Resilience, Emergencies and the Internet ─ Security In-formation

This book traces how resilience is conceptually grounded in an understanding of the world as interconnected, complex and emergent.

In an interconnected world, we are exposed to radical uncertainties, which require new modes of handling them. So, to what extent is resilience then conceptually indebted to an understanding of the world as interconnected? This book investigates resilience not as a mere practice of dealing with emergencies, but critiques and theorizes resilience as way of living through them. The aim of the book is to develop the argument that resilience is not the mere survival of emergencies, and shows how through the concept of resilience emergency and resilience are a fundamental part of life. They are consequences of interconnectedness, which recast life as adaptation, as constant interplay between security and insecurity.

As a specific aspect of this critical theorization of resilience, the book explores how the growing presence of the internet in societal interactions influences resilience as a security discourse and practice. This also presents the innovative angle of the work, which has been overlooked in the resilience discourse so far. It is no coincidence that the epistemological awareness of complexity and the limits of certainty, the rise of digital technology and the concept of resilience became prominent aspects of security governance at a similar point in time. The book shows how the internet not only nourishes narratives of connectivity and complexity in political discourses, but how it brings about new resilience practices. By drawing on rich case studies, the book discusses what 'the digital' (in the form of big data analysis), and 'the network' (in the form of social media) do to resilience. As such, the book’s aim is not only to offer a critical conceptualization of resilience that outlines how aspects of ontology, epistemology, spatiality, temporality and self-organization converge in the resilience- interconnectedness discourse, but it also contributes to the emerging scholarly discussion on security, technology and the digital. The book is subdivided in four thematic components, and the conclusion offers a theory of resilience as a way of governing the interconnected society.

This book will be of much interest to students of resilience studies, critical security studies, cyber-politics, and international relations in general.