Increasing the
T
he responsibilities of security are of the highest stakes. Operating in a
variety of different places, they must protect against multifarious possibilities of threats and attacks. Failure to prepare for the imaginable and even the unimaginable is no longer politically acceptable.
of society 10 © CI TY S ECURI TY MAGAZ INE – WINT ER 2016/ 17 www. c i t y s e cu r i t yma g a z i ne . com
resilience
As they protect people, resources, infrastructures and technologies, security professionals also preserve as far as possible the continuation of a way of life: a societal ethos. Yet history is a process of social change and security is part of that changing way of life. In this article, I consider how that societal ethos has changed in less than fifty years and how concepts and ideas about governance have fed, and responded to, those changes. As security builds resilience to future possibility, how is the very idea of resilience contributing to the need for greater securitisation?
A brief history of resilience and economy
In 1973, amid the rupture of the Oil Crisis, C.S. Holling developed a concept of ecological resilience. His ideas have since spread into the economic, psychological and security sectors. Holling argued that ecological systems were fantastically complex and that the only reason they survived ruptures and shocks was because they were able to rapidly absorb and adapt to change.
In a forest that had only seen long, dry seasons six times in the last 300 years, the biodiversity of different species was maintained by a worm that, during these unusual dry spells, severely depleted one type of fir tree. The dry seasons were effectively
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