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

Abstract

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’.