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• Biolitics of Resilience

The Biopolitics of Resilience

Principal Research: Chris Zebrowski

I. Research Question:
What accounts for the differences in evolution of the resilience discourses of the UK, the EU, and the US with respect to Critical Infrastructure Protection?

II. Summary:
Critical Infrastructure Protection has become a priority within the security strategies of advanced liberal states.  The UK Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CSS), as well as the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS), and the European Union Program for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP), all champion the concept of resilience as part of their strategic priorities. However, when analysed in detail, different resilience discourses and practices indicate that there is no unified understanding of this concept. It becomes evident that specific resilience strategies reflect different problematisations of security and operate under what, following the Foucauldian idea of security dispositif, (1) can be analysed as different ‘resilience apparatuses’.  This project is designed as a genealogy of the conditions of possibility of the three resilience discourses operating within the CCS, DHS and EPCIP. (2)  In practice, analysing the conditions of possibility of a discourse involves a historical inquiry into the conditions which shape these discourses and give them particular resonance in the social climate in which they operate.  Investigating these conditions of possibility thus requires mapping the cartography of power relations through which these discourse are (pre)formed within the specific resilience apparatuses of the CCS, DHS and EPCIP.  A genealogy will contribute a critical understanding of resilience and provide insight into the rationalities of contemporary modes of governance in advanced liberal societies. (3)

III. Aims and objectives:
The aim of this project is to advance knowledge on the ways in which populations are governed and protected in advanced liberal states.(4)  Resilience initiatives in the field of Critical Infrastructure Protection offer a privileged space for the interrogation of the specificities of strategies of governance in these societies.  Resilience is here defined as the capacity of a system to withstand and rebound from a potentially catastrophic event. (5)  The resilience of critical infrastructures is understood to play a vital role in optimising the resilience of the populations they support to these same disruptions.  Far from a mere technical exercise, optimising societal resilience is highly dependent on the production of new political subjectivities characterised by forms of behaviour which optimise the production and reproduction of self-emergent forms of social organisation.  Highly technical security literatures have not given adequate attention to these social factors, and as a result, have been unable to explain the differences existing within the resilience discourses embodied within the CCS, DHS and EPCIP.

Instead, resilience is more adequately explained as a biopolitical security strategy circumscribed within a risk-based understanding of security.(6)  Risk, rather than a particular disposition towards an uncertain future, is here understood as a mode of governance that allows interpretations of the future threat to influence the present.(7)  Risk invokes preparedness and preparedness enhances the conditions which contribute to the realisation of resilient social forms.  This project is inspired, and will draw extensively, on literature in the biopolitics of security that have similarly questioned how contingency is governed through technologies of surveillance(8) and insurance(9) in advanced liberal societies.  This project regards itself as a novel contribution to academic work in this field, with wider implications for Security Studies and International Relations.

The general objective of this project is to locate and analyse the conditions which explain the emergence of resilience discourses in the field of Critical Infrastructure Protection.  Here it is recognised that the discourses underpinning these three distinct resilience apparatuses reflect security problematics particular to the societies in which they have developed. 

Resilience discourses in the field of Critical Infrastructure Protection understand resilience as a characteristic feature of what Castells and others have called ‘network societies’(10) whose reliance on critical infrastructures is seen to create new vulnerabilities with regard to their interruption in the event of an accident or attack.(11)  Resilience does not refer to a particular strategy.  Rather it is a systemic property defined in terms of the performative adaptability of infrastructural and societal networks to withstand, re-route and recombine in the wake of a potentially catastrophic event, to maintain systemic operability.(12)  Recent scholarship in the geography of critical infrastructures recognises that the high rates of circulation and interconnectedness of critical infrastructures results in non-linear evolutionary behaviour and contingent organisational formations found within complex systems.(13) Recently, the high circulations of money, goods, people and ideas that underpin advanced liberal economies have similarly begun to be modelled within the language of the complexity sciences.(14)  The complex evolutionary behaviour of advanced liberal societies and the critical infrastructures that sustain them make both systems suitable for resilience strategies aimed at their protection and promotion.

The evolution of complex systems is closely tied to the circulation of information. It follows that the security of essential circulations, and information in particular, is vital to optimising evolutionary fitness.  Evolutionary fitness leads to contingent, self-emergent organisational structures.  Resilience strategies are thus directed towards optimising the evolutionary fitness, or conditions of possibility, for the self-emergent organisation of advanced liberal societies and the critical infrastructures which sustain them.  An analytic framework developed by Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero which emphasises the role of circulation, connectivity and complexity in understanding the problematics of contemporary security initiatives is thus highly appropriate for this project.(15)  These security problematics will closely scrutinised to ascertain how they relate to the emergence of resilience discourses in the field of Critical Infrastructure Protection.

Specific objectives:

1. A dispositif is understood here as a constellation of institutions, practices and beliefs that both generate and limit the boundaties of a discourse. Cf.Gilles Deleuze, "What Is a Dispositif?," in Michel Foucault Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics : Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979, Michel Foucault : Lectures at the Collège De France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977), Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1977).
3. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: Manchester University Press, 1998), Michael Dillon, The Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), Keith Krause, Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (London: UCL Press, 1997), Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror : Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies, Reappraising the Political (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006).
4. Nicolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
5. Sean P. Gorman, Networks, Security and Complexity: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2005), Christine Pommerening, "Resilience in Organizations and Systems: Background and Trajectory of an Emerging Paradigm," in Critical Thinking: Moving from Infrastructure Protection to Infrastructure Resilience, Cip Program Discussion Paper Series (George Mason University, 2007).
6. Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christina Masters, eds., The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero, "Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century: An Introduction," Review of International Studies 34 (2008), Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics : Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979, Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror : Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies.
7. Claudia Aradau, Luis Lobo-Guerrero, and Rens Van Munster, "Security, Technologies of Risk, and the Political: Guest Editor's Introduction," Security Dialogue 39 (2008), Michael Dillon, "Underwriting Security," Security Dialogue 39, no. (2-3) (2008), Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics : Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979, Mark B. Salter, "Imagining Numbers: Risk, Quantification and Aviation Security," Security Dialogue 39 (2008).
8. Peter Adey, "Airports, Mobility and the Calculative Architecture of Affective Control," Geoforum 39 (2008), L. Amoore and M de Goede, Risk and the War on Terror (London: Routledge, 2008), Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, "Transactions after 9/11: The Banal Face of the Preemptive Strike," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33, no. 2 (2008), Didier Bigo, "Globalized (in)Security: The Field and the Ban-Opticon," in Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (in)Security Games, ed. Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006), Melinda Cooper, "Pre-Empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror," Theory, Culture and Society 23, no. 4 (2006), Salter, "Imagining Numbers."
9. Luis Lobo-Guerrero, "Biopolitics of Specialized Risk: An Analysis of Kidnap and Ransom Insurance," Security Dialogue 38, no. 315-334 (2007), Luis Lobo-Guerrero, "Pirates, Stewards, and the Securitisation of Global Circulation," International Political Sociology 2, no. 3 (2008).
10. Stephen D. Berkowitz and Barry Wellman, Social Structures : A Network Approach, Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences. ; 2 (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit : A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society, International Library of Sociology (London ; New York: Routledge, 2006).
11. Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Kristian Soby Kristensen, "Introduction," in Securing 'the Homeland': Critical Infrastructure, Risk and (in)Security, ed. Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Kristian Soby Kristensen (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
12. Michael Dillon, "End of Award Report: Knowledge Resourcing for Civil Contingencies," ESRC Society Today  (2005), Gorman, Networks, Security and Complexity: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection, L. H. Gunderson et al., "Resilience of Large-Scale Resource Systems," in Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems, ed. L. H. Gunderson and Pritchard L. (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2002), Pommerening, "Resilience in Organizations and Systems: Background and Trajectory of an Emerging Paradigm.", U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "National Infrastructure Protection Plan (Nipp),"  (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2006).
13. C Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984), Pommerening, "Resilience in Organizations and Systems: Background and Trajectory of an Emerging Paradigm."
14. Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling, Panarchy : Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, DC ; London: Island Press, 2002), Russ Marion, The Edge of Organization: Chaos and Complexity Theories of Formal Social Systems (Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), Nigel Thrift, "The Place of Complexity," Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 3 (1999), John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
15. Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero, "The Biopolitical Imaginary of Species Being and the Freedom to Underwrite in the Molecular Age," Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 1 (2009).