Mareile Kaufmann

Emergent self-organisation in emergencies: resilience rationales in interconnected societies

Connectivity seems to have become an essential quality of modern societies. Following this understanding of being woven together, this article explores and describes complexity as the epistemological vantage point for the rise of emergency and resilience within discourses of security. It describes how seemingly contradictory logics of ‘governance’ and ‘self-organisation’, of ‘retaining’ and ‘developing with change’ converge in the concept of resilience and critically discusses the different forms of power they instantiate. It analyses how the understanding of security as ‘absence of danger‘ is recast by resilience as a continuous ‘process of adaptation’.

Resilience and (in)security: Practices, subjects, temporalities

Diverse, sometimes even contradictory concepts and practices of resilience have proliferated into a wide range of security policies. In introducing this special issue, we problematize and critically discuss how these forms of resilience change environments, create subjects, link temporalities, and redefine relations of security and insecurity. We show the increased attention – scholarly as well as political – given to resilience in recent times and provide a review of the state of critical security studies literature on resilience. We argue that to advance this discussion, resilience needs to be conceptualized and investigated in plural terms. We use temporalities and subjectivities as key analytical aspects to investigate the plural instantiations of resilience in actual political practice. These two issues – subjectivity and temporality – form the overall context for the special issue and are core themes for all the articles collected here.

Humanitarian technology: a critical research agenda

New technology may offer many opportunities for humanitarian action, but it also presents a number of challenges. Currently, most of the critical analysis of these potential challenges takes place in the blogosphere, on tweets and on listservs. There is a strong need for more scholarly engagement on the subject. This article offers an agenda for critical inquiry into the emergent field of humanitarian technology as applied to a broadly defined context of crises, encompassing both natural disasters and conflict zones, by identifying what technology does to the humanitarian enterprise, and by reflecting on the key challenges that emerge.

Resilience 2.0: social media use and (self-)care during the 2011 Norway attacks

Departing from the understanding that resilience is a technique of self-organization during emergencies, this article provides a study on the way in which the use of social media influenced and engendered societal resilience practices during the 2011 Norway attacks. It builds on the concepts of governmentality and mediality to discuss how the interplay between social media and its users created new forms of self-initiated and mediated emergency governance. Empirically, it draws on material from 20 in-depth interviews with Norwegians who explained and reflected upon their social media use during the attacks. The article presents an overview of the different functions that social media assumed in the process of dealing with the attacks and discusses these vis-à-vis their related challenges. It draws conclusions about the way in which resilience practices and the resilient subject are influenced by the networked character of 2.0 technologies.

A framework for selection of strategy for management of security measures

In this paper, we present and discuss a framework for security risk management, focusing on the selection of a management strategy for decision-making on security measures in particular. The framework provides guidance on the selection of a suitable type of management strategy for various types of decision-making contexts. An Information and Communication Technology case study is used to illustrate the practical implications of the framework.

Resilience governance and ecosystemic space: a critical perspective on the EU approach to Internet security

Since the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) promoted the image of the Internet as ‘interconnection ecosystem’, Internet security has been increasingly conceptualised through the language of resilience—the capacity to self repair. This paper uses performativity and relational space as theoretical lenses to analyse the political effects that ENISAs redefinition of the Internet entails. It argues that the Internet ecosystem is not only used to conceptualise the Internet as a heterogeneous, complex space, but also to legitimise resilience as a new security practice. The first section traces the trajectory of different discursive framings of the Internet as space and introduces the premise of understanding the Internet ecosystem through performativity and relational space. The paper then utilises this framework to conduct an analysis of the Internet ecosystem on the basis of a selection of ENISAs technical and policy documents. It explores infrastructural and political dimensions and discusses their correlated forms of resilience governance. It concludes that the reconceptualisation of the Internet as ecosystem is a highly political move, which also changes the notion of security. If security governance becomes a matter of facilitating distributed self-repair, security is not a state of being protected, which is how we often think about cyberspace, but it is self-made, processual, emergent, and strictly temporal.

Politics and 'the digital': From singularity to specificity

The relationship between politics and the digital has largely been characterized as one of epochal change. The respective theories understand the digital as external to politics and society, as an autonomous driver for global, unilateral transformation. Rather than supporting such singular accounts of the relationship between politics and the digital, this article argues for its specificity: the digital is best examined in terms of folds within existing socio-technical configurations, and as an artefact with a set of affordances that are shaped and filled with meaning by social practice. In conceptualizing the digital as numeric, countable, computable, material, storable, searchable, transferable, networkable and traceable, fabricated and interpreted, it becomes clear that the digital cannot be divorced from the social. These affordances of the digital are discussed in relation to specific political, digital practices that are further developed in the different contributions in this special issue, such as predictive policing (Aradau and Blanke, this issue), data protection (Bellanova, this issue), extremist recruitment videos (Leander, this issue), political acclamation (Dean, this issue), and pandemic simulations (Opitz, this issue).

Exercising emergencies: Resilience, affect and acting out security:

The idea of the complex emergency has given rise to the notion of resilience as a form of acting out security. While security policies largely embrace the concept of resilience, critical scholarship points to the ‘responsibilization’ of the threatened subject, who is ‘programmed’ to act out security in a fashion that internalizes neoliberal values. This behaviour is trained through disciplinary practices, such as exercises, that seek to conduct the conduct of disaster populations. However, is the resilient subject only ever an instance of programmes and disciplinary power? This article takes a look at how self-organization comes about and how this process can be conceptualized through affect. It uses the setting of a cyber-security exercise to describe the dynamic interplay between affect and re/action. Building on Spinoza’s understanding of affect as the onset for action, the article discusses what affect theory contributes to resilience theory. It concludes that, as a form of acting out security, resilience incorporates both ‘programmed’ and ‘self-determined’ actions. Both forms of acting, however, imply that the resilient subject has no choice but to act out security. Given this fundamental restraint, powerlessness as the incapacity to act appears as one of the few instances that escape the governmental logic of resilience.