framework, four different types of community are identified: geographical, interest, circumstance, and supporters. All of these communities are exhorted to support, enable, remove barriers, have effective dialogue, raise awareness, and work toward a shared framework to increase individual and community resilience against threats. Alongside these imperatives, there is also the requirement to produce an annual National Risk Register that, for 2010, put pandemic influenza and coastal flooding higher and as a more severe threat than terrorism (see Jennifer Cole ⁵⁹ and the National Risk Register for 2010 ⁶⁰ ). How meaningful such registers are in communicating risks or generating resilience is a moot point. Certainly, the presumption that communities are “resilient-deficit” that these kinds of policies embrace is subject to critical questioning, and as some of the evidence cited above suggest, is also mistaken. However, the United Kingdom is not alone in being preoccupied with formulating national resilience in this kind of way. The Australian National Strategy for Disaster Resilience reflects similar concerns. It states:

The whole-of-nation Strategy recognises the important roles we all play in achieving a more resilient Australia. The priority outcomes in the Strategy call on all individuals, organisations and governments to actively play their part. Involvement means realising the potential of all parties to build their resilience to disasters, and supporting and influencing these outcomes. You and your organisations need to consider how to support participation within your community. Governments, through adopting and supporting the Strategy, will review existing policies and instruments (not limited to the traditional emergency management sector), with a view to incorporating disaster resilience outcomes through all government operations. ⁶¹

The quote speaks for itself.

Regional

Moving from the national, regional concerns with resilience appear to ebb and flow. They are perhaps driven contemporarily by political unrest on one hand and the consequent access to resources for the global market on the other. The “Arab Spring” of 2011 stands as a good case in point, as does the current economic fragility of the European Economic Community. Each in their different ways is contributing to the reshaping of those regions historically considered to be members of the (economically) powerful. Of course, regional preoccupations look somewhat different in sections of drought-ridden Africa. David Last and Fahim Youssofzai ⁶² outline a framework for harnessing resilience at a regional level suggesting several different layers to the achievement of this: foundations, providers, enablers, and externalities. Their analysis indicates that first, for a society to respond to a catastrophic event or natural disaster, it requires that the threats to the “foundations” of society (e.g., breathable air, drinkable water, etc.) are monitored to ensure early intervention, should these systems be threatened. ⁶³ Second, in relation to the maintenance of “providers” for such things as water supply, health care, education, finance, policing and education, David Last and Fahim Youssofzai ⁶⁴ suggest that:

Increasing resilience often means building up simple robust alternatives, developing local sources and replacements for imports, considering stockpiles against short-term disruptions and supply restrictions, making infrastructure safer or more redundant, having “more-and-smaller” rather than “fewer-and-larger” of almost anything.

For them, the provision of such resilience means changing the delivery of such materials from being “complex, productive, and fragile,” to being “simple, limited, and robust” and managed by State-centered governance and policy, ⁶⁵ echoing much of the U.K.’s recent stance on maintaining national infrastructural resilience. In many respects, this argument brings us full circle to the comments of Darell Darnell and Thad Allen ⁶⁶ referred to earlier. First, in creating resilience at a local level, there is a need for the State to figure out how to do more to relieve socioeconomic needs of certain communities so they become self-sufficient, largely reliant upon themselves and therefore with the capacity for resilience in the face of an emergency. ⁶⁷ Second, ensuring that this is the case means equipping communities and thus regions with strong “immune systems,” to provide them with the best possible opportunity to “bounce back.” ⁶⁸

The tensions here are similar to those found with imperatives directed toward national resilience. Put simply, the vital questions raised are who is considered to have resilience, about what, for what, and by whom? At this juncture, it is also possible to discern an additional problem with how resilience is being understood here. While it is empirically the case that regional resilience varies considerably, it is equally important not to assume that in recognizing those differences that “we know” either how those differences are experienced or what it is that needs to, or can, be done about them. Raewyn Connell ⁶⁹ issues us with a timely reminder, as social scientists, not to reproduce regional/global resource imbalances in the presumptions made in our own intellectual agendas. These kinds of tensions are nowhere more explicit than when we consider resilience globally.

Global

The express desire for resilience at the global level is almost palpable, particularly on the issue of climate change and the sustainability of resources. While such global concerns play themselves out differently at the regional level—in the West as compared with Africa or Asia for example—from the Yokohama Strategy adopted in 1994 to the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015, the search for resilience rings loudly:

An integrated, multi-hazard approach to disaster risk reduction should be factored into policies, planning and programming related to sustainable development, relief, rehabilitation, and recovery activities in post-disaster and post-conflict situations in disaster-prone countries. ⁷⁰

The global concern with resilience transgresses both regional and national boundaries and interestingly returns us to one of the understandings of resilience with which this article began. This is resilience as it emanates from complex systems theory. As Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper ⁷¹ note, through the formation of the Resilience Alliance, Crawford Holling and colleagues, “were no longer concerned with resilience as a property of ecosystems as objects of conservation, but now advanced resilience as integral to the co-evolution of societies and ecosystems as a total complex system,” As suggested earlier, this totality is dubbed by Lance Gunderson and Crawford Holling ⁷² as a state of “panarchy,” and refers to the complex, cyclical, interrelationship between natural systems and human systems. This definition of resilience foregrounds a cyclical process of adaptation to change that involves growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal and as Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper ⁷³ aver: “Holling seeks to independently theorize an abstract dynamics of capital accumulation, one not predicted on the progressive temporality of classical political economy but rather on the inherent crisis tendencies of complex adaptive systems.” Here we are reminded that the variable capacity for global resilience is inexorably connected to, and is a feature of, global economic relations.

The introduction of “panarchy” was seminal in understandings of the resilience of ecosystems. In panarchy, resilience is constantly in the making and not envisioned as a fixed entity at all. This emphasis on resilience as a process of becoming rather than something actually existing, when translated into the social sphere of politics and policy requires a capacity to imagine alternative futures rather than a capacity to bounce back to some preexisting state. Yet, it is this embrace of resilience, as always the making, that has largely been overlooked in the process of translation. Before we go on to consider the implications of this observation, it is perhaps worth reflecting on what work this typology of resilience can do for us.

What Work Can This Typology Do?

Borrowing from an idea found in the work of William James, ⁷⁴ we have walked down the corridor of resilience and pushed ajar a number of different disciplinary doors making claims to knowledge about this concept. In doing so, we have found that resilience is multilayered and multifaceted. There are resiliences rather than one unitary, uniform understanding of resilience. In policy terms, it is possible to discern that at individual, familial, communal, institutional, regional, national, and global levels, building resilience can pose different questions in different circumstances with different answers. Sometimes those answers act in concert with, sometimes in tension with, and sometimes in contradiction with one another and the evidence provided to support them. Each of these layers or levels of resilience can also relate to one another in different ways. For example, it can be seen that national resilience is wired into regional concerns (over such issues like access to resources and the protection of local and national infrastructures) that are also reflected in some transnational and nation-state agendas, like building structures and legislation to counter terrorism. Institutional, community, and family resilience may differently inform how resilience manifests at the societal level, and there will be overlaps between community and family in contributing to local resilience. Individual resilience may be inherent, learned through experience, or socialized as an institutional process, but it is also critically shaped, mediated, sustained, and revived (when required) by family and community relations. The complex way in which these resilience interconnect with each other raises all kinds of questions for policy. For example, whether one is able to effectively build resilience, depends upon which layer in the typology is the focus of concern. From here the ways in which resilience is fostered will vary depending on the scale upon which this is to be engaged with (e.g., individual, local, national, etc.) and the extent to which a policy can effectively work in one layer without taking account of the other layers that contribute to its efficacy. There are, however, other issues that become more transparent that this typology has brought to the fore.

Embedded in this typology, and the academic and policy work that underpins it, is arguably, a set of presumptions. These presumptions reflect thinking around who, or what, is or is not, resilient, and who, or what, has the capacity for resilience. Indeed, the policy initiatives that have been referred to here for the most part presume a “resilience deficit” model. It is this notion of deficit that underpins the desire to build resilience. Concomitantly, how that desire manifests itself is also dependent on what the “deficiencies” are presumed to be and at what level. The dangers inherent in this view become particularly visible when what is known about community resilience, for example, is placed side by side with State-generated policies designed to build such resilience. Even a simple juxtaposition as this encourages us to question the motivations of the State, in economically austere time, in mobilizing communities to work in partnerships with emergency services and the business sector. The intention of this, of course, is to protect national infrastructure at a lesser cost, both financially and in terms of State accountability. However, such dangers are also manifest at the regional and global levels in what is presumed to be the regional and/or global “imbalances” in resilience and what the causation of those imbalances are. For example, questions of such “imbalances” arise when we put side by side the clearance and restructuring of the mass of debris at ground zero post–9/11 with the rebuilding of structures on the western provinces of Southern Thailand following the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake and subsequent Tsunami. Both events were caused by global and national threats known as risks to each country and both involved structural devastation and human loss on a grand scale. However, the processes by which both countries responded at the layers of national, regional, communal, familial, and the individual may be markedly different from one another. The United States and Thailand not only have obvious cultural differences, but the economic and political support structures available to both countries in terms of both wealth and deficit respectively are also markedly different. These “imbalances” notwithstanding both responses to terrorism and natural disasters are still understandable in terms of resilience in “making for a better tomorrow,” but in their own very different ways.

In summary, the interdisciplinary and policy work that this article has drawn upon to inform our typology points to an empirical and theoretical complexity that is suggestive of resilience as a continuum of experiences rather than an unitary or uniform entity that exists or does not exist. This is much closer to the panarchic understanding of resilience as a state of becoming. This understanding, despite the problems inherent in translating an ecological understanding to the social world commented on by Simin Davoudi, ⁷⁵ generates a cluster of dilemmas for politicians and policy makers some of which we have alluded to here.

Finally, but by no means least in importance, this typology encourages us to think about what is made visible and what is kept invisible in the way in which resilience talk is constructed. Questions of (in)visibility are embedded in the increasing use of resilience as a metaphor in the realm of policy and politics. The presence, if not the efficacy, of this metaphorical use of resilience adds further weight to the resilient deficit model presumed in a number of national policy statements. By definition, this usage, as Frank Furedi would aver, renders the coping strategies of communities, for example, invisible to the policy and politician’s eye. However, the layers of resilience highlighted in our typology also point to another “invisibility”: that of economic relations, more specifically, global capitalism.

For example, while all political parties in the United Kingdom are considered to be “resolute” about the need for policies and practices that demonstrate a prepared emergency response (see Charlie Edwards ⁷⁶ ), it is clear that counterterrorism remains a strategic priority. It does so in a context in which public sector services alongside military services face severe budgetary constraints, as the United Kingdom grapples with the fallout of the 2008 banking crisis. As we have alluded to throughout this critical discussion, the economic drivers to ensure that individuals, communities, and public, private, and third sector organizations are resilient in times of austerity are palpable. Against this backcloth, it is easier to see how and why resilience has risen up the policy agenda in the shape and form that it has. Here the policies themselves speak to “an imagined political community” (Bob Jessop ⁷⁷ ) in support of the “neo-liberal imaginary of each subject being the ‘entrepreneur of oneself’” (Pat O’Malley ⁷⁸ ). Thus, in the shadows of this typology of resilience, the search for resilience has had a somewhat hidden guiding hand. To be more explicit, exhortations for citizens and communities to be resilient takes place in an environment that is defined by economic power relations saturated with political interests, from the struggle to maintain oil supplies, to the dominating presence of the Murdoch media empire, to the rising economic power of Brazil, India, and China. These varying interests are not so different when it comes to their power and influence in the market place. Thus, in Althusserian terms, the resilience speak with which we have been concerned in this article makes appeals to individuals who are “always-already” exposed to dominant ideas and impacted upon by ideological forces ⁷⁹ associated with global capitalism. In adding this “invisible” hand to the visibly audible voice of politicians and policy makers, the questions of resilience from what, to what, and for whom, posed earlier, take on another, more critical, frame of reference.

Claudia Aradau ⁸⁰ reminds us that however disruptive a catastrophic event might prove to be, the capitalist system ultimately preserves its identity. As she puts it “while the CIA conjure images of a spiritual caliphate, we will still have Amazon.com.” Thus, echoing Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper’s ⁸¹ analysis of the economic parallels in Crawford Hollings’ complex systems theory of resilience, we are reminded that this search for resilience is generated at a particular moment in time and within the context of an age of “austere” capitalism in which cutting costs and reducing deficits is paramount. Drawing attention to the economic wires that connect the search for resilience does not imply that there may, or may not be, beneficiaries in the process of policy implementation concerned with “building” resilience. Such benefits may range from communities receiving investments that they would not otherwise have received, to both public and private sector organizations making gains from their involvement in such initiatives. As a consequence, some individuals may also benefit. In this sense, resilience is much more than a political metaphor. However—especially under times of economic constraint—the metaphorical use of resilience by policy makers and politicians alike belies the underlying economic and ideological interests that “resilience speak” serves at a particular moment in time.