This chapter begins by framing resilience discourse as a response to recent terror attacks, something Bean, Kerӓnen and Durfy (2011) suggest has attempted to idealise and foster a sense of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ since the 2005 attacks in London. It then shows how resilience has also become a central feature of contemporary counterterrorism policy, critical incident recovery, and disaster management preparation. Cognisant of the volume of psychological ‘resilience research’, such as Bonanno’s cited in the introduction to this book, the chapter subsequently considers how this research has positioned resilience in relation to the more established psychological lens of trauma. Doing so is not merely to contrast styles of reasoning inherent within each perspective, but rather to take seriously the notion that people frequently display a seemingly innate, natural ability to cope after adverse events or to withstand severe shocks to their lifeworlds. It considers this literature with the assumption that, notwithstanding undoubtedly important methodological discrepancies in the definition and measurement of resilience, such phenomena nevertheless surely exist. We see examples of such seemingly impossible, innate strength, whether in relation to illness, natural disasters or indeed high-profile terror attacks often enough for us to know this to be the case. Whether people should be implored to respond ‘resiliently’ (qua Furedi, 2008), or indeed whether resilience acts as an insidious neoliberal metaphor as has again been recently argued, for example, in relation to the international community’s response towards Palestine (Browne, 2018), are important though well-trodden avenues of critique. Instead, the chapter finally considers the issue of temporality, which is frequently positioned within resilience literatures as characterised by an ‘always-already’ episteme (Aradau, 2014) and discourse of futurity (Schott, 2015). It also considers the suggestion that resilience has come to replace risk as the new governing rationality of public and private security. Taken together, these distinct ‘angles’ on resilience all contribute to a more complex, better informed, picture of this stretchy concept (Walklate, McGarry and Mythen, 2014: 410) than if we were to focus solely on one aspect of it, highlighting a series of questions and points of departure to explore in later chapters.
Declared Resilience in the Face of Terror and Trauma: An Ascendant Relationship?
Events such as 7/7 and the speeches that followed are often cited as important discursive moments, particularly by critical scholars working with constructivist methodologies broadly conceived (Jenkins, 2003; Jackson, 2005; Croft, 2006), where it is possible to witness and deconstruct narrative construction in action. There is obviously more to resilience than the claims of politicians, but speeches such as the one above by former Prime Minister Tony Blair provide a useful and intriguing point of departure. Holland and Jarvis (2014) emphasise the important temporal and commemorative function such narratives serve for the public at large. Speeches following events such as 9/11 and 7/7 continue to be cited by scholars framing a range of studies including temporality and the war on terror (WOT) (Jarvis, 2009) and the genealogy of resilience (Zebrowski, 2016). Despite their usefulness in this regard, we must be cautious when placing unique importance on these events. Ideals of ‘Keeping Calm and Carrying On’ or the infamous ‘British stiff upper lip’ cast our minds back to at least the First and Second World Wars and even earlier, although the extent to which such mantras reflect some innate sense of Britishness, or whether they were simply wartime propaganda, remains contested.
Political elites have long attempted to affix a sense of unbreakable spirit to nations in the aftermath of great traumas. Similarly, attempts at counternarrative have a long history, particularly from anti-war activists. Pat Mill’s well-known comic strip Charley’s War, published between the late 1970s and early 1980s, is an excellent example of this movement, which tried to portray the sobering realities of war and violence – the antithesis of elite discourse both during the World Wars and since. Whether resilience explicitly emerged as an elite alternative to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’-style rhetoric or not is a moot point. Focusing specifically on its discursive deployment in the immediate aftermath of terror attacks, however, 7/7 certainly marked a point at which resilience discourse coalesced with material shifts in the organisation of counterterror and security policy (Bean, Kerӓnen and Durfy, 2011). The next section of this chapter looks more closely at these policies. First though, it is worth considering the deployment of resilience following 7/7 in more detail.
Bean, Kerӓnen and Durfy (2011) argue that in the days, weeks, and months following 7/7:
They go on to describe how ‘a people’ were activated in a time of great crisis. They identify Blair’s use of resilience cited above, as well as reference to the resilience of Londoners by Prince Charles after he visited survivors in hospital. They also draw together a range of references to resilience or phraseology synonymous with resilience discourse in the media (see also McGreavy, 2016). These sources, for Bean, Kerӓnen and Durfy (2011), evidence the presentation (whether real or imagined) of a collective subjectivity of Londoners, the activation of a British identity rooted in the Blitz spirit discussed above, and an illusory freedom granted to Londoners in which interruptions to economic life were minimalised by imbuing citizens with a proud sense of ‘bouncing back’. They usefully highlight that fears and, in some cases, racist retaliation following the attacks were successfully marginalised, lest they complicate the prevalent discourse of Britain as a resilient nation in which ordinary, innocent people simply returned to ‘business as usual’ and ‘got on with the job’.
Out of this collective wave of solidarity, Bean, Kerӓnen and Durfy (2011) argue, came a range of security policy implications that rode the coattails of this ‘resilient British identity’. This was mobilised, they argue, through the activation of a ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ which they define as ‘a political order that generally supports “universal”, “progressive”, or “cosmopolitan” values, yet translates those values into a distinctly nationalist vernacular to facilitate their codification into law or official state policy’ (2011: 429). Older categories of risk and security at local levels, such as physical borders, become less important than globally linked networks, necessary for neoliberalism to operate. The discourse of resilience, then, promotes not so much calls for human rights and protection as ‘international market moving’ (Bean, Kerӓnen and Durfy, 2011: 454). Their thesis chimes with that of Naomi Klein (2007), whose Shock Doctrine shows how major policy upheavals often follow in the wake of great disasters or national crises when populations are too physically and emotionally distressed and distracted to effectively resist their introduction. This sense of rupture, in the case of terrorism, has also enabled the portrayal of exceptional threats which in turn warrant exceptional responses (Agamben, 2005). While their analysis of risk and globalisation neatly dovetails Beck’s (1992) risk society, Bean, Kerӓnen and Durfy (2011: 455) acknowledge the importance of Benedict Anderson’s (2006) work on nationalism in Imagined Communities, providing a provocative and useful starting point for thinking through the policy legacies of 7/7.
Recourse to resilience was reiterated in similar ways more recently following the tragic Manchester Arena bombing and terror attacks in London in 2017. A review by Lord Kerslake into the response to the Manchester Arena attack refers to ‘resilience’ no fewer than 106 times (The Kerslake Report, 2018). During her Christmas Day speech, the Queen reflected on her hospital visit to meet with survivors of the attacks, describing the opportunity to meet with them ‘as a “privilege” because the patients I met were an example to us all, showing extraordinary bravery and resilience’ (Gripper, 2017). The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby echoed these sentiments a week later in his New Year Day’s message, with the threat and consequences of terrorism featuring centrally. The attacks in Borough Market, which left eight people dead, as well as the Manchester attack and other notable tragedies of 2017 including the Grenfell Tower fire, prompted the following reflections from the Archbishop (Welby, 2018):
Events of such magnitude repeatedly produce collective shows of solidarity. Community groups in Manchester and London were particularly active following the 2017 attacks, as were online ‘communities’. They enacted resilience in the form of street clear ups, poetry readings and through symbolic imagery such as the widely recognised Manchester bumblebee which now appears on social media, merchandise, and frequently as a tattoo design. As we might expect, such activity is heightened in the short to medium term following such events, particularly among those who were present more than those who witnessed from afar via television, and is then intermittently reactivated over time through commemorative ceremonies (Collins, 2004).
How, then, do we reconcile the deployment of resilience within policy on an ongoing basis between such high-profile events during times of relative stability? Talk of resilience in this context requires an actual or envisaged state of harm, vulnerability, or, more likely, trauma to which we must respond. As Scheper-Hughes (2008: 37) argues, trauma and our recovery responses to it are inexorably linked within ‘master narratives of late modernity as individuals, communities and entir...
