Resilience, security and the politics of processes

The prominence of resilience thinking in contemporary governance and security policies has received increasing critical attention. By engaging in dialogue with some of these recent critiques, predominantly leaning on biopolitics or neoliberal governmentality, this article develops an Arendtian reading of resilience as a temporal regime of processuality. Originating from life sciences such as ecology and complexity thinking, the increasingly malleable resilience discourse privileges the functioning of societal life processes over political action and human artifice. The article argues that this ‘rule of nobody’ is in danger of suffocating the concept of public space, so crucial for politics proper. As a necessary step out of this predicament, it is suggested that instead of settling for a mere cultivation of societal and individual adaptive capacities, as the popular necessitarian-processual sentiment proposes, the sense of being able to change the world and its structures through collective political action should be revitalised.