Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres [1st ed.] 978-3-658-15328-1, 978-3-658-15329-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-viii
Introduction: Resilience as a Perspective for the Analysis of Societal Processes (Marie Naumann, Benjamin Rampp, Martin Endreß)....Pages 1-7
Front Matter ....Pages 9-9
Resilience Constructions: How to Make the Differences Between Theoretical Concepts Visible? (Stefan Böschen, Claudia R. Binder, Andreas Rathgeber)....Pages 11-39
The Socio-Historical Constructiveness of Resilience (Martin Endreß)....Pages 41-58
The Question of ‘Identity’ in Resilience Research. Considerations from a Sociological Point of View (Benjamin Rampp)....Pages 59-76
Resilience from the Perspective of the Theory of Symbolic Forms (Martin Voss)....Pages 77-102
Front Matter ....Pages 103-103
The Resilience Discourse: How a Concept from Ecology Could Overcome the Boundaries Between Academic Disciplines and Society (Michael Meyen, Janina Schier)....Pages 105-120
Resilient Cities: Theoretical Conceptualisations and Observations About the Discourse in the Social and the Planning Sciences (Gabriela Christmann, Heiderose Kilper, Oliver Ibert)....Pages 121-147
The Emergence of Resilience in German Policy Making: An Anglo-Saxon Phenomenon? (Jonathan Joseph)....Pages 149-166
Resilience, Resistance, Infrapolitics and Enmeshment (Philippe Bourbeau, Caitlin Ryan)....Pages 167-189
The Imaginary of Resilience: Trauma, Struggle, Life (Julian Reid)....Pages 191-206
Front Matter ....Pages 207-207
Building Community Resilience in the Anthropocene: A Study of International Policy Experiments with Digital Technology in Jakarta (David Chandler)....Pages 209-229
Resilience as a Security Programme: The Janus Faced Guiding Principle (Stefan Kaufmann)....Pages 231-247
Chances of ‘Resilience’ as a Concept for Sociological Poverty Research (Markus Promberger, Lars Meier, Frank Sowa, Marie Boost)....Pages 249-278
Utilization of Resilience in German Development Policy—An Objective-Hermeneutical Analysis Exemplified by the Case of Welthungerhilfe (Marie Naumann)....Pages 279-303
Cultural Resilience as the Resilience of a Distinctness. Distinctness from What? for What? (François Bousquet, Raphaël Mathevet)....Pages 305-321
Resilience through social cohesion: A case study on the role of organizations (Bo Tackenberg, Tim Lukas)....Pages 323-344

Citation preview

Benjamin Rampp Martin Endreß Marie Naumann Editors

Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres

Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres

Benjamin Rampp · Martin Endreß · Marie Naumann Editors

Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres

Editors Benjamin Rampp Department IV – General Sociology University of Trier Trier, Germany

Martin Endreß Department IV – General Sociology University of Trier Trier, Germany

Marie Naumann Department IV – General Sociology University of Trier Trier, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-15328-1 ISBN 978-3-658-15329-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965235 Springer VS © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

Introduction: Resilience as a Perspective for the Analysis of Societal Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Marie Naumann, Benjamin Rampp and Martin Endreß Part I  Theoretical Considerations Resilience Constructions: How to Make the Differences Between Theoretical Concepts Visible?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Stefan Böschen, Claudia R. Binder and Andreas Rathgeber The Socio-Historical Constructiveness of Resilience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Martin Endreß The Question of ‘Identity’ in Resilience Research. Considerations from a Sociological Point of View. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Benjamin Rampp Resilience from the Perspective of the Theory of Symbolic Forms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Martin Voss Part II  Resilience Discourses The Resilience Discourse: How a Concept from Ecology Could Overcome the Boundaries Between Academic Disciplines and Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Michael Meyen and Janina Schier

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Resilient Cities: Theoretical Conceptualisations and Observations About the Discourse in the Social and the Planning Sciences. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Gabriela Christmann, Heiderose Kilper and Oliver Ibert The Emergence of Resilience in German Policy Making: An Anglo-Saxon Phenomenon?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Jonathan Joseph Resilience, Resistance, Infrapolitics and Enmeshment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Philippe Bourbeau and Caitlin Ryan The Imaginary of Resilience: Trauma, Struggle, Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Julian Reid Part III  Case Studies Building Community Resilience in the Anthropocene: A Study of International Policy Experiments with Digital Technology in Jakarta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 David Chandler Resilience as a Security Programme: The Janus Faced Guiding Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Stefan Kaufmann Chances of ‘Resilience’ as a Concept for Sociological Poverty Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Markus Promberger, Lars Meier, Frank Sowa and Marie Boost Utilization of Resilience in German Development Policy—An Objective-Hermeneutical Analysis Exemplified by the Case of Welthungerhilfe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Marie Naumann Cultural Resilience as the Resilience of a Distinctness. Distinctness from What? for What?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 François Bousquet and Raphaël Mathevet Resilience through social cohesion: A case study on the role of organizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Bo Tackenberg and Tim Lukas

Contributors

Claudia R. Binder  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), ENAC/ HERUS, Lausanne, Switzerland, [email protected] Marie Boost  Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) der Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA), Gries am Brenner, Austria, [email protected] Stefan Böschen  Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Aachen, Germany, [email protected] Philippe Bourbeau Université Laval, Laval (Québec), Kanada, philippe.­ [email protected] François Bousquet  CIRAD, UPR GREEN, Montpellier, France; GREEN, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, Montpellier, France, francois.bousquet@ cirad.fr David Chandler University of Westminster, London, England, D.Chandler@ westminster.ac.uk Gabriela Christmann  Leibniz-Institut Für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung E.V. (IRS), Erkner, Germany, [email protected] Martin Endreß  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany, [email protected] Oliver Ibert Leibniz-Institut Für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung E.V. (IRS), Erkner, Germany, [email protected] Jonathan Joseph  Univerity of Sheffield, Sheffield, England, j.joseph@sheffield. ac.uk Stefan Kaufmann  Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, [email protected] vii

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Heiderose Kilper Leibniz-Institut Für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung E.V. (IRS), Erkner, Germany, [email protected] Tim Lukas Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany, lukas@ uni-wuppertal.de Raphaël Mathevet  CNRS, CEFE, Montpellier, France; Institut Français de Pondichéry, Pondicherry, India, [email protected] Lars Meier Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaft und Kunst (HAWK), Holzminden, Germany, [email protected] Michael Meyen  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, G ­ ermany, [email protected] Marie Naumann  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany, [email protected] Markus Promberger Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA), Nürnberg, Germany, [email protected] Benjamin Rampp  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany, [email protected] Andreas Rathgeber Universität Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany, andreas.­ [email protected] Julian Reid  Julian Reid, Univerity of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland, julian.reid@ ulapland.fi Caitlin Ryan  Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands, c.m.ryan@ rug.nl Janina Schier  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany, [email protected] Frank Sowa  Technische Hochschule, Nürnberg, Germany, [email protected] Bo Tackenberg  Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany, [email protected] Martin Voss  Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, [email protected]

Introduction: Resilience as a Perspective for the Analysis of Societal Processes Marie Naumann, Benjamin Rampp and Martin Endreß

During the past decade the term ‘resilience’ experienced, and still experiences, an ongoing growing reception in several disciplines of the social sciences, particularly in sociological research. This research context includes heterogenic approaches on how to conceptually frame resilience in the light of various theoretical foundations. Common to all these approaches is, however, that resilience becomes topical in the context of analysing phenomena and processes of the ‘resistance’ or the ‘resistibility’ of certain (social) units or actors which are perceived as faced with various constellations of disruptive change—be those social, cultural, political, economic, institutional or organisational disruptions which become relevant in terms of a self-perception and/or a foreign perception and which are identified as threats, hazards, dangers, shocks, catastrophes, risks, crisis etc. in empirical perspective. Thereby, the guiding terminological understanding of resilience generally targets the identification of varied potentials of (social) units or actors in certain spheres of action—that is to say resources, dispositions and strategies—which potentially enable or enabled them to encounter a disruptive constellation in the light of existential preservation. Against this background, the present volume provides a preliminary appraisal of socio-scientific and sociological resilience research by assembling contributions of authors originating from different disciplines of the social sciences, thus, M. Naumann (*) · B. Rampp · M. Endreß  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] B. Rampp E-Mail: [email protected] M. Endreß E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_1

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fostering an interdisciplinary discussion on the theoretical and analytical potentials as well as the empirical applicability of the concept of resilience. Simultaneously, it provides an updated state of the art of social sciences’ and particularly sociological resilience research. To systematically approach this objective, the volume is structured in three parts: the first part contains four contributions which discuss the potentials and difficulties related to the previous and further admission of resilience in socioscientific and sociological research from a theoretical perspective, whereas the following two parts respectively assemble empirical analyses of its utilization in the context of various social, cultural and political spheres. Stefan Böschen (Aachen), Claudia R. Binder (Lausanne) and Andreas Rathgeber (Augsburg) open up the first part which focuses on “Theoretical Considerations” by pursuing the question of which different theoretical models can be identified with view to the utilization of the concept of resilience in different scientific constructions of resilience and how they differ from one another. Based on the findings of a quantitative empirical survey, the authors argue that four different theoretical models can be observed in regard to the scientific use of the term ‘resilience’ which, in turn, can be described by two dimensions: firstly, the underlying theoretical conceptualization (‘structural’ versus ‘process-related’) and secondly, whether relations to the context are part of conceptual considerations or not (‘context-resilience’ versus ‘self-resilience’). In the following contribution, Martin Endress (Trier) continues with a constructivist perspective on resilience. Having the overall goal of the development of a sociologically-viable concept of resilience in mind which current research is still lacking, he discusses the socio-historical constructedness of resilience from a firm sociological point of view which integrates both a social constructivist as well as a sociology of knowledge perspective. His theoretical considerations are guided by four central analytical dimensions, that is to say normative neutrality, temporality, perceptivity and power. Whilst emphasising quite different research-theoretical focuses, both of the above-mentioned contributions respectively make a claim for systematically approaching theoretical considerations on resilience and, thus, provide an updated, grounded basis for the further development of a (sociological) theory of resilience. Benjamin Rampp (Trier), in turn, places a firm research focus on the question of ‘identity’—or speaking more precisely from a social-constructivist sociological perspective: the question of ‘identification’—which becomes thematic in course of the nexus between continuity and change as a central, yet essentialistically understood analytical aspect of previous discourses on resilience. By visioning resilience as a non-essentialistic theoretical perspective on non-linear social processes, he discusses this issue by productively comparing analytical potentials of

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resilience heuristics on the one hand and figurational approaches to sociology on the other hand which, as he argues, both are, ultimately, linked to the analytical dimensions of scaling as well as relationality. The first part closes with a contribution by Martin Voss (Berlin) who analyses resilience through the sociological lens of the theory of symbolic forms and, thereby, discusses basic epistemological problems which underlie the previous scientific utilization of resilience at least in social spheres. Similar to the aforementioned contribution, he argues that theoret­ ical considerations on resilience have to strictly partake in terms of relationality and processuality as central analytical dimensions. The following second part of the volume includes five empirical contributions which respectively analyse different “Resilience Discourses” and, thus, focus on a rather meta-analytical level. Michael Meyen and Janina Schier (München) start off with a comparative investigation of the similarities and particularities of the utilization of resilience between different scientific discourses—among them (social) ecology, social geography, (comparative) economics, psychology and management research—and public discourses, that is to say the contexts of corporate communication of company-related health insurance funds, popular research and mass media. Their analysis, thereby, makes use of Foucault’s knowledgeanalytical considerations on the topic of discourse analysis as a guiding research perspective and, thus, draws upon his heuristics of different rules of discursive formation. The other four contributions, in turn, focus on specific societal discourses on resilience. Gabriela Christmann, Heidrose Kilper and Oliver Ibert (Erkner) provide an investigation of central theoretical conceptualisations which underlie the resilience discourse in the social sciences in general and the herewith strongly interwoven German planning sciences’ discourse on resilient cities in particular. Speaking more specifically, they analyse conceptual utilizations of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ in the aforementioned discursive contexts with view to their analytical limitations as well as to crucial desiderata and, on this basis, to promising theoretical and analytical extensions from a sociological point of view. Jonathan Joseph (Sheffield) comparatively analysis the emergence and utilization of resilience in Anglo-Saxon and German discourses in regard to two material areas of policy making: national infrastructure protection and overseas disaster and humanitarian intervention. He especially discusses if and in how far a neoliberal understanding of resilience—that is the emphasis of individual self-regulation and, thus, limited government intervention—comes into effect in these discourses. Philippe Bourbeau (Quebec) and Caitlin Ryan (Groningen) continue with an investigation which addresses the International Relations’ discourse on resilience which is currently characterised by the debate on how the concepts of ‘resilience’ and

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‘resistance’ have an analytical connection with each other. Instead of emphasising them in a substantialist-ontological perspective as competitive, mutually exclusive concepts, the authors advocate for a process-relational perspective which draws upon the disregarded mutual assistance of both concepts. The analytical surplus of considering ‘resilience’ and ‘resistance’ as complementary concepts is, thereby, empirically illustrated by the exemplary case of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Julian Reid (Rovaniemi) closes the volumes’ second part with a discussion of the analytical potentials of the concept of the ‘image’ or ‘imagination’ for the advancement of a grounded understanding of resilience in social, particularly political spheres. Thereby, the psychological discourse on ‘the resilient self’ within which this concept is highly prominent marks the starting point of his critical considerations which are decisively based on philosophical approaches. The third and last part connects six contributions in terms of a compilation of different “Case Studies” on the emergence, utilization and relevance of the term and/or concept of resilience in different societal contexts and, therefore, focuses on a more micro-analytical level. David Chandler (London) starts off with a discussion which critically explores in how far hacking can be understood as a mode of resilience in the context of digital policy activism. His considerations, thereby, are analytically strongly connected to the concept of the Anthropocene which is currently of growing interest in International Relations’ discourses with view to the research-theoretical challenges it evokes in the context of the study of security. In a thematically similar orientation, Stefan Kaufmann (Freiburg) continues with a contribution which concentrates on the career of the concept of resilience in security studies with regard to its creation as well as previous contexts of its utilization. The authors’ investigation is, thereby, analytically based on Foucault’s genealogical works and argumentatively closes with suggestions concerning development potentials for the further application of the concept of resilience in the fields of security policy and research. Subsequently, Markus Promberger (Erlangen-Nuremberg), Lars Meier (Frankfurt/Berlin), Frank Sowa (Nuremberg) and Marie Boost (Nuremberg) follow up with an investigation of the analytical surplus which can be identified with view to taking in a resilience-orientated research perspective in the course of sociological poverty research. With regard to potentially as well as virtually effective resilience resources, they comparatively investigate empirical cases of autonomously conquered poverty and, relating thereto, social re-advancement in contrast to a case example of social relegation and the herewith connected solidification of poverty. Marie Naumann (Trier) proceeds with an objective-hermeneutical analysis of the utilization of the term and/ or concept of resilience in the political context of German development policy which the author considers as a first step in the direction of a comprehensive

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‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’. In terms of an explorative analysis, she focuses on the internationally operating non-governmental organisation “Welthungerhilfe” which is considered as one of the central operational practicing actors in the investigated material context. Whereas the aforementioned four empirical contributions specifically concentrate on resilience in the context of a certain realm of political action, the following two contributions emphasise a firm cultural and organisational perspective on resilience and, thereby, both explicitly focus on the so-called concept of community resilience. Given that previous discourses already identify the role of a cultural dimension as centrally linked to the understanding of the concept of community resilience, François Bousquet and Raphaël Mathevet (Montpellier) discuss whether this linkage has to be considered as a question of ‘the resilience of a culture itself’ or of ‘resilience through culture’. Arguing from a social-constructivist perspective, the authors identify the perception of identity and, thereto related, distinctness as the central issue with which the aforementioned ambiguous question deals. Their considerations are illustrated with view to an analysis of the empirical case example of the Spanish festival “La Romeria del Encuentro” which is organised by and yearly held in Mauguio to celebrate the Spanish ‘culture’ or rather ‘identity’ of this French municipality. Bo Tackenberg and Tim Lukas (Wuppertal) close the volume with a contribution which empirically investigates the role of social cohesion as a central factor for building and enhancing community resilience in the context of the work of civil protection organisations. Thereby, the authors’ considerations are based on a critical review of previous socio-scientific approaches which frame social trust, shared values and norms, reciprocity, participation and social networks as main aspects of social cohesion in a community. The editors are convinced that the concept of resilience offers interesting and promising ways to approach central societal subjects and spheres of action in the context of the social sciences in general and sociology in particular. Against this background, the present volume shall be understood as an attempt to comprehensively mark the variety of theoretical as well as empirical possibilities to embed and develop previous understandings and conceptualisations of resilience with regard to genuine socio-scientific and sociological questions and issues. In a research pragmatic perspective, it is, moreover, considered to foster the interdisciplinary dialogue on resilience in the aforementioned scientific disciplines. The volume, thereby, is associated with an intensive discussion which took and still takes place in the context of the DFG-research group “Resilience. Phases of Societal Upheaval in Dialogue between Medieval Studies and Sociology” at the

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University of Trier which examines socio-historical processes between the 13th and 16th century and analyses how the concept of resilience can be transferred to add more analytical insights to the investigations of these historical constellations. We would like to take the opportunity to warmly thank all involved colleagues as well as contributors of this volume for the interesting and inspiring conversations which we have had so far and which, ultimately, led to this book publication. At this point, we also want to express special thanks to David Chandler, Gabriela Christmann and Jonathan Joseph who not only contributed to this volume but also enriched the research groups’ work with their research stays and guest lectures at the University of Trier as well as to Antonia Hofmann for the editorial preparation of this volume. With this publication the editors hope to provide a further impetus for both a critical and a constructive discussion of the role and relevance of resilience in the context of the social sciences and sociology.

Naumann, Marie  (M.A.) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Trier where she studied Sociology and German Studies until 2015. She is currently working as a Research Assistant in a DFG-funded project which examines socio-historical processes between the 13th and 16th century by analysing how the concept of resilience can be used to add more analytical insights to the investigations of these historical constellations (“Resilience. Phases of Societal Upheaval in Dialogue between Medieval Studies and Sociology”/Project “Theory of Resilience”, University of Trier). Therein integrated, her dissertation project focuses on resilience as a concept of societal self-observation. Her research interests include the following topics: Social Resilience, Sociology of Knowledge, Qualitative Methods of Social Research, Perspectives and Methods of Discourse Analysis. Rampp, Benjamin  (Dr. phil.) is a Postdoc Research Associate at the University of Trier in the DFG-funded research group “Resilience. Phases of Societal Upheaval in Dialogue between Medieval Studies and Sociology”. His areas of interest are Sociological Theory, Political Sociology, Sociology of Trust, Security Studies, Governmentality and Resilience. Relevant publications: Blum, S., Endress, M., Kaufmann, S. & Rampp, B. (2016). Soziologische Perspektiven. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 151–177). Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2015). Resilienz als Perspektive auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse: Auf dem Weg zu einer soziologischen Theorie. In M. Endress & A. Maurer (eds.), Resilienz im Sozialen. Theoretische und empirische Analysen (pp. 33–55). Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2014). Resilienz als Prozess transformativer Autogenese: Schritte zu einer soziologischen Theorie. Behemoth. A Journal on Civilisation 7 (2), 73–102.

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Endreß, Martin (Prof. Dr.) is Professor of General Sociology at University of Trier, ­Germany. His areas of interest are Sociological Theory, Political Sociology, Sociology of Knowledge, Sociology of Trust and Resilience. Relevant publications: Endress, M. (2018). Soziologische Theorien kompakt. 3rd rev. and ext. ed. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter; Endress, M. & Nicolae, S. (eds.). (2016). The social construction of reality. Human Studies 39 (1), Special Issue; Blum, S., Endress, M., Kaufmann, S. & Rampp, B. (2016). Soziologische Perspektiven. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 151–177). Wiesbaden: Springer; Endress, M. (2015). Prozesse von Resilienz – eine neue Perspektive auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse. In M. Thomas & U. Busch (eds.), Transformation im 21. Jahrhundert. Theorien – Geschichte – Fallstudien. Vol. I (pp. 115–131). Berlin: trafo; Endress, M. (2015). The social constructedness of resilience. Social Sciences 4, 533–545. http://http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/4/3/533/; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2015). Resilienz als Perspektive auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse: Auf dem Weg zu einer soziologischen Theorie. In M. Endress & A. Maurer (eds.), Resilienz im Sozialen. Theoretische und empirische Analysen (pp. 33–55). Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endress, M., Maurer, A. (eds.) (2015). Resilienz im Sozialen. Theoretische und empirische Analysen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2014). Resilienz als Prozess transformativer Autogenese: Schritte zu einer soziologischen Theorie. Behemoth. A Journal on Civilisation 7 (2), 73–102.

Part I Theoretical Considerations

Resilience Constructions: How to Make the Differences Between Theoretical Concepts Visible? Stefan Böschen, Claudia R. Binder and Andreas Rathgeber 1 Resilience Constructions: Differences as a Problem The concept of resilience has performed an amazing career. Starting out in some selected disciplines, such as psychology (e.g., Nöker and Petermann 2008) and ecology (e.g., Gunderson et al. 2010), it has been applied in a vast variety of disciplines including natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences (see Gabriel 2005; Günther 2009; Folke et al. 2010; Brand et al. 2011; Mergenthaler 2012; Endress and Maurer 2015; overview: Wink 2016). Resilience deals with the characteristics of individuals, units—more abstractly: entities—that enable them to not only maintain their identity in face of unusual or critical situations, but to potentially even emerge strengthened from such stressful situations. Its concurrent appearance seems to indicate the far-reaching impact of at present transformation processes. The concept of resilience comes into play when individual entities (no matter if these are individuals, groups or states) must prove their abilities and competences to face the challenges generated in the turmoil of c­ ontemporary S. Böschen ()  Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Aachen, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] C. R. Binder  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), ENAC/HERUS, Lausanne, Switzerland E-Mail: [email protected] A. Rathgeber  Universität Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_2

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dynamics. Resilience is the ability to resist to these challenges. The way this ­ability plays out depends not only on the specific capacities of an entity but also on its context. As the concept of resilience is used by many disciplines and for a wide range of purposes, different ways of theorizing resilience are observed. This is why there are different entities and challenges, many and very different disciplines have been using and interpreting the concept of resilience in a—from their own perspective—fruitful way. Thus, it has also been argued that resilience might be a useful concept for interdisciplinary cooperation (see Günther 2009; Wink 2016). However, although the interdisciplinary application could be seen as useful, the different conceptualizations of resilience suggest that it is too simple to claim the interdisciplinary function of the concept as such. We argue that first of all, the wide-spread usefulness of one and the same concept should make us suspicious and raise some questions. Why could this concept undergo such a career? More specifically with regard to the epistemological form: how is the conceptualization of resilience related to the different applications? Scholars have shown that there are some relevant differences among the ways in which resilience is conceptualized. On the one hand, the different conceptualisations emerge because the respective studies have very different targets (e.g., Biggs et al. 2012). On the other hand, they depend on the theoretical-­conceptual background of the respective reference discipline (see, e.g., Olsson et al. 2014). In addition, it has been reported that the differences do not necessarily imply that the theoretical concepts are totally distinct from each other—on the contrary, there are some remarkable similarities in the design of resilience concepts (see Barrett and Constas 2014). We postulate that the different constructions of resilience are based on different theoretical models. These vary not so much in relation to a specific discipline (as, e.g., Olsson et al. 2014 suggest), but rather in respect to the issues addressed in the scope of specific research projects (see Böschen et al. 2017). Moreover, we hypothesize that a limited number of ­different theoretical models can be identified. The following considerations try to answer the double question of whether the projects of a research consortium (on resilience) differ based on the theoretical models they use, and if so how these differences can be classified with regard to specific theoretical features. To put it short, we find that these models can be described by two dimensions, first, the underlying theoretical conceptualization (structural versus process-related) and second, whether relations to the context are part of conceptual considerations or not (context-resilience versus self-resilience). In light of this, our argumentation follows four steps: The first step shows that something like a shared core can, in fact—contrary to the assumptions of ­differences among

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the concepts—be found in the term of resilience (chap. 2). In the second step, in a quantitative analysis, we present the differences of theoretical models of projects of a research consortium (on resilience). To do so, we run a factor analysis based on a survey on the utilization of resilience aspects within the projects. We found that 5 factors explain the differences among the projects’ conceptualization of resilience (chap. 3). Third, we further uncover these differences by analysing the results of the factor analysis in relation to the different groups of theoretical models found, and by highlighting one exemplary project per group (chap. 4). In the final fourth step, we bundle the results from these presentations by illuminating the connection between the theoretical models and the application of the term resilience. Finally, we develop perspectives for future resilience research while reflecting on the chosen theoretical presuppositions. This is also a prerequisite for being able to cooperate in trans- and interdisciplinary projects (chap. 5).

2 Theoretical Models of Resilience The dynamic in the development of concepts of resilience has already led to a diversity that is difficult to oversee. This is reflected in the fact that a large number of studies was set up in the last decade to structure the discourses from various disciplines and to put them at a relationship to each other (see Olsson et al. 2014; Wink 2016). In light of the differences among the theoretical models as presented above, the following observations appear particularly relevant: On the one hand, specific individual indicators of resilience seem to make up the shared analytical core of the term as they are widely used, e.g. the bounce-back ability or adaptability or transformativity (see Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). On the other hand, it becomes evident that the way in which these indicators are used is anything but consistent and that the architecture of these individual indicators varies as well. This leads us to the above mentioned hypothesis that there are different underlying theoretical concepts of resilience. Analyses of the differences among the theoretical concepts of resilience have focused so far on normative motives (see, e.g., Olsson et al 2014) or varying goals of the analysis, e.g., enhancement of theoretical understanding versus practical application (see, e.g., Biggs et al. 2012). However, we consider that these explanations are not sufficient. The explanations may be plausible because the concept of resilience is relatively easy to apply in several disciplines and for manifold ways of problem constructions. However, doing so, they underestimate the ­ problem-transforming quality of ways in which resilience is understood. Therefore, it seems to be much more promising to initially look at the constructional act of problem generation and

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to then take a close look at the theoretical architecture of resilience used by the scientists. We propose that this architecture is closely related to the selected theoretical model of resilience. A theoretical model thereby is defined is a basal analytical form for both opening up new areas of empirical research as well as offering explanatory interpretation of phenomena and which can be used independently of the specific object examined. Typically, such a theoretical model results from taking a basic path for theory development, especially by selecting basic categories (e.g., specific indicators) and putting them into a coherent form. In physics, a relativistic perspective fundamentally differs from a classical one. In resilience research, a structural perspective differs from a process-related one, accordingly. Additionally, the context also differs in problem-oriented research, to which resilience research belongs to. Whether and how is this context considered and to which extent does it shape the theoretical model? An entity can be understood as a monad and thus with the status of a lone fighter against its environment—or vice versa, the resilience consideration may make the links and interdependencies between entities and their environment the core of a resilience analysis. Before we present this in detail, we want to note that there are important shared features in resilience analysis in spite of the postulated differences in theory-building in resilience research.

2.1 Basic Elements in Definition(s) of Resilience Looking at an overview of attempts to define resilience (see Holling 1973; Adger 2000; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013), none of them offers a comprehensive definition, but we can identify some common, basic elements. Resilience means the ability or characteristic of an entity (individual, actor, system) to react to crisislike impacts in a way that maintains or even increases its ability to act while maintaining its own identity. This is shown in the following core elements of resilience definitions: 1. Continuity of existence. Initially, the further, i.e., future continuous existence of a unit, is considered a central aspect. It is by definition not possible for an entity to react resiliently by any form of self-destruction. The altruistic sacrifice for a community is typically not subsumed when we talk about resilience (Holling 1973; Walker et al. 2004), even if the altruistic sacrifice were the case from the point of view of the community itself (we refer to this duality as the differentiation between self- and context-resilience; see below).

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2. Preservation of core properties. This criterion deals with the form of preservation of the entity. Preservation of identity hardly means that an entity will not change at all. Instead, independently on whether a resilient reaction simply takes the form of a bounce-back or a far-reaching system change, in any case the entity has to remain identifiable and therefore finally describable with selected properties (Walker et al. 2004). 3. Event that acts or is interpreted as a disturbance. Resilience mostly appears in reaction to a specific event that triggers a ‘stress’ for the entity. It is initially irrelevant whether this is a factual or a perceived ‘stress.’ Following the so called ‘Thomas Theorem’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928) things are factual in their consequences if they are seen as real by social actors. Therefore, obstacles are subject to a construction process, as well as strategies are to manage such obstacles. 4. Situation-related management reaction, further development and reorganisation to create new options. This criterion finally treats the form of resilient reaction options of the entity across all existing differences. The resilient reaction of the entity takes place based on certain properties. These are usually based on competences, such as media competence or interaction competence. Such competences offer the entity options to react on events, which may reach from bounce-back to adjustment, to transformation, in a then resilient way (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). Therefore, resilience is always a relation with multiple points in which at least one triggering event, one entity and its reaction are linked to each other. Moreover, constructional moments are highly relevant. The perception of an event as a threat is a constructional process. Only in some cases, this can be condensed in a stimulus-reaction scheme and thereby in an essential way. The explicit design and examination of this relation, however, essentially depends on the respective specific theorisation of resilience. Which ways of constructing such theoretical models can be differentiated?

2.2 Two Dimensions of Theoretical Models We consider two dimensions particularly relevant for the construction of theoretical models: The chosen theoretical concept and the contextualisation of the entity examined. The first dimension (structure/process-related consideration) of theoretical models refers to the theoretical perspective chosen that aligns the conceptualization. It can focus on the structure of a system or on its dynamics

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(processes). For sure, structures and processes are necessarily interlinked. This means, structures can also be understood as dynamic equilibrium within processes and the procedural change in a system can only be measured making reference to its structure. But, there is a decisive difference based on which of the both perspectives is exposed and analytically put at the focus. The structure observation puts the system at the focus. This perspective on resilience is often used in social-ecological research. This is about maintaining a system and its functions; the focus is put on preservation (Walker et al. 2004). The process observation, in contrast, puts the learning capacity of a system at the focus. In this case, resilience means analysing the design options that preserve the innovation capacity of a system (see, e.g., Folke et al. 2010). The focus is on process observation, referring to changes to be assessed as resilient (see Luthe and Wyss 2015). The second dimension refers to the fact that resilience analyses necessarily relate entities to their environment(s) (Folke et al. 2010; Walker et al. 2004). It is often assumed that increasing resilience of one entity is aligned with an improvement of resilience for other or superordinate entities or units. However, what happens if increased resilience of one entity reduces the resilience of another one? Self-­ resilience (‘first-order resilience’) describes the resilience of an entity in the context of its directly related environment. As this perspective does not consider to which extent this entity promotes or impairs the resilience of linked entities, another type of context-relation has to be considered. We suggest to distinguish context-resilience (‘second-order resilience’) from the above-presented self-­resilience. It describes the specific resilience qualities of an environment of an entity. The contrast between these two forms of resilience offers a measure for making visible whether the resilience of an entity is related to the one of its environment or is de-coupled.

3 An Empirical Test: Four Theory Models of Resilience We performed a survey to explore which different interpretations of resilience were present in the different disciplines and projects. The survey was based on the “resilience questionnaire” for social-ecological systems SES (Walker et al. 2006), and was adjusted specifically to include key aspects of resilience relevant for social systems (see the concept of Lebel et al. 2006). The questionnaire was put together by the following sections: a first section elicited general projectrelated information (such as the disciplinary background and research focus). A second section focused on indicators indicating on how the projects framed resilience allowing for the differentiation of theory models (see Table 1).

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Table 1   Important indicators typically used in concepts of resilience and their assumed indication for respective dimensions (we also report indicators in the questionnaire which turned out not being selective) Indicator

Aim of question?

Structure/Process Self-/Context-

Resilience of self, and Does it make sense to – context differentiate between self- and contextresilience?

High: context-­ resilience Low: self-resilience –

Tipping points/­ thresholds

Are tipping points and High: structure thresholds important Low: process for the project?

Risks

Are the risks ­conceptualized as measurable factor?

High: structure Low: process

Actors

Are knowledges as well as motifs of ­activity relevant for actors?

–

–

Diversity

Which importance is laid on the diversity of entities related to the entity under ­consideration?

–

High: context-­ resilience Low: self-resilience

Connectivity

How important is the interrelation between the different entities looked at?

–

High: context-­ resilience Low: self-resilience

Adaptability

Where and how adapts the analyzed entity to a change in ­environment?

–

–

Institutions

How important are institutions in the theoretical model of the research project?

High: Structure Low: Process

Scales (­geographic + social)

Differentiation by type – and number

–

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It has to be noted that the relationship between theoretical models and indicators is only possible if the indicators can be allocated to a specific component of the theoretical model. Indicators are interpreted as information providers. This means, for example, that the indicator diversity does not measure the diversity of components of an entity (as interpreted by Folke et al. 2010), but determines the diversity of the setting surrounding an entity. Finally, some indicators cannot be related to a specific dimension or expression of it. The results of the cluster analysis, combined with individual project analyses, permit an initial typology of theoretical models of resilience. The first dimension in the topology defines the basic orientation in the concept, with either stability (structure) or growth (process) being the issue to be theorised. The second dimension defines the relevance of context for the resilience concept and distinguishes between self-resilience and context-resilience. Based on this, four theoretical models of resilience can be distinguished (see Table 2). In order to analyse and interpret the differences between the groups, a principal component analysis was conducted as well. In the scope of this, the most important factors for the different projects are identified (see Hartung and Elpelt 2007). The basis comprised all groups of questions as given in Böschen et al. (2017), with the exception of the questions regarding the scales. The latter were not used, as in Böschen et al. (2017), because these questions were based on a different scale. For this, the answers to the groups of questions were transformed into factors using a principal component analysis. It becomes evident that five factors are sufficient to explain 86% of the variance of the answers. These five factors were rotated in the second step, in order to provide better interpretation opportunities. The loading matrix resulting according to the Varimax rotation is presented below. It indicates which answers are included in the calculation of each individual factor and how strongly. Table 2   Typology of Theoretical models of resilience Perspective to Context Theoretical Concept Structure

Process

Closed (Self-Resilience)

Focus of research: entities, their Focus of research: entities, their reaction and change form and stability Expansion Model (Gr III) Stability Model (Gr I)

Open (Context-Resilience)

Focus of research: entities, their stability in relation to a specified context Interference Model (Gr IV)

Focus of research: entities, their co-stabilization in relation to the context Transformation Model (Gr II)

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Table 3 shows that the first factor is strongly characterised by the difference between the context and conceptualisation perspective, or more specifically: positively dependent on the resilience order and negatively on tipping points/ thresholds. Similar findings can be made for the second factor. Again, the context perspective (here: the diversity) is applied positively and the conceptualisation perspective (risks) negatively. The third factor is strongly determined by entity, adaptability and connectivity and negatively affects the context variables with the latter. While the fourth factor is not characterised by the two perspectives, the conceptualisation perspective is relevant for the fifth one. This primarily negatively affects the institutions and positively affects the thresholds. All in all, factor 1 and 2 reflect the differences between the perspectives, while factors 3 and 5 are assigned to one perspective each (rather negatively charged). Even though the fourth factor cannot be assigned to the perspectives, it is a factor that helps distinguish the projects. It positively affects time and negatively affects normativity. Table 3   Rotated loading vectors for the first five factors (Method Varimax)

Entity Order

Factor 1

Factor 2

Factor 3

Factor 4

Factor 5

0.03

−0.10

0.34

−0.04

−0.06

0.66

0.16

0.16

0.13

0.31

0.13

0.14

0.17

0.45

−0.03

0.04 Context

Time Risks

Concept

Tipping Points

Concept

Actors

−0.01

−0.05

−0.80

0.35

−0.02

0.03

−0.13

0.12

−0.68

0.14

0.17

0.07

0.33

−0.25

0.01

−0.08

0.39

−0.07

Diversity

Context

0.01

0.48

Institutions

Concept

0.00

0.06

0.05

0.05

Connectivity Context

0.15

Adaptability

−0.03

−0.18

−0.43

−0.12

0.17

−0.70

Normativity

0.13

−0.04

0.02

0.13

−0.27

−0.61

−0.27

0.14

0.13

−0.85

0.00

0.07 −0.07

Direction Contextconcept

Contextconcept

Context

Most Order important

Diversity

Besides Normativ- Instituadaptability ity tions

Factors

Risks

Connectivity Time

Tipping points

Concept

Tipping points

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In the last step, the values of the factors in the four theory models are determined. For this, the values of factors 1–5 for the individual projects are calculated (Table 4). They are determined and then the arithmetic average is calculated across all projects that were assigned to a model in the cluster analysis at Böschen et al. (2017) (Table 5). Against this background, the first important question is whether the identified factors can be related to the four theory models of resilience highlighted before. By grouping concepts and factors, one can first state that the process-related concepts have a positive value of factor 5 while the structure-oriented concepts have a negative one. Similarly positive values of factor 3 coincide with a context-­ resilience whilst negative value are in line with the self-resilience. The results related to factor 1 and 2 seem to be a bit more puzzling. This is why this factor combines contrasting elements. Therefore, the extreme values positive are related to a contextual and process related perspective and vice versa. By emphasizing specific qualities one gets the following connection between models and the main factors (cf. Table 6).

Table 4   Value of the factors for the different projects. (In bold are the sample projects analyzed in detail) Projects

Group

Factor 1

Factor 2

Factor 3

Factor 4

Factor 5

2

I

0.03

0.06

I

0.07

0.90

0.71

−0.55

8

II

−0.27

−0.67

0.50

9

0.16

0.48

0.07

0.10

11

II

0.17

0.20

3

III

−0.02

0.60

4

III III

−0.11

0.37

7

−0.40

−0.90

−0.55

12

III

0.60

−0.07 0.09

13

III

0.33

1

IV

5

IV

−0.64

6

IV

10

IV

Mean Standard Deviation

0.57

0.62

−1.00 0.16

−0.39

−0.02

0.50

−0.23

−1.00

−0.55

−0.25 0.07

0.38

0.23

1.00

0.91

0.70

0.17

0.78

0.31

−0.04

−0.73

0.02

0.41

0.07

−0.25

−0.07

0.17

0.44

0.00

0.70

−1.00

−0.10

1.00

−0.51

0.18

−0.21

0.47

0.21

0.26

0.30

0.36

0.36

0.46

−0.57

−0.32

−0.15

0.49

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Table 5  Value of the factors for the different projects. (Depicted in bold are the groups with the highest and lowest values) Factor 1 Gr III

0.34

GR IV

−0.47

GR I Gr II

Factor 2 −0.21

−0.45

−0.12

−0.30

0.33

0.07

Factor 3

Factor 4

Factor 5

0.43

0.45

0.28

0.01

0.53

0.70

0.39

−0.24

0.13

−0.23

−0.78

−0.40

Table 6   Typology of theoretical models of resilience and the related factors Perspective to Context

Theoretical Concept Structure

Process

Closed (Self-Resilience)

Focus of research: entities, their form and stability Factors: (negative Values for factor 2), positive value of factor 3, almost positive factor 4 and negative value of factor 5 Stability Model (Gr I)

Focus of research: entities, their reaction and change Factors: about zero for factor 2, slightly positive value on factor 3, positive value for factor 4 and slightly positive value of 5 Expansion Model (Gr III)

Open Focus of research: entities, their (Context-Resilience) stability in relation to a specified context Factors: about zero value of factor 2 and negative value of factor 3, (almost positive value for factor 4) Interference Model (Gr IV)

Focus of research: entities, their co-stabilization in relation to the context Factors: positive value of factor 2, (slightly negative for factor 3) and negative value of factor 4 Transformation Model (Gr II)

We saw within this section that there is a plausible correlation between the models and selected factors. Nevertheless, we found that the references between factors and models are not conclusive in all cases. Therefore, a deeper analysis seems to be appropriate.

4 Theoretical Models and the Construction of Resilience Such a deeper analysis should shed light specifically on the contrasting values of the factors discussed above. Some of the inconclusive findings seem to be related to the fact that the factors in some cases combine conceptual as well as contextual

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indicators. Therefore, the interpretation of specific values of factors becomes a difficult task. We assume that it might be helpful to look at the different theoretical models while doing two things. First, to discuss in an overview the different cases (i.e., specific projects) found in the collaborative research program. Thereby, the specifity of the different factors is reflected in an overarching way. Second, one selected project is discussed exemplarily per theoretical model. This is done to offer an insight why there are obvious inconsistencies in the relation between factors and theoretical models. Our assumption is that relations between models and factors are resulting in a more difficult picture as the indicators behind influence these. Thus, the four theoretical models of resilience are specifically detailed based on a qualitative analysis of selected projects from the examined research cooperation, highlighting the relevance and effectiveness of this theoretical-conceptual model formation.

4.1 Expansion Model (Gr III) Projects from this group have a procedural understanding of resilience and examine the reactions of the entities in change. Their object of study is the entity itself and its ability to react. Self-resilience is at the focus. All the projects have a positive value of factor 3, which is related to a negative value of the context-resilience indicator ‘connectivity’ (see Table 1 and Table 3). This matches not only with the perspective of self-resilience in this model, but also indicates a clear contrast to Gr IV—which is positioned diametrically opposite to Gr III. This is also indicated by a low factor 2. Looking at factor 5, one can see a positive value indicating a process-oriented view. Moreover, the groups Gr I and Gr III (both following a self-resilience perspective), which at the same time differ in the theoretical concept, are distinguishing most with regard to factor 5. Finally, looking at the aspect of the theoretical perspective, with one exception, the value of factor 1 is slightly positive, meaning that in these cases the indicator ‘threshold’ is low as there is a minus (see Table 1 and Table 3). This relates to a process-related concept for theory. Examples from the research cooperation are studies on the change of the media system (P7; Meyen et al. 2014), the change of the work organisation towards team-based work (P3), change of specific corporate structures under internationalisation conditions (P4), change to consulting structures from foreign policy (P12), and changing cascade use of forests (P13). For a more detailed analysis, we look at the project 13. In the scope of this project, a clear field of transformation is put at the focus, which WBGU (2011) also dealt with in its World in Change study: sustainable use of wood. WBGU

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recommended to support cascade use of wood from sustainably managed and certified forests (see ForChange 2017, p. 257). In light of this, the project turned to the question of how transformation paths could be identified in the scope of a defined wood use and forest system and which factors could strengthen or weaken these. Factor 4, which includes the order of time positively and that of normativity negatively, is particularly relevant for this project. In this case, it appears particularly noticeable that both aspects are of high importance for the conceptualisation of the project. Although the project raises a specific normative demand, it transfers it into analytically-empirical issues to specifically include the aspect of normativity only as a justifying background assumption. Furthermore, the project analyses long periods of time, asking about the conversion-critical relevance of time. This results specifically from dealing with transformation paths. Factor 1 indicates a process-related perspective as the indication of thresholds is low. This is why, as it has to be noted, that one selected research strategy seems to have led to this specific loading of the factor. This is based on the conceptualization of change within a model of interrelated systems, “[…], one is a socio(political)-ecological system under forest management while the other is a socio(technical)-economic system under industry management” (Bobar and Winder 2017, p. 194). This interrelatedness in the empirical situation corresponds to a theoretical model based on a process-related perspective. At the same time, several influences from the context were used to describe changes of the wood use and forest system. In describing the cascade use of wood, possible thresholds (indication for self-resilience) were given less attention in order to characterise the transformation processes in this. All in all, the project showed on the one hand that the forms of sustainable forest use and wood management did only multiply but also spread. On the other hand, it showed that this process was brought about by “institutionalisation of networking and innovation promotion” (ForChange 2017, p. 258) which also stabilised it.

4.2 Stability Model (Gr I) Projects of this group have a structural understanding of resilience and combine this with a closed context perspective (focus on self-resilience). This corresponds to an analysis of preservation and stability of the entity. It differs from group IV in particular in factor 3 (context factor), which refers to connectivity. The c­ entral difference from group III can be found in the context perspective of factor 5.

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Factor 5, which loads on institutions and thresholds, is negative in case of Gr I, whereas it is positive or group III. Group I differentiates itself from Gr II in factor 2, which contains both the context and conceptualisation perspectives in diversity and risks. Typical examples for this are the ecosystems (Holling 1973), development of economies under special consideration of the system transformation of Communism into a market economy or the conversion of legal systems (Frensch 2015). Both projects from the consortium that fall into this group treat issues of stability, in one case based on international economic disturbances leading to weaker legal prerequisites for an economic equilibrium (P2), and in the other case from digital change leading to growing relevance of media competence as a resilience resource (P9). Exemplarily, we focus on P9. Project nine asks a central research question regarding resilience: How does media competence develop from the teens into the young adult age? Is media competence an important resilience factor? (See Gralke et al. 2017a, b) The main proposition is that media competence is a (­protective) resilience factor that protects from potential risk factors such as the rapid media change and negative media effects, while at the same time serving to utilise the positive potential of media. It can be recorded as a central result that media competence correlates positively with positive development factors and negatively to inhibiting factors. However, a relationship between media competence and the scope of resilience according to Connor and Davidson (2003) could not be found, which is particularly due to the construction of the measure. Project 9 also showed that media competence correlates positively with the interest in politics in the model, which in turn influences the self-concept of young recipients. This provided initial evidence for media competence being a resilience factor for youths and young adults. Braun et al. (2018) describe resilience as a resistance fed by various resilience or protective factors. From a developmental psychological point of view, a protection factor is a measurable characteristic of persons or environmental conditions that predicts a positive development during the transition to adulthood. These factors ensure a healthy and successful development in spite of possible risks and dangers of the environment. The research project is thereby based on the seminal work by Werner et al. (1971), according to which resilient children were successfully integrated into the community in spite of harmful initial conditions. Project nine thus generally focuses on resilience of the entity and therefore on first-order resilience. Resilience factors therefore are personal characteristics. Media competence positively correlates with these protective factors, such as intelligence, mathematical skills, success at school, media diversity, interest in p­ olitics,

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self-concept, taking different perspectives, reading comprehension and speed and negatively with risk factors such as addiction to computer games or TV consumption. The latter is also due to the construction of media competence, which includes the difference between fiction and reality as an essential component. This interpretation aligned with self-resilience is strengthened by the interpretation of the factor analysis. Here, it becomes clear that factor 3 is very high in relation to other projects. The latter strongly includes connectivity. The resilience concept in this project can generally be viewed as structure-­ preserving. The focus is on the resilience factors observed at one point in time, such as mathematical competence or school grades from the academic area, or resilience factors such as an interest in politics from the social area, which preserve the structural characteristics of the entity. These factors may generally change over time. However, the change is not immanent in the theoretical model. They are only viewed in the scope in which cross-section analyses are made at different times. This is also evident in the answers to the open questions of the survey according to Böschen et al. (2017). Thresholds are only viewed as relevant there as far as the entity is no longer resilient at a point of time. This view is increased when looking at factor 5, which is positively influenced by thresholds and that has the lowest value in project nine. The second component of the factor ‘institutions,’ however, only has limited indicative strength based on the answers to the open questions, since the institutions meant here are not part of the underlying theoretical model. To the contrary, they only serve as exogenous social institutions such as educational institutions. Looking at the further factors, project nine shows a lower value for factor 1. The latter positively affects the resilience order and negatively affects the thresholds. Specifically assessment of factor 1 clearly presents the focus on self-­resilience (resilience order) and dominance of the structural perspective (thresholds). Interpretation of factor 2, however, is not clear. The value here is extremely high, which indicates context-resilience as well as a process-related perspective. However, the responses to open questions show that the item of risks was answered from the point of view of applied methodology rather than from that of the underlying theoretical concept. The value therefore is only partially indicative. It is also of interest that normativity is rather unimportant and that time is rather relevant. The latter is interpreted based on the methodology as well. All in all, it can be recorded that in spite of certain indications of context-resilience and process-related perspective, the term of resilience used must be interpreted as a near-prototypical stability model especially from the theoretical point of view.

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4.3 Transformation Model (Gr II) Projects from Gr II have a procedural understanding of resilience and examine the entity and its co-stabilisation in context. The difference between Gr II and Gr I as well as Gr II and Gr III can be related to factor 2. Hereby, projects of group II have a positive value of factor 2, while the ones of Gr I are related to a negative one. This is in alignment with the fact of a context-sensitive perspective (context-resilience). Interestingly, the projects of this group show a negative value of factor 4. This indicates a highly normative perspective as this factor is negatively correlated to the indicator of normativity (see Table 1 and 3). Projects from Gr II analyse, e.g., phenomena such as resilience and transformation of individuals, groups and their effects on society. These are projects where resilience of transformation or, as Olsson et al. (2014) call it, “the resilience of a new direction” comes to the focus (see Binder et al. 2017). This is addressed when theorisation takes place with a view to relevant contexts, i.e., when it is ‘context-open.’ In the consortium, this dedicated co-stabilising perspective is found in a project on basic questions of the ability to act in changing environments (P8) and a project on the relevance and specification capacity of normative orientation in basic conversion processes (P11). For a more detailed view, we look at the project P11. The question of transformation of society under the impression of global environmental changes moves to the focus under a specific assumption in this project. It is assumed that the previous strategies of problem solution, specifically the “socio-technical management” (ForChange 2017, p. 221), will not be sufficient to solve the problems that currently occur. Instead, the “future of our civilisation will only (be) possible through pervasive change to our life- and economic style” (ForChange 2017, p. 221). The contribution of the project to answering these questions is in exploring forms and the relevance of normative questions for design of this kind of transformation while focusing on the “correlation between pioneering groups in the civil and entrepreneurial society, value change and politically-legal institutions” (ForChange 2017, p. 222): “How (can) transformation of the current economic model and lifestyle be achieved (?) What may be leading ideas for this?” (ForChange 2017, p. 226). In the scope of this project, factor 2 is designed following the assumptions. The concept of risks is not relevant here. The concept of risk is specifically based on assumptions that are viewed as in motion and as changing in the scope of the project. Even more: it is specifically assumed that the previous assumptions of a management of transformation by science and technology must be questioned. In contrast to this, the aspect of diversity, which positively affects factor 2, is given a very high relevance. This aspect is in fact a central item for the project. It not only takes resilience as a fixed concept, but specifically explores the different

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interpretations and their productivity for solving problems in society. Additionally, the project assumed that “impulses for sustainable transformation of society … depend on many different actors, not least on the civil society and on pioneers and practitioners of cultural change” (ForChange 2017, p. 226). The two indicators of normativity and time specifically influence the factor 4. The factor of normativity is decisive in the scope of this project. The project is virtually based on a theory model. “The normative content of the resilience concept that is in the tension field between system preservation and context stability, between adjustment and transformation, requires basic clarification in the scope of interdisciplinary dialogue” (ForChange 2017, p. 226). Questions of normative orientation centrally characterise the theory model, with the project looking for answers in two directions. On the one hand, it exports all normative sources available for this, which not only comprise ethical, but also religious knowledge. On the other hand, the project sees a central result of own considerations in developing arguments for a “reflexive resilience” that is able to respond to challenges with a situation-related development of alternative actions and the corresponding flexibility of action (Schneider and Vogt 2017, p. 179). For the structure of the project, addressing basic conversion processes and conversion requirements for which it is assumed that they require a new manner of thinking and that new ­orientation guidance must be developed for people. At the same time, such orientation guidance come from a practice that has already been in use, but is not yet generalized (ForChange 2017, p. 228 ff.).

4.4 Interference Model (Gr IV) Projects of Gr IV mostly combine a structural understanding of resilience with the perspective of context-resilience. This group seems to be quite specific with regard to the factors and their values. Factor 1 is negatively loaded, i.e., thresholds are very relevant. This fits well with the structural perspective and the high relevance of the context. Factor 2 is also negatively loaded, suggesting a dominance of risks over diversity. Again there is a clear correspondence to the main theoretical conceptualization of this group. A structure-based perspective presumes that there are risks to keeping the current state of the system. Also factor 4, time, is relevant as these projects address the dynamics of a system under changing boundary conditions (context). In contrast, the results for factor 3, the context perspective, are not conclusive. In this case, we would argue that this situation is fuelled by the fact of combining the extremes of values in factor 1 and 2.

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The differences to other groups seem to be more relevant. Gr IV differs from group III in particular by factor 1, which contains both the context and conceptualisation perspectives (order and thresholds). It differs from Gr II in factors 2 and 4, which makes interpretation difficult. Typically, Gr IV spans projects for which several actor levels are relevant and that view extended time scales. ‘Nested’ ­systems are often addressed. How can the stability of a system, e.g., an energy system or economic system, be preserved in interaction with its context? In contrast to the stability model, change is not primarily viewed as a pointed interference, but as one that continues over time. Such projects deal with preservation of the function of an entity subject to transformation of the environment (Hecher et al. 2016). Projects from the consortium that fall into this group address paths of resilient energy system transformation (interference space regions; P1), examine operational structures at preservation of workability (interference space between employee and company; P5, Hurtienne et al. 2014), analyse the changes to legal regulation in contemporary societies (interference space between law and organisations; P6), or study stability conditions of highly volatile finance and raw material markets (interference space market and society; P10). For a more specific analysis, we looked at project P1. This project deals with the energy transition at the regional level, i.e., the Allgäu, a rural region in Southern Germany. The regional level is relevant as it provides innovative impulses for local design of the energy transition and for establishing new governance forms (Kunze 2013; Gailing und Röhring 2016). At the moment, regional initiatives and actors are, however, facing changed framework conditions, in particular regulatory changes on federal and state levels, that slow down the development of renewable energies and that make local implementation of the energy transition difficult (Klagge et al. 2016; Müller et al. 2015; Ohlhorst 2016). Regional actors therefore are confronted with the challenge of finding practices and strategies for successfully handling changing framework conditions. In light of the important role of the regional level for the energy transition on the one hand, and the current obstacles in the transition process on the other hand (see Sect. 2.1), the question about dynamics and resilience of regional energy transition arises. Thus, the research project particularly focused on the role of adjustment and transformation capacity in dealing with system interferences (Walker et al. 2004). An indicator-supported approach was developed to analyse the resilience of transitions in energy regions. The latter assumes that the energy system as such must be resilient (i.e., it must meet its function of supplying energy at any time in the course of the transformation process-structural perspective). Tipping points, therefore, play a central role. The aspect of how actors can create resilient regional governance structures that permit adjustment to changing

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framework conditions (context-resilience) is relevant as well. Stability and flexibility are identified as central characteristics of resilient governance structures. From the analytical perspective pursued in this paper, the following observations can be made: Factor one, resilience order and thresholds, is negatively charged, implying that thresholds play a central role in the transition itself. It is, however, not the same for both components of the socio-technical system. The technical system is less robust against changing external framework conditions than the social system. While the development of renewable energies quickly dropped as a consequence of changes in the regulatory framework, the social structure continued in the form of networks, organisations and responsibilities. The second factor links risks and diversity. This is also negatively charged in project 1, i.e., the risks play a central role. Again, there is a difference between the social and the technical systems. While the social system is characterised by a strong diversity of actors, increasing flexibility and reduced risks, the technical system (electricity) shows a low diversity—due to high energy imports. This low diversity in the technical system, connected to the financial dependence, is a risk to the resilience of the energy transition. The third factor that puts connectivity and adaptation capacity at the focus, has a neutral effect. This sounds counter-intuitive, nevertheless it indicates a relevant form of stability. The stability of the governance structure was centrally influenced by the connectivity between the actors and by the modularity of the actors groups. Structures were created in the Allgäu that permitted a stable framework for coordinated collective action while being flexible enough to integrate new actor groups and action modes. Only in the most recent phase can a growing instability of the governance structures be found that slows down the transition. In addition to the aspects mentioned, the context-resilience plays a central role. The development in the Allgäu region illustrates the creation of autonomous regional energy systems. Both the technical-material and the social dimensions of the regional energy transition are embedded into supra-regional structures that have had a supportive or impairing effect on the transition process itself.

5 Discussion and Outlook What can we interpret from our findings? In short, we can see that the four models differ in a relevant way, not only with regard to the formal factors, but also by looking at the different projects more concretely. The deeper empirical analysis of four projects has shown that the differentiation into the specified theoretical models

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is valid and that the factors represent a sensible additional dimension of analysis. The charge of the factors permits further specification of the theoretical model formation. Therefore, we would like to sum up the main differences between the groups—asking whether the four identified theoretical models correspond to a specific application perspective. Looking at the differences between the groups, there are two relevant forms of contrasting the groups. One strategy is the one of diametrical opposition. Thereby, we look at the differences between the Gr III (expansion model: self-resilience and process-oriented) and the Gr IV (interference model: context-resilience and ­structure-oriented) and the differences between the Gr I (­stability model: selfresilience and structure-oriented) and the Gr II (transformation model: contextresilience and process-oriented). With regard to Gr III and Gr IV, there are key differences in factor 1 (Gr III = 0,34 and Gr IV = −0,47) representing at the same time the extreme values. Moreover, it is the factor 3 indicating a clear contrast to the Gr IV diametrical opposite to the Gr III (Gr III = 0,43 and Gr IV = 0,01) and finally the factor 5 (Gr III = 0,28 and Gr IV = −0,24). With regard to Gr I and Gr II, there are key differences in the factor 2 (Gr I = −0,30 and Gr II = 0,33). Moreover, it is factor 4 which points towards a relevant difference in the theoretical model (Gr I = 0,39 and Gr II = −0,23). There are two arguments. First, this factor is related to the indicator of time and this category is used in the Gr I of stability model. Second, this factor is related to the indicator of normativity, whereby the Gr I projects are related to a perspective of objectivity (therefore the indication of normativity is negative) and the projects of Gr II have to take the normative dimension into consideration as typically different views on transformativity are part of the game. The other strategy is to compare the groups pairwise. This means to look at the differences between the class Gr I and Gr IV versus the class Gr III and Gr II, representing the overarching differences in the theoretical concept, as well as looking at the differences between the two classes Gr I and Gr III versus Gr IV and Gr II, representing the overarching differences between the perspectives to context. Comparing the classes (Gr I/Gr IV) versus the (Gr III/Gr II), one can see the following specific features. In this case, the factor 3 is combining the extreme values in one class (Gr I/Gr IV) = 0,7 and 0,01 versus (Gr III/Gr II) = 0,43 and 0,13. With relation to factor I the classes are grouping highly consistent as (Gr I/Gr IV) = −0,12 and −0,47 and (Gr III/Gr II) = 0,34 and 0,07. This indicates a strong contrast with regard to the theoretical concept chosen. Moreover, there is an interesting contrast in the factor 2 as the two classes each include the two values mostly related: c(Gr I/Gr IV) = −0,30 and −0,45 versus c(Gr III/Gr II) = −0,21

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and 0,33. This indicates that there are specific more options to construct processrelated models depending on the specific problem-description constructed in the respective projects. With regard to the second distinction (context dimension), there is the interesting fact that these groups each combines more or the less the extreme values of factors. E.g., with regard to factor 2, the classes spread as follows C (Gr I and Gr III) = −0,30 and −0,21 and C (Gr IV and Gr II) = −0,45 and 0,33. Or looking at factor 4, the classes are C (Gr I and Gr III) = 0,39 and 0,45 and C (Gr IV and Gr II) = 0,53 and −0,23. This can be interpreted that way that with regard to the contextual perspective the strategies of contextualization are highly specific and have to be related to the theoretical concept chosen. Nevertheless, some unspecific and inconsistent charges of the factors show that there is a further need for research. The questionnaire that was used for analysis of the resilience in the respective projects was derived from the questionnaire used by Walker et al (2006), developed for social-ecological systems. Since we focused on social systems here, the questionnaire should be further revised based on our experience after this first application. It has become clear that many questions that can be answered clearly for social-ecological systems are not suitable for the analysis of the resilience of social systems. In particular, terms such as thresholds, self- and context-resilience or adaptability must be defined more clearly and adjusted to social systems. Acknowledgements  First, we want to thank Benedikt Gleich, Herbert Mayer, Holger Sauter for their support in data collection and all colleagues from the research consortium ForChange for their cooperation and constructive criticism. Special thanks go to our colleagues Susan Mühlemeier, Romano Wyss and Thorsten Schilling for active discussion, valuable suggestions and notes on compilation of the essay. We also thank the Bavarian State Ministry for Science, Research and Art, which subsidised the projects in the scope of the Bavarian research association ForChange.

Appendix List of projects from the research consortium ForChange (see Böschen et al. 2017, p. 227)

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Topic

Question

Background discipline

Which discipline(s) is (are) the basis for your own work (regarding prior assumptions and methods? 

Research focus and research Which central questions (tasks) are to be answered question  by resilience analysis? Why should resilience of an entity by analysed? 

A1  B1 

C1  Examined resilience entities Which system (or which entity/which object) does (which system/object/entity the resilience refer to?  does resilience refer to?)  In what or against which influences/factors/etc. must C2  the entity be resilient?  Who are central actors/elements/functions? 

C3 

Which role/task/function do these have in their system (their entity)? 

C4 

1st and 2nd order resilience  What kind of differentiation between 1st and 2nd order resilience is sensible in the scope of this project? 

D1 

If so, please specify the level in the following questions, or state when the answer is about 1st or 2nd order resiliences.

D2 

Time 

What is the relevant time horizon for resilience analysis? (estimate if necessary) 

E1 

Risks, Uncertainties 

Which risks/uncertainties influence resilience (of the F1  entity)? 

Thresholds 

Can these be measured and evaluated, and how? 

F2 

How can they be dealt with? 

F3 

What relevant system-internal/entity-internal thresholds (bifurcation points) or sensitive balances are there and what are they made of? Are these developments reversible? 

G1 

Which attracting conditions (‘attractor,’ ‘Basin of Attraction;’ conditions that require a much higher effort to change) are there? 

G2 

Which thresholds lead to total loss of resilience and/ G3  or identity (irreversibility) of the examined entity?  Can these be measured, how and according to which G4  parameters?  How robust is the entity regarding changes to certain G5  parameters?  Are there important path dependencies or any other relevant historical observations on tipping points? 

G6 

Resilience Constructions: How to Make the Differences … Topic

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Question

What knowledge do the central actors/elements/ H1  Knowledge of the actors regarding examined systems functions have?  and their dynamics  How does the present knowledge relate to that which H2  is actually necessary or applied?  How is knowledge distributed (also within these actors) and which structures are there for the information flow? 

H3 

What role do which communication processes play to H4  spread knowledge and the flow of information?  Driving moments of the actors 

Options for action of the actors 

Diversity 

What drives the actors/elements/functions? Which values and leading images do these have (implicit/ explicit if applicable)? 

I1 

What standards and indicators (as operationalisation of the values and leading images) influence the actions of the actors? 

I2 

Which options for action are there for which actor/ element/function? 

J1 

Which of these action options are actually implemented? 

J2 

How can the action options or their implementation be improved? 

J3 

K1  How high is the diversity of functional groups/ elements/actors/functions? How many G/E/A/F are there? How many action options do the G/E/A/F have and how diverse are they?  How does the existing diversity influence resilience? K2  (Does it increase or reduce resilience?) 

Types and functions of the institutions that prevail in the system 

Can different groups/elements/actors take the same function in the system? 

K3 

How does this redundancy influence resilience? (Does it increase or reduce resilience?) 

K4 

What are the most important institutions (within the L1  system/entity)?  Is its performance appropriate for the task field/ resilience of the relevant entity? 

L2 

How may they need to be adjusted? 

L3 

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Topic

Question

Connectivity 

Which other actors/entities/system components are relevant outside of the entity? 

M1 

Which central interdependencies are there with them? 

M2 

Where are there interdependencies between the scales and actors (if appl., divided into within and outside of the “system border”)? 

M3 

Is there any specified structure between scales/actors/ M4  elements or functions (governance) and what is it made of?  How are the actors to be weighed regarding interde- M5  pendencies and resilience? 

Adaptability 

Where is there a need for action? Where should interdependencies be increased or reduced? 

M6 

What roles do communication and connectivity and interdependence play for each other? 

M7 

Which of the entity under observation or any important actors show adaptability (incremental adaptability)? 

N1 

Which of the entity or any important actors show transformability (fundamental adaptability)? 

N2 

Which of the entity or any important actors show N3  persistence (toughness/self-preservation/robustness)?  Normative aspects of resilience 

When is resilience good for other entities or systems? O1  (see 2nd order resilience)  What is the normative evaluation framework (laws, values, etc.) of resilience? 

O2 

When should resilience be promoted in an entity? 

O3 

Annex for factor analysis: This covariance matrix Σ of the reduced (demeaned) responses X was decomposed with

� = ŴΛŴ T into a diagonal matrix Λ of the eigenvalues of Σ and the orthogonal matrix Γ of the eigenvectors Σ (see here and below: Hartung and Elpelt 2007). While matrix

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Λ contains the explained variances on the diagonal Γ, the matrix Γ shows the factor loadings; this means that it states how strongly a factor is determined by a group of questions. The matrix decomposition based on the idea that the first factor explains the maximum possible variance of the data. Graphically, this means that the first factor is a (straight) line through the set of data points of the answers to explain the maximum variance. The second line then is orthogonal to the first one and explains the set of data points second-best. After having placed one line in each dimension and thus determined one factor each, the same number of factors as groups of question in the individual projects results; however, they are differently suitable for explaining the data and therefore have a different amount of information content (explained variance to total variance). This case results in the following image (Fig. 1). According to the Kasier-Guttmann criterion, it is evident that the first 5 factors suffice to explain 86% of the answer variance (Dunteman 1989). In order to better interpret the first five factors, the factors can be transformed. Therefore, the factor axes are rotated further, while keeping the origin of the coordinates the same. This technically corresponds to multiplication of the matrix of factor loadings with a transformation matrix T:

Ŵ ∗ = ŴT

Percentage of the explained variance

100% 90% 80%

70% 60%

Percentage of explained variance (single factor)

50%

Percentage of explained variance (cumulave)

40% 30% 20% 10%

0% 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Number of factors

Fig. 1   Share of explained variance by the factors of a principal component analysis (­percent variability explained by principal components number n in blue, percent variability explained by the first n principal components in red)

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The criterion according to which the turn takes place is decisive for the interpretation. The Varimax is one of the most common procedures here (see Kaiser 1958), in which factor axes are orthogonally rotated until the variance of the squared charges per factors has reached its maximum. The loadings are the weights (shares) that individual groups of questions have in the respective factor. The process thus maximises the share of the respective groups of question. In the last step, the factor variations in the four theory models are determined. For this, the variations of factors 1–5 for the individual projects Y (see Hartung and Elpelt 2007)

Y = ŴT X are determined and then the arithmetic average is calculated across all projects that were assigned to a model in the cluster analysis at Böschen et al. (2017).

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Böschen, Stefan  (Prof. Dr.) is Professor for Technology and Society at HumTec, RWTH Aachen, Germany. He studied Chemical Engineering, Philosophy and Sociology, and holds a diploma in Chemical Engineering, a doctoral degree as well as a habilitation in Sociology. His current research focuses on Sociology of Science, Sociology of Modernity, Risk Sociology—with special emphasis to problem-oriented research, technology assessment, the analysis of risk politics and risk communication. Relevant publications: Böschen, S., Binder, C. & Rathgeber, A. (2017). Resilienzkonstruktionen: Divergenz und Konvergenz von Theoriemodellen – Eine konzeptionelle wie empirische Analyse. GAIA 26 (S1), 216– 224; Böschen, S. (2016). Hybride Wissensregime: Skizze einer soziologischen Feldtheorie. Baden-Baden: Nomos; Böschen, S. (2013). Modes of constructing evidence: Sustainable development as social experimentation—The cases of chemical regulations and climate change politics. Nature and Culture 8 (1), 74–96. Binder, Claudia R. (Prof. Dr.) studied Natural Sciences at ETHZ and holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences and a Venia Legendi in Human-Environment Systems, both from ETHZ, Switzerland. She is holding the Swiss Mobiliar Chair for Urban Ecology at ENAC, EPFL and is the head of the laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS). Her research interests lie in analysing, modeling and assessing transitions towards sustainability. For doing so she develops inter- and transdisciplinary methods which are able to depict the key aspects of the ecological and the social systems and their relations. Her application areas are in energy, phosphorous, water, food and land-use in the context of urban, peri-urban and rural development in Europe and Latin America. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications in renowned journals such as Ecology and Society, Ecological Economics, Environment Science and Technology and Industrial Ecology. Rathgeber, Andreas  (Prof. Dr.) holds a W2-Professorship for Finance and Information Management at the Institute for Materials Resource Management at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Materials Engineering at the University of Augsburg. He is primarily concerned with resource management and finance and in particular the interface between these two disciplines. Amongst other journals, he published in Nature Materials and Journal of Industrial Ecology. Andreas graduated in Economics at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart and then studied Mathematics at the University of Augsburg from 1997 to 2001. He holds a Ph.D. with a work about “Multi Price Processes and Exercise Conditions for Option Pricing” since 2004. Between 2005 and 2008 he completed his habilitation thesis (topic: Determining Discount Factors). From 2009 to 2010 he was Professor of Financial Management and Taxation at UMIT in Austria. He was honored with the Science Award of the Kurt and Felicitas Viermetz Foundation in 2009.

The Socio-Historical Constructiveness of Resilience Martin Endreß

1 Introduction The multidisciplinary discourse of and about ‘resilience’ has achieved c­ onsiderable prominence especially within the last three decades (Folke 2006; Brand and Jax 2007; Kaufmann and Blum 2012; Wink 2016; Folke 2016). We find the term being used in a variety of ways and with a diverse array of meanings in numerous ­scientific, professional and even everyday contexts. Professional actors ‘observe’ phenomena through a conceptual apparatus centered on resilience; academic disciplines, meanwhile, use this concept to ‘observe’ both the everyday, professional (practicing therapists, pedagogues, psychologists) and political uses of the concept (‘the jargon of resilience’), as well as scrutinizing academic perspectives that deploy the term. When looking at how the term ‘resilience’ is typically used, it is striking that it 1) has a markedly positive charge (the resilience of ‘x’ is good, desirable, etc.), that it 2) implies both a supposedly clear knowledge about what is to count as a threat, etc., as well as what should be regarded as an appropriate approach and objective (within the framework of the management of resilience) and that 3) alongside a starting point taken as unambiguously fixed, the term also implies an

An earlier version of this paper was published open access in “Social Sciences” 2015, 4, 533-545 (Endress 2015a); https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci4030533 (ISSN 2076-0760; www. mdpi.com/journal/socsci). M. Endreß ()  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_3

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equally obvious endpoint of a process. The argument of the present essay is that, for the purposes of socio-historical research, we need to revise this normative, one-dimensional and temporal (teleological) character (Endress and Rampp 2015). The aforementioned problems and conceptual restrictions are mostly identifiable in the current uses of the concept of resilience, particularly, though not exclusively in the therapeutic, pedagogical and (developmental) psychological literature (Goldstein and Brooks 2013; Reich et al. 2010; Ungar et al. 2013). Hence, this essay seeks to highlight and discuss a number of conceptual problems and questions associated with a social constructionist reorientation of research on resilience to socio-historical as well as sociological ends. In the following considerations, I consistently refer to resilience as an (interpretive) perspective. The paper starts with some remarks introducing the social construction perspective (2), which consequently leads to a sociology of knowledge approach analyzing the current prominence of the resilience concept (3). I will then introduce a heuristic, which can help to develop a sociologically-viable concept of resilience (4), and add some concluding remarks on the three-part research task for which a sociology of resilience should strive (5).

2 Preliminary Remarks: Social Construction Perspective In what direction do the following reflections point us when they underline the social constructional character of ‘resilience’? What does this emphasis mean beyond the simple fact of perspectivity, beyond the various aspects of the concept of resilience that are accentuated in different social situations and its differing manifestations within them? What are we talking about when we refer to the historicity and constructiveness of ‘x’? And with respect to the case that is to be discussed here: what are we talking about, or which conceptual aspects are we emphasizing, when we foreground the social constructionist character of the concept of ‘resilience’ with respect to every instance of its usage?1 Generally speaking, a social constructionist approach to examining social reality—in other words: to understanding and explaining it—is geared towards this reality’s constitutive relationship to, and constitutive interrelationship with,

1See for further elaboration on these points and related questions: Endress 2008, 2016, 2019.

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certain interpretations, ideas and conceptions.2 This perspective functions on the assumption that when constructionist authors talk about social reality, they always investigate it partly as a result of the beliefs and insights of individuals and ‘collective’ interpretive models, just as social reality in this sense is also a topic and object of everyday conversations. This means that what social ‘units’ (individuals, groups, associations, societies, etc.) comprehend and in some cases communicate as ‘their view of things’ (or what can be reconstructed as such on the basis of their actions and words) depends on their specific situation, their specific interpretation of this situation and the expressive options, which are (objectively) available to them. Varying criteria of social rationality are mobilized in this context (Lepsius 1989), whose plausibility and potential for legitimation can be gleaned reconstructively from the interpretive schemes characteristic of a particular group, societal context or sociocultural epoch. In research, a social constructionist approach is necessarily beholden to a socio-historical comparative perspective. This methodological perspective compares ‘something’ with a view towards ‘something’ else; in other words, its observation of difference is only possible against the background of a reference to something allegedly ‘identical’ or against the background of a reference to another ‘something’ in light of which or in comparison with which the ‘something’ or the other ‘somethings’ can appear as specifically socially-constructed and, thus, as different. Therefore, this type of analysis is inherently relational (Endress 2000, 2011). This recourse to an antecedent comparative reference point, which can inevitably prove its value only through subsequent empirical analysis, constitutes an imperishable epistemological circularity, one that distinguishes an analytical social constructionist perspective as a continuous process, while at the same time underscoring this perspective’s relationship to the object that helps constitute it.3 Beyond a specifically sociological analysis of social reality, it can by now surely be considered both quotidian and scientific common sense that the various interpretations that arise, in other words the processes of coding and recoding resilience (or social phenomena from a resilience point of view), are dependent on attention structures and expectational horizons among the actors who adopt these perspectives in any given case, that is on their social situation. A sociological analysis that examines the concept of resilience from a social constructionist p­ erspective,

2The

classical sociological reference is here, obviously, Berger and Luckmann 1966. As for our current topic, see, for example, Bonss 1997 and Lau 1998. 3The same argument appears in Oevermann’s (2003) systematic reflections on the methodological classification of a social constructionist perspective.

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according to my view, should therefore scrutinize 1) the socio-historical genesis of this concept; 2) the typical groups of agents who use it; 3) the temporal-spatial parameters of its use; 4) the ideas or key concepts alluded to (or not) to explain resilience perspectives; and 5) the conceptual apparatus used (or not) on the basis of these ideas or key notions. The following remarks challenge a number of what I think to be crucial conceptual issues for the kind of empirical studies that will be central here. As an observational category, the social constructiveness of resilience is itself a multilayered phenomenon. If we want to be systematic, it is important to analyze this phenomenon with respect to the relationship between knowledge (as an interpretive resource) and spatial structures (Christmann and Ibert 2012), social structures (Lamont et al. 2013) and temporal structures and temporal layers (Koselleck 2000). However, it seems particularly important to reflect upon time. This relates to the time prior to events perceived as disruptive (ex ante), and thus, the question of what groups or societies (social units) identify as potential vulnerabilities and threats and as associated options for coping, adaptation and transformation (Folke et al. 2010; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013; Lorenz 2013), how or why they regard this resilience as relevant and what is regarded as the resilient unit, the ‘core’ that must be preserved, in other words the reference point of measures intended to achieve resilience (Endress and Rampp 2014). Examination of time also, and from the same angle, relates to processes and situations in the wake of disruptive events. In particular, it concerns the period following events perceived as disruptive (ex post), during which there is a reflexive focus on the perspectives on ‘resilience’ (and the measures introduced in an attempt to achieve it) that have de facto proven historically impactful and effective. Furthermore, of special significance are the consequences, side-effects and, in some cases, paradoxical effects of processes formerly interpreted as relating to the ‘production’ of resilience, effects that come into focus as a function of the temporal horizons of observation (Böschen et al. 2006; Endress 2010). To call for socio-historical and sociological research in order to take a fundamentally social constructionist approach is by no means to endorse a relativistic sociology of knowledge; this is an important point given recent discussions within the sociology of science and recurrent critiques emanating from objective hermeneutics (Oevermann 2003; Kneer 2009). The interpretive models introduced or harnessed to identify resilience come up against their limits firstly through internal-situational standards of appropriateness or criteria of plausibility and secondly, spanning situations, through categories’ constitutive rule-like characters. Oevermann (2003) refers here to “universal rules not amenable to material criticism” that generate sense or meaning.

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Current discussions on the monetary policies of the European Central Bank provide a graphic illustration of this difference. Various commentators have discussed whether the flooding of European markets with Euros serves to stabilize the Eurozone or whether it is in fact failing to do so. Evidently, this is in the first instance a question of the temporal horizon in which one aims to answer this question (in analogy to the question of the soundness or success and side-effects of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy at the beginning of the financial crisis). However, beyond this, it is a question of the criteria used to assess the quality of this monetary policy. Inevitably, this assessment entails intuitive judgements about what ‘essentially holds together’ societies that are or will be affected by this policy and about how these societies and their internal structures either ensure or do not ensure a decent existence for those affected. Such assessments or the grounds for such assessments (which are not explicitly discussed) incorporate dimensions of implicit knowledge or practical consciousness, or even intuitive elegance, that are nothing less than constitutive rules à la John Searle (1969). Therefore, from a sociological point of view, a social constructionist perspective is needed in resilience research in order to overcome its common normative, teleological and objective research perspective.

3 The Prominence of Resilience: A Sociology of Knowledge Perspective Among other things, concepts and their uses document dominant aspects of societies’ self-perception. The general observational climate is one in which terms such as insecurity, risk (which can be predicted or calculated only to a limited extent and is largely uncontrollable), danger, threat, hazard, uncertainty, crisis and disaster play a key role (or have played it for a good twenty-five years and will likely continue to do so). It is thus evidently no longer sustainability and/or progress or development that function as things to avoid or strive for, but rather phenomena that inform widely-propagated strategies for dealing with dangers, hazards or disasters; it is increasingly the concept of resilience. Many contributions have brought new spheres of society into the concept’s scope, for example, to foster resilient organizations and resilient types of democracy, while books on how to achieve and foster individual resilience as a means of resisting the imponderables and abysses of life are very successful. The question thus arises as to what is understood by resilience, by whom, in which contexts and to what extent this empirically-demonstrable shift in key communicative currencies expresses more profound changes, for example, in typical societal interpretations of social relations and of the social awareness of the consciousness of time.

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Why are various agents using the tool of resilience to describe, interpret and decide what to do? What does the evidently increased appeal of the concept of resilience consist of? Are there aspects ‘in the nature of the beast’ that reveal the concept’s current resonance as more than a fashionable phenomenon and render it comprehensible? What are the contours of the interpretive model of resilience? That is: which structures of self- and world observation or interpretation can be reconstructively identified as aspects of this concept or model? On the one hand, within society as a whole, key prerequisites for the (no longer quite so contemporary) career of the concept of resilience within the widest variety of scientific, professional, political and other discourses probably lie in the growing tendency, especially towards the end of the twentieth century, to reflect on the internal history of violence and destructive characteristics of the Western type of modernity. On the other hand, they lie in the parallel need to pay attention to the primarily scientifically- and technologically-generated scenarios outlining the extent of threats and damage (interpreted in terms of complexity theory), that is, scenarios which are also generated within modernity (Miller and Soeffner 1996; Beck 1986; Bonss 1995; Chandler 2014a, b; Blum et al. 2016). This dual reflexive movement sets in motion a progressive process of sociocultural unsettling. In line with this, the background to the career enabled by the concept of resilience for a number of years, including in the social scientific context, is a specific hallmark of (Western) modernity and the place of the human beings within the framework of this constellation: acting and interpreting are to be found constitutively in the “mode of fundamental uncertainty” (Imhof 2002). Various authors have identified a disenchantment of all cultural certainties and associated losses and pluralizations of criteria (loss of orientational, as well as ontological security). Others have diagnosed the dissolution of linearities of practical action, the associated multiplication of the simultaneous and of the perceived pressure of acceleration (loss of time for action). These are the interpretive cornerstones of a practice of living that is increasingly conceptualized as onerous. There are also communicative uncertainties: metanarratives’ diminishing relevance not only imposes significant obstacles in the way of all practices of legitimation, but intrinsically bound up with this are central factors in the dynamization of sociocultural interpretive resources, due among other things to countervailing processes and claims of rationalization. In this sense, the prominence of the concept of resilience may articulate a “new culture of uncertainty” that has bid farewell to the notion that it is in principle possible to achieve total security or controllability (Bonss 2010, p. 65; 2014, pp. 19, 29). However, what is the relationship and what are the interactions between the concept of resilience and other concepts and terms found in recent societal selfdescriptions? Here, we must surely ask in what respects and to what degree of

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importance certain concepts share such things as semantic aspects or key ideas with the concept of resilience or are incorporated into it. On the one hand, this involves concepts, such as those of endangerment or threatenedness, risk, crisis, disaster, but also prevention and sustainability, which are essentially a reaction to social and societal dimensions of the challenges specific to modernity. On the other hand, it also applies to concepts such as that of vulnerability, activation, empowerment, flexibility, creativity or (life-long) learning, which predominantly respond to the individual, subjective side of the modernity-specific hallmarks of the contemporary era (Lorenz 2013; Bürkner 2010). Overall, however, the conceptualizations of resilience that are being deployed primarily have yet to address specific problems, namely how the various challenges (described as disruptive and identified as threats to survival) are being dealt with in particular cases (that is, which strategies are being deployed and which practices are proving conducive to resilience) and which resources of a wide array of different kinds are (or can be) deployed, such that the survival of a given social unit (or its ‘function,’ ‘structure,’ ‘feedbacks’ and/or ‘identity’) is or might be preserved (Folke et al. 2010; Walker et al. 2006). If we attempt a typological approximation, we can distinguish descriptive-­ analytical uses of the concept and pronounced normative-interventionist understandings. Descriptive empirical perspectives limit themselves to the descriptive recording of what they view as ex post ‘empirical expressions’ of resilience, or in other words; their impact. Interventionist perspectives, in contrast, seek to conceptualize an ideal form of a given resilient unit ex ante in order to then formulate guides to achieving a state of resilience. In both cases, then, we find that resilience is currently debated as an objective of unquestioned validity given the challenges faced by both subjects and forms of sociality. By way of contrast, the present contribution advocates comprehending resilience as an analytical perspective on social processes or phenomena that examines when, by whom and to what extent (in other words, in recourse to which key ideas and criteria of rationality) something is regarded, or is and/or was communicated as threatened, or vulnerable, or at risk with respect to specific social units or phenomena. We would then have to examine how certain identifications and particular interpretations become or became established in this way or how identifications and interpretations of a situation established as relevant sets or set in motion particular processes of social action.4 In the following, I will try to present an analytical framework for such a research agenda.

4One

of these interpretations then proceeds to identify a process of neoliberalization, see Joseph 2013.

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4 Conceptual Revisions For the reasons set out above, if we want to develop a sociologically-viable c­ oncept of resilience, in contrast to the common use of the concept in pedagogy, individual and pe developmental psychology and therapeutic contexts (Goldstein and Brooks 2013; Reich et al. 2010; Ungar et al. 2013), as well as in social ecology (Folke 2006; Folke et al. 2010; Bonss 2014; Berkes and Folke 1998; Gunderson et al. 1995; Gunderson and Holling 2002), but also in contradistinction to the ways in which political science (Ganghof 2010; Longstaff 2010) has taken up the concept, our goal must be (Sect. 4.1) to adopt a normatively neutral perspective, (Sect. 4.2) to pay attention to the structural logic of reflection that ensues from the use of a concept of resilience, (Sect. 4.3) to conceive of changes examined empirically in any given case as processually open, and (Sect. 4.4) to take account of the agonal dimension, that is to include issues of power or interpretive sovereignty, since the concept of resilience is interpreted in a variety of ways that operate with differing references (postulates of relevance) and differing hierarchies of relevance.

4.1 Normative Neutrality In the first instance, it is hardly surprising that the resilience perspective entails a normative reference point. If we work on the assumption of objectively existing vulnerabilities and dangers and of target states that are also objectively identifiable or (social) conditions that are regarded as desirable, as manifested for example in objectives such as security, health or, more generally, social ‘well-being,’ then we are confronted with resilience as an essentialistically conceptualized condition, and they go hand-in-hand with a perspective that envisages saving all that which is identified as under threat. When it comes to the analytical interests of sociological enquiry, however, we must fundamentally question this perspective. A sociology of knowledge and social constructionist approach to resilience must inevitably relativize normative certainties with respect to their historicity or their dependence on specific temporal, spatial and social contexts and the parameters of their genesis, and thus, in other words, contextualize them (without, as noted earlier, endorsing relativistic arguments). The problem of the normativity of resilience approaches is evident in more concrete form when we look at the prominent notions of the resistance and survival of existing entities, which draw, among other things, on (normatively charged) ideas of normality and functionality and are therefore attacked for being

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structurally conservative.5 Though such a critique must be qualified since contemporary concepts of resilience, in contrast to a simplistic concept of “engineering resilience,” begin their analyses with not one, but multiple stable states (Folke et al. 2010; Walker et al. 2006), these concepts still tend to view the preservation of the (normatively) assumed identity of a threatened social entity as a positive goal, which means they (must) consider comprehensive, and especially disruptive, social changes as something that ought in principle to be avoided. This immanence of normativity in the approaches to resilience that have dominated so far underlines the general need to revise these contributions with a view towards including a resilience perspective in the sociological debate and theory building. From a sociological angle, every concept of resilience and every perspective on resilience must be considered structurally ambivalent in normative terms. Sociologists can neither distinguish a particular form of resilience and, thus, specific target states as normatively positive regardless of historical era, nor can they privilege specific measures that lead to or preserve this particular form as timelessly valid. Additionally, this is applied in both respects simply because of the substantial historicity of that which is marked out as normatively valid at a given point in social history.

4.2 Temporality When we turn to the analysis of time, we can then discern a peculiar feature of the logical structure of reflections on the concept of resilience (cf. Endress 2015b): this structure is paradoxical in the sense that for social units, the definition of resilience can only ever be identified and formulated on an ex post basis; in other words: their capacity to withstand certain situations that have proven threatening can only be established retrospectively, yet in considering the resilience of social units, certain resources must always inevitably be identifiable or identified ex ante as conducive to resilience. At the same time, within a particular era, something is always discerned or identified as a danger, as a threat or challenge to the survival of a social unit, with respect to which, in the past, this social unit pursued measures (actions, strategies) regarded as tried-and-tested or valued in order to secure a desired (hoped-for, routinely expected) future and repulse these threats.

5See,

for instance, Joseph, who points out “[t]he conservative ontology behind this” (2013, p. 43).

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In brief: in retrospect (ex post), something may have proven resilient of which actors previously (ex ante) had no awareness; i.e., that they may have had no awareness of an ‘object’ of possible resilience or could have had no awareness of such due to the observational perspectives that were objectively available to them in the past. As a consequence, every sociological analysis of resilience that entails a constitutive historical perspective must attempt to identify an identitarian ‘center of gravity’ that is continually developing in view of current challenges arising from processes of change; and must therefore itself be understood as a process (see Rampp 2019, in this volume). This is a center of gravity that we must in a sense conceptualize as a self-processing (temporal) core of identity, in order to clarify our analytical point of reference within the research process itself.6

4.3 Perspectivity It is also crucial to pursue and fortify this processual perspective, which views resilience as not absolutely present, but as a historically ‘open question’ and as an ongoing process, in the context of a sociological analysis of social resilience that continues to reflexively ensure the historicity of its ‘object’ and the historicity of its own observations. This processually open perspective, which is geared towards the perspective-dependency and level or layer relativity of social resilience, has already been addressed in a basic way in the models of the “adaptive (renewal) cycle” and of panarchy within socio-ecological research (Gunderson et al. 1995; Gunderson and Holling 2002; Holling 1986; Walker and Salt 2006). This, however, has not reached an adequate level for the purposes of sociological analysis. The specific problems that ensue from this perspective (a vital tool for sociologists if they wish to be historically aware and sensitive to context) are clearly apparent in the difficulties involved in determining the so-called ‘resilient unit’ that forms the focus of analysis in a given case. This is because the identificatory core of a social unit, which is central to a given analysis depending on its observational stance and is comprehended as worth preserving or protecting, constitutes this unit in the first place. The question of the perspective that is associated (ex ante) with a resilience concept for a particular social unit, and with the resilience

6For

a first attempt to discuss this issue in dialogue with classic sociological contributions, see Endress and Rampp 2014.

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strategies that are mobilized to protect it, is beholden to the identificatory core that has been singled out in order to define it. Therefore, regardless of problems that arise from the concurrence of resilience perspectives that enjoy formal analytical equality with respect to a social unit, what we must keep in mind is that when the identificatory core, with respect to which a social unit is discussed, shifts in the course of the historical process, the resilience perspective also necessarily shifts. At this point, we again see the significance of highlighting the structural ambivalence of resilience. This means that, firstly, an increase in the adaptability of a social unit at point in time t1 may result in a reduction in its resilience at a point in time t2 (as a result, among other things, of potential side-effect dynamics), and that resilience cannot be reduced to prevention and precaution (Lorenz 2013). Secondly, highlighting this structural ambivalence means that very different resilience perspectives (may) arise depending on the ‘core’ that is regarded as worth preserving and protecting against threats. In other words, resilience is a perspectival phenomenon; and in general terms, both aspects imply the problematization, if not renunciation, of teleological analyses that assume clear-cut causalities. Therefore, from a sociological standpoint, we must pay attention to processes of resilient existence-preservation, as well as the negative consequences of (objectively) failed strategies of resilience. In concrete terms, this means that (empirical) analyses must take account of side-effects in the sense of unforeseen, unforeseeable and even ignored effects of actions, discern paradoxes in as much as the direct pursuit of specific goals can make the achievement of these goals less likely, and pay attention to contradictions and processes that (objectively) contradict one another, i.e. track processes whose objectives clash (Endress 2010; Böschen et al. 2006). As cautious as we must be when delving into historical research fields, we may perhaps illuminate this analytical trope of structural ambivalence (particularly when making recourse to various temporal layers of historical processes) in connection with innovations undertaken by Charlemagne in order to secure his power. Over the course of centuries, the perpetuation of these innovations generated a pronounced destabilizing dynamic for structures of power. As the successor to Clovis I, Charlemagne tried to secure the Francia that emerged under the former around 500 BC, 300 years later, by creating a new form of political rule, vassalage, which involved granting his followers estates along with the peasants living on the associated territories on a loaned basis (‘fee,’ Latin: feudum). This innovation, which can be understood as a strategy of resilience, initially ensured stability for the empire through the profound loyalty and binding force that it generated. As this system was perpetuated over time, however, it not only generated primogeniture, but also a dynamic of hierarchization that led to a complex system of

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subvassals, with serfs at the bottom end of the status pyramid (lacking the status of person). This development in turn had substantial destabilizing effects.

4.4 Power Thus, any sociological research program on the resilience of a sociology of knowledge and social constructionist tenor must be rounded off by exploring which (social, communicative) constructions, perceptions, interpretations and knowledge stocks gained currency within a particular (social, field-specific) discourse, in other words: which achieved interpretive force within society, and how this occurred. What we need to investigate are the social fields, professional contexts and institutions in which concepts of resilience are enforced and various programs of action are propagated and implemented using these concepts (see, for example, Naumann 2019, in the present volume). In addition, we must scrutinize the groups of agents who make it their business to (re-)code resilience and to flag up their interests under the banner of resilience. These programs may be identified within the fields of ecology, health and selfhelp, as well as in the fields of security, social or urban policy. To flesh out what this means for studies which are mindful of the insights above, we can point, for example, to debates that understand and criticize resilience, chiefly through the prism of theories of governmentality, as a new form of neoliberal government.7 At issue here is the (seemingly paradoxical) shift and attribution of responsibility to subjects (responsibilization) in a context marked by (generally unforeseeable) side-effect dynamics. The corresponding techniques of power are frequently flanked by (ultimately cynical) attempts to label such allocations of responsibility as forms of ‘empowerment.’ Nevertheless, reflecting these contributions methodologically, I have shown that the neo-liberal, governmentality analyses of resilience and its use in diverse political, societal and scientific fields may be adequate to a certain extent in these areas, but it is not constitutive for a resilience understanding to a larger extent, which is thus not at all limited to this specific understanding. By confounding a discourse analysis and its ideology-critical impact with a perspective on resilience, which focuses on a special type of social processes, these contributions ignore the systematic use of resilience as an analytical tool in sociological theory.

7See

especially Joseph 2013, 2016, 2018; Neocleous 2013; Chandler 2014a, b and Bröckling 2017.

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To sum up, sociological research on resilience, which is aware of the normative neutrality, the temporality, the constitutive perspectivity, as well as of the unavoidable power-relatedness of the concept of resilience, will manage to conceptualize the phenomena in question as open socio-historical processes. Thus, a constructionist concept of resilience can serve as a new analytical perspective to identify former, as well as current social processes, which societies and social constellations undergo in historical change.

5 Conclusions What follows from the foregoing remarks on the social construction of resilience? Any sociological analysis of the use of the concept of resilience in contemporary societies and any attempt to sound out its analytical potential for sociological studies should take on at least a three-part research task that can be differentiated analytically. It must 1) study the genealogy (the ‘career’) of the concept from a sociology of knowledge and sociology of science perspective in everyday, professional, socio-political and scientific-disciplinary contexts—since when (Walker and Cooper 2011), where, by whom and how is the concept of resilience used here—and it must 2) examine the relevance ascribed to the concept of ‘resilience’ in these contexts with a view towards analyzing it from a societal or social perspective: relevance that is articulated against the background of increasing communication (on the level of an expressive repertoire) about social insecurity, uncertainty, a sense of threat, among other things, because of the observed side-effects of scientific-technological civilization and cultural constellations understood as foreign. Additionally, it must examine 3) the resonance that follows from the identifiable genealogy and ascribed relevancies of the concept of resilience for this interpretive perspective, a resonance generated by the interpretive power or interpretive sovereignty of the actors enforcing this perspective in view of the associated potential for structuring and restructuring experiences and expectations. All three aspects are due to an evidently changed societal perception of problems, which endows conceptual ‘fashions,’ changed relevancies and, thus, other interpretations with societal efficacy (interpretive sovereignty). What are the implications and consequences of the reflections above for the design of sociological studies on resilience from a pragmatic research perspective? What we must analyze are the (key) ideas and interpretive models on which actors draw to identify all of the phenomena that become relevant within the conceptual framework of resilience or with respect to it. This applies to described

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vulnerabilities and threats to survival, as well as to those professional actors (such as therapists and advisers) who place themselves on the agenda of resilience with respect to the potential for action to which they lay claim and the resources that, for example, are articulated for certain social spaces and/or social entities. We must investigate the impacts and the formative potential of (key) ideas, interpretive models and the criteria of rationality that are deployed within their framework in the wake of processes and strategies of resilience and with respect to resources of resilience. For theoretical and empirical studies, the term ‘(key) ideas’ comprises the investigation of the social relevance of legal, literary, religious, societal and (socio-) political semantics and interpretations. In concrete terms, we may be dealing here with individual and collective (socio-spatially specific) self-descriptions and selfconstructs (in the sense of models of affiliation and identification), actors’ structures of expectation and meaning or specific political, legal, aesthetic, religious, scientific and professional legitimizations, for example of strategies and programs. In this sense, a social constructionist investigative perspective on this phenomenon must also analyze the perspectival shift frequently associated with the current dominance of the concept of resilience as analytical foil. In the same vein, we must also question, for example, whether and, if so, to what extent we can identify the concept of sustainability giving way to the one of resilience and whether such a shift may indicate a move away from an (activist) category geared towards future potential to shape the world (sustainability) towards a more (passivist) category geared towards tried-and-tested elements of the past and constellations worth protecting (resilience). However, beyond such a material definition, we must in a first step recognize that the concept of resilience is deployed to observe phenomena that are regarded as under threat with respect to their plasticity, in other words with respect to the malleability that has facilitated their ‘survival’ or has the potential to do so. Every reference to the social construction of ‘x,’ however justifiable it may be from a methodological point of view, must nonetheless remain ‘empty’ as long as it has yet to be verified through empirical studies that can demonstrate differing group-, context- and situation-specific codings of ‘resilience.’ For the empirical investigation of (key) ideas and interpretive models, our analyses are guided by a dual perspective in the sense that, on the one hand, ideas function reflexively as descriptive repertoires and interpretive resources facilitative of coping, adaptation and transformation and must be investigated; yet on the other hand, ideas just as reflexively facilitate the identification of resilience, vulnerabilities, resilience processes, resources and strategies in the first place, i.e. they constitute them. With respect to these theoretical shifts

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it is the overall purpose of this contribution to state some reasons why resilience is appealing to social sciences.8

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Oevermann, U. (2003). Regelgeleitetes Handeln, Normativität und Lebenspraxis. Zur Konstitutionstheorie der Sozialwissenschaften. In J. Link, T. Loer & H. Neuendorff (eds.), “Normalität” im Diskursnetz soziologischer Begriffe (pp. 183–217). Heidelberg: Synchron. Olsson, L., Jernek, A., Thoren, H., Persson, J. & O’Byrne, D. (2015). Why resilience unappealing to social science: Theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific use of resilience. Science Advances 1 (4), 1–11. Rampp, B. (2019).The Question of Identity in Resilience Research. In R. Rampp, M. Endress & M. Naumann (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres (pp. 59–76). Wiesbaden: Springer. Reich, J. W., Zautra, A. J. & Hall, J. S. (eds.). (2010). Handbook of adult resilience. New York: Guilford Press. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ungar, M., Ghazinour, M. & Richter, J. (2013). Annual Research Review: What is resilience within the social ecology of human development? Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry 54, 348–366. Walker, J & Cooper, M. (2011). Genealogies of resilience: From systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation. Security Dialogue 42, 143–60. Walker, B. & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking. Sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington: Island Press. Walker, B., Gunderson, L., Kinzig, A., Folke, C., Carpenter, S. & Schultz, L. (2006). A handful of heuristics and some propositions for understanding resilience in social-ecological systems. Ecology & Society 11, 13. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/ iss1/art13/ (accessed on 19 March 2014). Wink, R. (ed.). (2016). Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

Endreß, Martin  (Prof. Dr.) is Professor of General Sociology at University of Trier, Germany. His areas of interest are Sociological Theory, Political Sociology, Sociology of Knowledge, Sociology of Trust and Resilience. Relevant publications: Endress, M. (2018). Soziologische Theorien kompakt. 3rd rev. and ext. ed. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter; Endress, M. & Nicolae, S. (eds.). (2016). The social construction of reality. Human Studies 39 (1), Special Issue; Blum, S., Endress, M., Kaufmann, S. & Rampp, B. (2016). Soziologische Perspektiven. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 151–177). Wiesbaden: Springer; Endress, M. (2015). Prozesse von Resilienz – eine neue Perspektive auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse. In M. Thomas & U. Busch (eds.), Transformation im 21. Jahrhundert. Theorien – Geschichte – Fallstudien. Vol. I (pp. 115–131). Berlin: trafo; Endress, M. (2015). The social constructedness of resilience. Social Sciences 4, 533–545. http://http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/4/3/533/; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2015). Resilienz als Perspektive auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse: Auf dem Weg zu einer soziologischen Theorie. In M. Endress & A. Maurer (eds.), Resilienz im Sozialen. Theoretische und empirische Analysen (pp. 33–55). Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endress, M., Maurer, A. (eds.) (2015). Resilienz im Sozialen. Theoretische und empirische Analysen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2014). Resilienz als Prozess transformativer Autogenese: Schritte zu einer soziologischen Theorie. Behemoth. A Journal on Civilisation 7 (2), 73–102.

The Question of ‘Identity’ in Resilience Research. Considerations from a Sociological Point of View Benjamin Rampp 1 Introduction At the core of resilience research lies the question of the interrelationship between continuity and change, or, more precisely, their reciprocal, dialectical dependence: how is continuity possible in the face of change and even more so, how can change be a prerequisite for continuity? This assumption, which is dealt with not only in resilience’s initial discursive contexts such as psychology and (social-)ecology, but as well in regard to a genuinely social understanding of resilience in the humanities and social sciences in general and in sociology in particular, is only prima facie paradoxical. It obtains more clarity, when the multi-level character of the particular objects of interest— i.e.: the analytical unit, process or system, which is being examined regarding its resilience in the face of (potentially existential) challenges and threats—is taken into account. Thus, change being a prerequisite for continuity addresses the change of (as the case may be: central) elements of an object, while preserving the nucleus of this object. But, and this will be the central question to be addressed in this contribution, what is this core or nucleus of the analytical unit? Or to reframe it more precisely in a methodological way: how can this nucleus and its boundaries be analytically understood and conceptualized? To discuss this question, I will, in a first step, outline the common answer in the social-ecological discourse, that is: identity. In the following, I want to ­scrutinize

B. Rampp ()  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_4

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this answer from a sociological point of view. Thus, I want to question the essentialist assumption, which seems to be the basic, shaping premise inherent in this answer, which, at least to the analysis of social processes of continuity and change, does not seem viable. To contrast this, I want to argue for a social-constructionist understanding of the nucleus in question, and thus, for a social constructivist understanding of the interrelationship between continuity and change and resilience in general, as well. To meet this objective, I will take into account central models and ideas of social-ecology, but revise and complement them with sociological concepts and approaches, particularly Norbert Elias’ processual and figurational sociology. With this, I eventually want to argue for analyzing processes of identification instead of identity, when thinking about the nucleus of an analytical unit between continuity and change.

2 Continuity and Change in Social-Ecology: A Matter of Identity? In 2001, Carpenter et al. prominently identified the question “Resilience of What to What?” (Carpenter et al. 2001) as a fundamental issue of resilience research. With this question, a central methodological desideratum, which only prima facie seems to be obvious and easy to be answered, is being addressed: we need to define the object we are examining. This is especially true, when the topic of investigation revolves around the interrelationship between continuity and change, since the question of what persists and what changes not only arises throughout this research process, but even more so, it constitutes its very core (see also Endress and Rampp 2014). Defining this object of investigation is however first and foremost a methodological question and not an ontological one, as I will show in the following. How is this object of investigation defined in social-ecology? Or more precisely: how is the question of the nucleus of the respective object answered? Looking at two seminal works on resilience research in the field of social-­ecology, we can find closely intertwined answers. Walker et al. define resilience as: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks. (Walker et al. 2004)

Thus, it is “function, structure, identity, and feedbacks,” which constitute the persistent core of a system in the course of experiencing disturbance and change.

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Although the concepts of function, structure, and feedbacks hint at and might be helpful for a figurational and thus relational approach to the understanding of a system’s core, which I will discuss later on, I want to focus on the idea of identity, which is present here, in a first step. That is, because Folke et al. (2010) narrow down their answer to the central question of what resilience is, which closely ties in with the paper of Walker et al., even further. To them, resilience is: “the capacity to change in order to maintain the same identity” (Folke et al. 2010). But what exactly does identity mean? This question is of utmost importance, since without a distinct conceptualization of identity, it threatens to only serve as a metaphor, which in the end is not able to productively address the interrelationship between continuity and change. Instead, identity as a metaphor would only shift and eventually obscure an analytical solution to our problem. The same issue can be found in the differentiation of the three basic capacities, potentials or modes of resilience, i.e., ways of dealing with challenges, which are discussed in social-ecological resilience research (see Folke et al. 2010; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013; Endress and Rampp 2015). The modes of coping, adaptation, and transformation not only focus on varying temporalities (with coping referring to short-term, ex-post, and adaptation as well as transformation to long-term, exante processes), but they differ in the degree of change, which is addressed, too (see Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, p. 10 f.). This means they represent different approaches to the continuity and change nexus: while coping essentially refers to the unaltered persistence of a system (and thus: its core) and only allows for ‘bouncing back’ kind of processes, adaptation contrastingly comprises forms of change, although within and depending on already present paths, and transformation finally allows for radical changes, which may transcend previous characteristics of the system. But again, the question remains the same: where does one state of an identity end and where does another one begin, i.e., which are the boundaries of an identity? Thus, although resilience research principally takes the question of continuity and change into account, the answers to it remain prima facie unsatisfying, because it is not analytically spelled out what exactly is meant by the identity, which needs to be retained in order to consider a system resilient. Nonetheless, the question of what identity means—especially in the context of processes of change in complex systems—has already been addressed in socialecological resilience research in a paper by Cumming and Collier (2005). With regard to the metaphor of Theseus’ ship, they highlight the “ambiguity of the concept of identity over time” and space, and list some necessary elements for “[a]

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n adequate working specification of a complex system” (Cumming and Collier 2005), with which the question of identity might be addressed. These are: (1) the system components, which may be defined in varying degrees of detail; (2) the relationships between system components; (3) the location and spatial scale at which the definition is applicable and the importance, or lack thereof, of spatial constancy; and (4) the temporal scale at which the definition is applicable and the author’s perspective on the question of identity through time. (Cumming and Collier 2005)

On the basis of these elements, Cumming and Collier differentiate and discuss several metamodels of the change of complex systems. They identify the “adaptive cycle,” the “random walk,” the “replacement” the “succession” and the “dynamic limitation” models as well as the model of “system evolution,” which however is of no further relevance to their question regarding the dynamics of change of complex systems. To our discussion, the random walk as well as the replacement model are of no interest, too, because they either rely solely on contingency (random walk), which does not allow for studying the structural features—and in the end: the identity—of social systems and processes from a sociological point of view, or they refer to the complete replacement of a system (and hence its identity), which is likewise unappealing to us, because it avoids the continuity and change nexus, which is central to our endeavor. Thus, it is Cumming’s and Collier’s discussion of the models of succession, dynamic limitation, and system evolution as well as the adaptive cycle, which is of interest to us, because all of them tackle the question of how continuity of identity is possible despite—or because of—change. While the adaptive cycle model focuses extensively on the continuity and change nexus from a circular perspective and will thus be discussed in more detail later on, the succession model is, according to Cumming and Collier, interested in linear approaches to the continuity and change of identity (i.e., focusing on processes of growth and conservation, while bypassing release and reorganization dynamics, which play a central role in the adaptive cycle, too). Dynamic limitation, on the contrast, addresses the continuity of identity in the face of change as well, but focuses more closely on the role of external drivers and on dynamics of “constantly pushing against external limits;” hence, this model has to be understood as “a set of forward and backward movements as if between two dance partners, with an occasional ‘explosion’ or release when constraints are removed” (Cumming and Collier 2005). Finally, system evolution addresses the interplay of variation and selection, but Cumming and Collier notice “that the evolutionary metamodel is not entirely appropriate for the kinds of complex systems that we are interested in” (Cumming and Collier 2005), that is: complex social-ecological

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systems; and although they concede that the model might nevertheless be useful to analyze phenomena of cultural evolution, they again qualify this potential because of problems of transferring a biological model of evolution to the sociocultural sphere. Although these (meta-)models approach the question of identity in resilience research and address a diversity of questions to the continuity and change nexus, the adaptive cycle model, in comparison, seems to be analytically more interesting to us, because it promises to not only offer a basic understanding of the interplay of continuity and change, but an elaborated heuristic. But before discussing the adaptive cycle—and the closely related concept of panarchy—, I would like to add some more considerations on the question of (continuous) identity in the face of change from a sociological point of view, especially in regard to the analysis of social systems and processes, where perceptions of identity and its manifestations are probably even more contingent and contested than in social-ecology (see Olsson et al. 2015, p. 3 f.). These considerations start from the observation of an overly essentialist understanding of identity, especially, but not only in social-ecology (see Endress and Rampp 2015, p. 43 ff.). Although framing identity in an essentialist manner in social-ecology might prima facie not be surprising, sociological analyses and particularly science and technology studies have shown extensively by now, how processes of construction are prevalent in the natural sciences, too (see Bijker et al. 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Pinch and Bijker 1984; as an overview: Lynch 2016). The need to challenge essentialist conceptualizations of identity is obviously true to the social sciences and humanties as well, since identity has to be understood in this context as the (never final, but always contingent and continuously contested) result of various, interrelated processes of construction (see Goffman 1959; Jenkins 2000). Thus, scrutinizing this essentialist basic assumption seems to be the necessary point of departure for a sociological approach to resilience in general and to the interrelationship of continuity and change in particular. To this end, three analytical aspects will be considered in more detail: constructivity, processuality, and relationality. Although processuality and relationality have to be located on another, ‘lower’ analytical level than constructivity and need to be understood as specifications of constructivity, they will be of special interest here, because they directly tie in with concepts from resilience research, that is, the adaptive cycle model (regarding questions of processuality) and the concept of panarchy (concerning the topic of relationality). But I will also show how a sociological perspective, particularly Norbert Elias’ processual and figurational sociology, adds to the analytical potential of these concepts, especially in the context of analyzing social processes.

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3 Continuity and Change from a Sociological Point of View: Constructivity as a Starting Point What does an essentialistic understanding of resilience exactly mean and how can a constructivist perspective tackle the problems which come along with this understanding? Christmann et al. summarize the problem as follows: Aside from the fact that existing notions of vulnerability and resilience have generally lacked a theoretical footing, it is also evident that they are based upon an essentialist perspective of the world. While vulnerability is understood as the de facto susceptibility of systems, resilience is seen as a system’s coping capacity in an equally clear-cut, concrete fashion. Hence, both concepts are seen as objective, yet modifiable, matters of fact. From this perspective, a system simply is vulnerable or resilient in a certain way by virtue of particular, objectively measurable factors. Such an understanding is widespread in both the natural and social sciences. (Christmann et al. 2012, p. 3 f.)

To be more specific, essentialist assumptions apply in this context to several aspects of resilience research. As a bottom line, there is the general assumption that vulnerabilities and challenges to a system’s existence, and vice versa: a system’s resilience to these challenges, are objective facts. Hence, the processes which lead to these perceptions are typically not scrutinized in detail. Building on this, possible strategies, dispositions, and resources of resilience aren’t questioned either, but are accepted as given, transsocial,—spatial, and—temporal realities. And accordingly, the same holds true for the question of identity: what constitutes the system, what its nucleus is, where its boundaries are, and when a tipping point of change is exceeded, where the system stops being ‘itself,’ is supposed to be an objective datum. These assumptions can and have to be contrasted by a social constructivist perspective, as it is laid out seminally by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, for example (see Berger and Luckmann 1966), that is: a perspective which points out that social reality is the result of processes of construction and ascription, which is inherently contingent, however by no means arbitrary, and might thus prove relatively stable and long-lasting in practice. Hence, it is important to remark regarding our question of identity, that this focus on processes of social construction does not mean, that ‘everything goes’ and reality is nothing more than imagination or ‘text.’ On the contrary: processes of construction—and thus: empirical realizations of identity—are deeply rooted in the respective given social, spatial, and temporal context and they are related to manifest questions of power. Important insights to the utilization of such a perspective in resilience research have been conceptually discussed by Endress (2015, 2019), Christmann et al. (2012),

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Christmann and Ibert (2012), and Bürkner (2010), and empirically put to test by Christmann et al. (2014, 2019). It is Endress, who points out that a social constructivist perspective on resilience needs to particularly address and incorporate “Normative Neutrality, Temporality, Perspectivity and Power” (see Endress 2015, p. 538 ff.). Hence, resilience (of a system or a system’s identity) is not to be understood as per se good, but has to be conceptualized from a scientific observer’s perspective, to phrase it in Weber’s terms, free from value judgment; which is of special importance, when the temporality and historicity (see Endress 2015, p. 534) as well as the perspectivity of resilience and questions of power regarding the struggle over interpretational sovereignty come into play. To our discussion, the questions of temporality and perspectivity are of particular interest and will be discussed more extensively regarding the terms of processuality and relationality in the following. But what is to be said already at this point and what constitutes the basic assumption of our discussion, is that the topic of identity, its nucleus and its boundaries is, to us, first and foremost a methodological question, and not an ontological one. With this assumption in mind, we can ask, how specifically social constructions are being realized—a question which in turn is always interconnected with aspects of power and normativity. And these aspects are particularly relevant, when the phenomenon in question is the one of identity, which obviously is a highly (normatively as well as analytically) charged and controversial subject, and thus: an essentially contested concept. This manifests remarkably, when the topic of identity is associated with the question of which systems are constructed as worthy of preservation and which are not, or even more so: which are constructed as sacrificable for the higher purpose of preserving others systems; a question which might turn out to be a zerosum game or at least an utterly conflictual, antagonistical constellation, whose interpretation is highly dependent on the respective perspectives and interests. Thus, in other words, “the resilience of one analytical unit might imply the vulnerability of another one” (Endress and Rampp 2015, p. 46 f., own translation) and we need to “identify the probable winners and losers” (Keck and S ­ akdapolrak 2013, p. 14) of resilience in the process of analyzing the figurations in which identities are being socially constructed. An excellent empirical illustration of such an analysis of the social constructions of identity in sociological resilience research is provided by Christmann et al., who examine the local constructions of resilience and vulnerability in Lübeck and Rostock in the face of climate change (see Christmann and Heimann 2017; Christmann et al. 2014 and in this volume). In these cities, C ­ hristmann et al. identify different constructions of climate change: while in one case (­Rostock), climate change is perceived as an economical opportunity, in the other one

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(Lübeck), it is interpreted as a vulnerability and danger to the cities’ existence as itself, i.e., as a city with a rich, hanseatic cultural heritage (see Christmann et al. 2014, p. 151 ff.). Hence, the authors emphasize the importance of identifying what is essential to the respective cities’ identities (from their own point of view), i.e., what the “centrally placed unit” (Christmann et al. 2014, p. 152) is, to then follow up on the question of what consequences these self-perceptions have for the construction of resilience and vulnerability.

4 Processuality With the basic assumption of the social constructedness of reality, and thus: identity, in mind, I want to discuss in a next step, to what extent identity has to be understood as an ongoing and contested process, and how perspectives from resilience research and sociology can be integrated here. This processual understanding is of particular importance, when identity is situated in the continuity and change nexus, where identity is conceptualized as highly contingent and fragile, yet not understood as arbitrary. On the contrast, to speak about identity, there has to be some kind of stability and persistence, but in a specific manifestation. Bühl calls this understanding of a continuity and change nexus, which to him is of particular interest within complex social systems, “dynamic stability” (1990, p. 40 ff., own translation). With this idea, he tries to distance his approach from a concept of stability, which results in excessive manifestations of “functional rigidity” and “sclerosis,” as well as from on overly contingent, ‘everything-goes’ understanding of dynamics, which results in “rampant oscillations and fluctuations” (Bühl 1990, p. 40, own translation). Instead, he emphasizes the importance of the idea of isomorphy in multi stable states, yet in a more processual and relational way than it might seem prima facie (see Bühl 1990, p. 40 f.). Thus, Bühl not only addresses the (discrete) sequentiality of multi stable states, but questions the implicit substance ontological perspective which comes with this, and reformulates it even more consequently processual in focusing not only on the transformation of the respective elements of a system, but on the change of the coupling of these elements as well; systems, to his understanding, have thus to be conceptualized as being in constant transition (see Bühl 1990, p. 40)—panta rhei. With this perspective on dynamic stability, Bühl summarizes: But social change always comprises both: structural stabilities and paths of equilibrium as well as bifurcation points with subsequent unsteady flows and disequilibria, with surprising (random and historically singular) transitions and turnovers of form. (1990, p. 41, own translation)

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This processuality and the idea of dynamic stability is, to some extent, conceptually present in resilience research as well, particularly in the adaptive cycle model. The model describes four sequentially linked phases (see Holling and Gunderson 2002, p. 25 ff.): the r-phase addresses processes of growth and exploitation of the system, while its direction of development is very contingent; the subsequent K-phase depicts a phase of conservation in a highly connected and efficient, and thus: inflexible and vulnerable, state; the Ω-Phase represents (disruptive) release processes in the face of exceeded thresholds and tipping points; and in the α-Phase, the system reorganizes and rebuilds in a adapted and/or transformed way. It is this α-Phase, which is of particular importance to our question of identity, since the reorganization of a system most pressingly asks the question of how it may be preserved while changing its properties. But this phase is not the only one of the adaptive cycle model, which focuses on the question of the identity of the system, because obviously, in a cyclical model, each phase is connected to the others in more or less direct ways. Thus, continuity results from the cyclical, processual character of the model, particularly with the released potential of past phases and/or cycles acting as “legacies” (Holling and Gunderson 2002, p. 45), which structure the transformation to new cycles; (new) identity is thus being created by (past) identity—an idea we elsewhere referred to as “transformative autogenesis” (Endress and Rampp 2014). With the adaptive cycle model, resilience research addresses the concept of “multistable states” (Holling 1994) as an approach to the continuity and change nexus, too. Yet, the aforementioned problem of a substance ontological bias strikingly emerges here again. While Bühl discusses multiple states as a first, but not sufficient step towards a genuinely processual understanding of dynamic stability, the adaptive cycle model seems to focus dominantly on this idea of multistable states, i.e., the analytical differentiation of essentialistically separated states in a transition process (although it bears in mind the interconnection between the four phases within the model), which, at least for the needs of a sociological analysis, appears to be too static. Thus, although the adaptive cycle model explicitly discusses the question of identity and might give the sociological discourse important insights into how the question of the interrelationship of continuity and change may be framed analytically from a non-linear, cyclical perspective, the basic challenges endure: to understand the aforementioned constructivity genuinely processual and, vice versa, to de-essentialize processual thinking. These challenges are even more pressing, when other analytical problems of the adaptive cycle model, such as its (at least implicit) normativity, are taken into account (see Endress and Rampp 2015). We will come back to this issue later on.

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To deal with these analytical challenges, taking a look at Norbert Elias’ approach to a “Theory of Social Processes” (1997) might prove helpful. Elias emphasizes the importance of a truly fluid, processual understanding of the social. Thus, with regard to our research question, we shouldn’t only think about the identity of systems as phenomena which move in time, but we should focus on the motions—the processes—themselves; an idea we, for instance, already fundamentally encounter in the works of Max Weber, when he transforms Tönnies’ sharply differentiated concepts of community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft) into a processual language, that is (particularly striking in the original German terms): Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung (1976[1920/21]; Lichtblau 2000). Elias distances this genuinely processual perspective explicitly from a substance ontological approach, that is, he rejects an understanding of processes which merely strings together a multiplicity of singular states and which to Elias is dominating sociology thus far: There cannot be the slightest doubt that the same also applies to sociology. Our languages tend to place at the forefront of our attention substantives, which have the character of things in a state of rest. Furthermore, they tend to express all change and action by means of an attribute or a verb, or at least as something additional rather than integral. In many cases this is an unsuitable technique for conceptualising what we really observe. (2012b, p. 107)

In contrast, Elias argues in favor of focusing on processes themselves: Although it runs counter to our usual habits of speech and thought, it would be much more appropriate to say that a person is constantly in movement; he not only goes through a process, he is a process. (2012b, p. 113 f.)

This conceptualization of processuality informs Elias’ whole oeuvre and is reflected in his empirical studies—e.g., his investigation of the “Process of Civilisation” (2012a)—as well as, from a theoretical-conceptual point of view, in his outlines of a “Theory of Social Processes” (1997). Here, Elias programmatically writes: A theory of social processes must diagnose and explain those long-term and unplanned, yet structured and directional trends in the development of social and personality structures that constitute the infrastructure of what is commonly called ‘history’. (1997, p. 355)

Resilience, as we already discussed elsewhere (see Endress and Rampp 2014) has the analytical potential to be a heuristic to describe, understand, and explain such

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“long-term and unplanned, yet structured and directional trends,” that is, particularly their structural features, or, in Elias’ words, their “specific type of order” (2012a, p. 403), which evidently differs from the idea of social processes as “merely a sequence of unstructured and chaotic changes” (Elias 2012a, p. 403). But before resilience heuristics in general and the adaptive cycle model in particular can be utilized for such purposes, we have to, as I already pointed out, discuss how a more consequent social constructivist, processual understanding of the continuity and change nexus can be developed. To this end, we need to complement the already addressed social constructivist and processual perspectives with a third one: the question of perspectivity and positionality—and thus: relationality.

5 Relationality When we understand identity as a constructed phenomenon which is constantly in the making, and conceptualize it therefore to some extent as a practice, the question arises of where—or more precisely: in which context—this practice takes place. In other words: since practices are never isolated, but interconnected parts of a multiplicity of practices, this is true to processes of the construction of identity, too. Thus, we cannot speak about a social process in the singular, but always have to refer to their plurality. Elias frames this idea as follows, with—speaking as a Menschenwissenschaftler—a focus on the human: The image of a human being needed for the study of sociology cannot be that of a singular person, a homo sociologicus. Rather it must be that of people in the plural; we obviously need to start out with the image of a multitude of people, each of them relatively open, interdependent processes. (2012b, p. 116; see also 2012b, p. 117 ff.)

Hence, it is not only the multiplicity of processes, but also their interrelationship— or in Simmel’s words (2009): their interactions (Wechselwirkungen)—, which has to be taken into account; only a relational perspective, which bears in mind the structuring effects of the respective perspectives on a (to be constructed) phenomenon, will thus enable us to understand the processes of constructing identity. This might be the reason why, in resilience research as well, the question of identity is formulated in close connection to concepts such as “functions” and “feedbacks” (see Walker et al. 2004), which are intrinsically relational concepts. But thinking of systems and processes as phenomena in relations is reflected in resilience research yet more explicitly. This topic is particularly laid out in the

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concept of panarchy, which describes a “nested set of the four-phase adaptive cycles” (Holling and Gunderson 2002, p. 73) and which focuses on the question of scaling systems and processes as well as relating them to each other. Scaling systems and processes by the concept of panarchy means that adaptive cycles are being allocated to specific levels of analysis with their respective (social or spatial) scope and particularly with different speeds and temporalities, which are associated with each level (see Holling et al. 2002, p. 74). Thus, adaptive cycles which are located on a higher level are supposed to be larger and to be characterized by a slower speed, while cycles on a lower level are supposed to be smaller with a higher speed. With this scaling, a second, to our ends more important question comes along: how are the respective systems and processes on their distinct levels interrelated? Panarchy gives us a first answer to this question (see Holling et al. 2002, p. 75 f.). Connections between systems on different levels are conceptualized in two ways, as “remember” and “revolt.” The remember-connection addresses structuring effects from larger to smaller systems, i.e., it focusses on continuity, while the revolt-connection vice versa addresses contingent effects from smaller to larger systems and thus focusses on change: The smaller, faster, nested levels invent, experiment and test, while the larger, slower levels stabilize and conserve accumulated memory of system dynamics. (Resilience Alliance n.y.)

These connections are important to our question regarding the continuity and change of identity insofar they address the relative location of a system as well as the relationship between different systems. That is, the panarchy concept allows us a first look at the relational identity of a system: is it (relatively) small and fast or large and slow? Which effects does it have on which others systems? And vice versa: which effects do other systems have on our system? This is reflected particularly in the case of failure or destruction of smaller systems, which are supposed to be necessary sometimes to evoke change in systems located on higher levels (i.e., revolt), which prevents these systems to fall into a “rigidity trap” (see Holling et al. 2002, p. 96), i.e., becoming overly inflexible and vulnerable—an idea we also encounter in Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” (see Schumpeter 1942). But there are problems to this approach to relationality and the question of how to utilize it to our topic of identity, which may prove to be even more challenging than in the case of the adaptive cycle model: firstly, the concept of panarchy and its approach to scaling systems seems to be quite essentialist: systems are

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supposed to exist in a specific form with specific characteristics, while processes of social construction—regarding first order constructs within the empirical case as well as second order constructs from the scientific observer’s point of view (see Schütz 1953)—are neglected. Secondly, the types of connections between different levels, i.e., remember and revolt, are fairly—possibly too—schematic: it is assumed that the respective directions of the connections depend on the relative size of the systems, i.e., remember is conceptualized as a top-down and revolt as a bottom-up effect, while we learn only little about their dialectical interweaving and (paradoxical) side effects (see Merton 1936).1 Thirdly, the concept of panarchy comes with a normative bias, at least in its empirical implementations, which I already addressed briefly regarding the general importance of a social constructivist perspective on identity: there seem to be (implicit) assumptions of which systems are supposed to persist and which ones are allowed and supposed to fail for the higher purpose of preserving the other ones. These assumptions become particularly problematic, when the concept is transferred to the analysis of social processes, where the question of what (or who) is to be preserved and what (or who) has to fail is obviously a matter of perspective. Thus, there is fourthly the challenge of how to transfer the concept of panarchy—or more generally: how to address the question of relationality—in the social sphere. An approach which promises to be helpful to take a more relational perspective is Elias’ figurational sociology. With Elias—and structurally equivalent to the question of processuality—, we might succeed in analyzing not only systems or processes in relations, as I have formulated it above, but the relations themselves. Elias approaches the question of relationality with the concept of figurations. He understands figurations as follows: The communal life of people in societies always has – even in chaos, in disintegration, in extreme social disorder – a very particular form. That is what is expressed by the concept of the figuration. By virtue of their fundamental interdependence on one another, human beings always group themselves together in the form of specific figurations. (2009, p. 2)

Hence, with concept of figuration, Elias addresses a complex understanding of the interweaving of different systems and processes—be they located on the same analytical level or on different levels (see Elias’ remarks on one and multi-level

1There

are, however, some approaches which try to develop a more complex understanding of these interconnections. See, for example, Fath et al. (2015).

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“game models,” 2012b, p. 66 ff.). And this concept is—in contrast to the concept of panarchy—understood genuinely dialectically and anti-essentialistically by Elias. Thus, it is the (paradoxical) side effects and dynamics of unintended consequences which are of particular interest to him in his empirical studies (e.g., regarding the “Process of Civilisation”) and which show the complexity of interrelationships between systems and processes: This continuous, interweaving of people’s separate plans and actions, can give rise to changes and patterns that no individual person has planned or created. From this interdependence of people arises an order sui generis, an order more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of the individual people composing it. It is this order of interweaving human impulses and strivings, this social order, which determines the course of historical change; it underlies the process of civilization. (Elias 2012a, p. 404)

And with the same reasoning in mind, Elias continues: Civilisation is not ‘reasonable’; not ‘rational’, any more than it is ‘irrational’. It is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by specific changes in the way people are bound to live together. (2012a, p. 405)

Thus, it is in consequence, as I mentioned above, not the ‘objects’ or elements of social figurations, which Elias is interested in, but the figurations—that is: the relationships—themselves: The ‘circumstances’ that change are not something that comes upon people from ‘outside’: they are the relationships between people themselves. (Elias 2012a, p. 444)

With this approach, it becomes clear that identity has to be understood as a manifoldly intertwined figuration. This is why, when we are speaking of identity, we first have to locate our objects of interest—be it systems or processes—within a multitude of levels of analysis, and secondly need to focus on the connections of our objects of interest within and across these levels. In doing so, we make methodological decisions about the status and character of our object of interest—and thus about its identity and, in consequence, about its nucleus. Ultimately, identity is therefore a social construct, which depends on our methodological decisions and ascriptions as observers, which in turn are formulated in relation to other social constructs and, finally, the perspective we take as observers ourselves. Only when this multitude of relationalities is taken into account, it is possible to speak of identity in a consistently constructivist (and

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processual) way and thus to avoid essentialist reductionisms. Hence, heuristics and models of resilience research, such as the concept of panarchy, bring along an important perspective on relationality, yet they need to be revised from a sociological point of view, as I have shown above.

6 Conclusion We started our discussion with the assumption that the interrelationship between continuity and change is a central question to resilience research, that is, the insight that continuity and change don’t have to be understood as opposites, but as mutually dependent aspects of non-linear processes. This is why the question of what exactly changes and what persists in the course of such processes is of particular interest to resilience research and needs to be analytically tackled. To answer this question regarding the nucleus of a process or system (and thus: its boundaries) with the concept of identity proved to be, although fairly common in resilience research, unsatisfying, particularly because of its essentialist implications. To address this desideratum more productively, I suggested to approach it from a genuinely constructivist perspective. With this, it may not be possible to identify the ‘real,’ objective, per se core of a system; but from a sociological point of view, this seems to be unnecessary, hardly worthwhile, and even more: counterproductive, anyway. Instead, a constructivist perspective on resilience and the question of identity implies the need for a reflexive methodological decision of the scientific observer, which takes into account first order constructions as well as their fundamental fluidity, notwithstanding the relative stability of social constructs in practice. This constructivist perspective benefits analytically from focusing on two subsequent aspects: on the question of processuality and on the question of relationality. With these, the contingency as well as the conditionality of social processes are being incorporated in our analysis. Thus, it shows that the continuity and change nexus not only needs to be understood as a matter of constructions, but is has to be conceptualized more specifically as always being in motion, yet having its own, lasting history, as well as a question of scaling, perspectivity, and manifold interdependencies. With the aspects of processuality and relationality, two central heuristics of resilience research have come to our attention: the adaptive cycle model and the concept of panarchy. Although they might not meet all of the needs of a sociological analysis, as we have seen, they offer a promising starting point, which can be complemented with a processual and figurational approach to sociology as it

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is provided by Nobert Elias. Thus, resilience research and sociology promise to be two perspectives, which can productively enrich each other in the search for a non-linear theory of social processes which centers around the complex interrelationship between continuity and change. In this regard, and with the three analytical aspects of constructivity, processuality, and relationality in mind, it shows that the question of identity in resilience research needs to be reformulated from a sociological point of view. I thus suggest focusing on processes of identification rather than on identity. Hence, what exactly the nucleus of a system or process is, has consequentially to be understood as a methodological question, which can only be answered empirically in the respective, specific case.

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Rampp, Benjamin  (Dr. phil.) is a Postdoc Research Associate at the University of Trier in the DFG-funded research group “Resilience. Phases of Societal Upheaval in Dialogue between Medieval Studies and Sociology”. His areas of interest are Sociological Theory, Political Sociology, Sociology of Trust, Security Studies, Governmentality and Resilience. Relevant publications: Blum, S., Endress, M., Kaufmann, S. & Rampp, B. (2016). Soziologische Perspektiven. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 151–177). Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2015). Resilienz als Perspektive auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse: Auf dem Weg zu einer soziologischen Theorie. In M. Endress & A. Maurer (eds.), Resilienz im Sozialen. Theoretische und empirische Analysen (pp. 33–55). Wiesbaden: Springer VS; Endreß, M. & Rampp, B. (2014). Resilienz als Prozess transformativer Autogenese: Schritte zu einer soziologischen Theorie. Behemoth. A Journal on Civilisation 7 (2), 73–102.

Resilience from the Perspective of the Theory of Symbolic Forms Martin Voss

1 Introduction Every time has its language and every language has its time and every language and every time have their own form of being. Plato was the first to recognise the problem as such, the problem that the individual being that exists is not to be understood merely by its constitution and structure but by the concept and the meaning of the concept of that being—according to Ernst Cassirer in the first of his three volumes on Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1953). This is no less true of scientific concepts as he argues: “The fundamental concepts of every science, the means by which the science poses its questions and formulates its solutions, no longer appear as passive representations of a given being, but as self-created intellectual symbols” (Cassirer 1953, p. 5, own translation). And as such, they themselves are a symbol of a time and of a form of being. Every academic discipline has modes and cycles in which concepts rise and fall, move out of the niche and into the centre, push other concepts out and then in turn gradually fade away. We can say with confidence that resilience is ‘en vogue.’ There has already been much written about the emergence of the concept of resilience (see for example Alexander 2013; Bonss 2015). The indeterminacy of the term has been widely discussed, criticised, and taken as a starting point for reformulation and redefinition. One cannot overlook how many research projects and institutions—in the fields of sustainability, climate change adaption, security research and disaster prevention alone—are striving to operationalise resilience, to make it measurable and incorporate it into their practices. It is M. Voss ()  Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_5

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clear that c­ onsiderable resources are devoted to these endeavours. A provisional assessment of these efforts results in an image that might be termed structured noise: in the discourse surrounding resilience, communities emerge—for example, of people who undertake qualitative or quantitative research, engineering or ­systemic-ecological oriented, discipline-specific communities or those with certain normative objectives or foci such as the resilience of infrastructures or cities—which, when compared to others, suggest more commonalities than differences in their understanding of resilience. Regarding the fields that have formed in this way, one may be under the impression that the determinateness of the concept is increasing. However, if the ‘real world’ and its practices beyond the boundaries of these fields are taken into account, only the inner climates within these communities seem to be stabilising. Between them—and what is even more important: between them and practice as ‘real life’—there are gaping, often fundamental and, from an epistemological perspective, perhaps even increasing differences. In my view, a considerable part of this has to do with the fact that, at least when we are examining the resilience of humans, basic epistemological problems must be addressed; the discourse here, however, is lagging behind the theory developed in sociology and the humanities over recent decades. This article subscribes to the hypothesis that resilience denotes a quality of human existence that is to be understood in strictly relational and processualpractical terms. The central assumption is that humans are characterised by the fact that they fashion themselves and their environment in a systemic and processual manner. Resilience is thus the ability to harmonise one’s own expectations and perceived order with one’s experiences and environments, constructed as practice. In order to discuss this conception of resilience, I will argue in the first section that it is necessary to understand that humans are processually embedded in a symbolically formed relationship that evades an essentialising approach. Thus, it is the fact that interaction between humans and the environment neither involves primarily rational planning nor trial and error (both in fact do play a role) which is decisive here. Rather, it primarily involves the transcendence of all that we perceive, a transcendence that evades all attempts at essentialism. A de-essentialisation of the concept of resilience is therefore of utmost importance, as I will show in the second section, for if that what makes humans into historical humans evades a substantialising description, a practice that is oriented towards the strengthening of resilience using an essentialist concept risks unintended or even contraindicated effects. It runs the risk of strengthening the resilience of infrastructures, cities and economies, but at the same time, of forgetting humans as cultural, historic beings that perceive their unique world as meaning. In the third section, following philosophical anthropology, I attempt to characterise

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humans as being sympathetically connected with their environment via the symbolic transcendence of the forms that they experience and which create them. In the fourth section, I then complement this account with some reflections on the everyday practical construction of meaning and sense. In doing so, I sketch out a field and a number of approaches that seem appropriate to me for conducting spatial social and humanities research, in particular on crises, disasters and sustainability. I end my contribution with a plea for utmost awareness in our approach to the resilience of the human being.

2 Symbolic Forms and Resilience Following the use of the term by Ernst Cassirer, I have suggested elsewhere (see Voss 2006) that contemplation of symbolic forms serves as a countermeasure to an essentialist fundamental understanding that has colonialised occidental thinking for hundreds of years. I argue, that using essentialist terms cannot solve the problems evolved due to essentialism. The contemplation of symbolic forms aims to rebind the fundamental dependence on the conditions of their appearance of phenomena that are observed, communicated, treated in practices or which only enter consciousness as resistance, back to the phenomenon itself. It aims, to a certain extent, to correct the order in which we have learned or unlearned to read the world. The perception of the occidental-enlightened Homo is trained to contrast object and subject, to think of things and facts separately from their interpretation, to think of technology, nature and society as spheres that are ontologically divorced. Yet, for the Homo, there is nothing that is not already social and not already historical, that is not, therefore, already laden with presuppositions and bound up with itself. The Homo is a social being; even more, he is a transcendental being that forms himself and his world and whose world forms him. Thus, humans are existentially connected with everything else: everything that exists for humans emerges from something else, everything forms itself against the background of formations and what we then observe in the particular is always only a part of that whole with which we actually have to do. The world is created for humans as a “relief character” (“Reliefcharakter,” Heidegger 1975, p. 38 ff.), as a reference structure which before all reason—as practical sense, as I will argue below with Pierre Bourdieu, however appropriating the concept—shows that there is more behind that which we see, in the occurrence of which we, as cause and effect, participate to a great extent, but the whole of which can never be fully explained because it first defines and shapes itself in the process of consideration, a process that is characterised by history and praxis. In short, it is not the case

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that the individual being comes first and then the meaning. An individual being arises in meaning and interpretation as a practice of life against the background of what is meant. In the practice of the enlightened, modern Homo, a being appears via the abstraction of its constitutive conditions as an object, but still without ever existing as an object by itself. The being always encounters humans as symbolically formed, and form and reference remain inseparable from the existence of humans. Without the symbolic formation of the world and its phenomena, without transcendence, there is no human; this is the thesis on which this essay is based. Thus, every attempt to establish or promote resilience takes place against the backdrop of the fundamental indeterminateness of the constitutional conditions of a meaningful life. This is why I argue that the humanities and social sciences must work hard on epistemologically grounded criticism, but then also, in view of pressing existential threats, participate in the development and implementation of concrete solutions. This requires, however, a rigorous engagement with epistemological foundations. Resilience cannot be understood independently of the references and practices from which and into which it is discursively rendered. Resilience is, on a very fundamental level, first of all meaning. I choose this approach because to me, the discourse surrounding resilience—also explicitly the discourse in the social s­ciences—seems to a great extent to be characterised by the fact that it largely disregards the historical conditionality and thus, from a phenomenological perspective, the fundamental property of all being as meaning, which, as being meaningful for humans, transcends what appears to them. Resilience is, in large parts (for a more differentiated knowledge-sociological view of different perspectives, see Blum et al. 2016), thought of as something de-historicised and de-cultured, as something which might be manufactured like a commodity. In the discourse surrounding resilience, there is still no real attention being given to what has been at the heart of debates about theory in social science for at least five decades, namely that there are no extra-social, natural or ahistorical criteria for this research tradition that allow us to make sense of the world objectively. A de-essentialisation of the concept of resilience, as it was demanded by Endress and Rampp is yet to be achieved: On the one hand, it is necessary to investigate the social constructive character (social processes) of those very phenomena that are being problematised for analysis by means of the resilience perspective, and on the other hand, their scope must be expanded beyond the narrower framework of the natural basis of human coexistence to a whole range of socio-cultural structural conditions of human coexistence. (2015, p. 44, own translation)

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There is a wide discussion about systems or societies that are said to be able to cope with disruptions and shocks (e.g., United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction [UNISDR] 2009). But who or what defines the system and its limits, who says what a society is, where it begins and where it ends? At question here is the time a system needs to return to its previous equilibrium after a disturbance, or how great the disturbance can be without driving the system out of this equilibrium (e.g., Scheffer et al. 2002). But in which spatial, temporal, functional or cultural references is the equilibrium of complex, non-linear systems defined? Who evaluates what is a disturbance for whom and when if we ask this question without essentializing values in a multicultural world? A wide range of articles questions whether a system is capable of learning and adapting itself and whether it can organise or transform itself (Walker et al. 2002; Biggs et al. 2012). But who or what should judge, before the backdrop of what cosmology—with its emic, historically congealed cultural standards and values, rationality heuristics, and divergent notions of beginning, end, cyclicality, from this side and the other side—whether a system learns or changes itself? Three objections may be made here. Firstly, the demand has been made of resilience research for more than a decade and a half that it has to be determined whose resilience and resilience to what one is addressing (Carpenter et al. 2001). It is necessary to define whether the resilience of a factory, a community of sustainably operating agricultural enterprises or a delimited ecosystem should be examined with regard to types of disturbances that are also to be identified, and in what spatial and temporal contexts. But this is not meant here. What is meant is rather that it is not a matter of simply naming the spatial, temporal or otherwise delimited units about whose resilience is being spoken. For these elements are indeed not simple, and as such they cannot be considered inconsequentially in isolation from everything that surrounds them and gives them meaning. Every factory, every agricultural operation and every ecosystem designates a nucleus of human existence that is historically congealed as a symbolic form. They are constructions, fixed within a network of references of infinitely multi-layered, even multi-dimensional, kind, over which, and in and out of which, humans design or rather are designed. An individual being is to be understood according to its concept and the meaning of its concept, as Cassirer (1953) wrote. The term and the meaning point humans beyond themselves to a horizon that extends to the undefined, that embraces and gives birth to all meaning, therefore to all that it is human. The simple naming and demarcation of objects disregards the genealogy of all forms, and thus also the power relations that are implicit in this naming. The product can then no longer be ‘objective,’ the image of resilience designed on this basis can no longer be neutral. The interests and motives of actors whose

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participative capacities (see Voss 2008)1 are unequally distributed mix themselves into the investigation and into the practices related to resilience, and thus resilience becomes a political instrument. A second objection might be that, although these artificial boundaries have consequences that must be taken into consideration, the drawing of boundaries and the disregard of all references is, at the same time, a condition of the existence of humans. Without these everyday abbreviations, survival would simply be impossible. How, therefore, is this apparent contradiction between necessary reification and the phenomenological processuality of all existence to be dissolved? At another point, we have identified two forms of resilience (see Voss and Dittmer 2016) that are in a complementary relationship to one another and we have named these systematic and systemic resilience. Only in closed, linear, deterministic systems (which in ideally no way interact within their environment), in which the initial and target variables can be determined clearly and ideally with the involvement of all relevant actors, is it possible to derive systematically, that is, by analysing the components that characterise the system and the relationships of these elements, which conditions are decisive for system functionality in the case of disturbances. In practice, we are permanently dealing with systems that approximate (only ideally, again, as in the last instance they remain embedded in contexts, see below) these conditions, especially in technical systems, such as a vehicle, or more complex organisational forms such as a hydroelectric power plant. But at least when people are concerned, the connections become more and more systemic, and hence ultimately indeterminable. But even here, in the vast majority of situations, ‘abbreviations’ apply. These are proven in the truest sense of the word, insofar as they are tested via countless practical experiences. Every human, for example, has a practical sense of what temperature level he or she can cope with over a certain period of time, without his or her body being adversely affected, without actually knowing in detail the biophysical or psychological processes that determine whether the body compensates for the temperature stress or topples into another state—such as influenza. As long as the unintended consequences of these practical abbreviations remain within a certain tolerance zone, the disregard of the conditions of constitution as a reduction of real complexity is generally not only a condition of possibility of life, but also

1Elsewhere,

I have suggested the term “participative capacity” to complement coping and adaptive capacities, which are widely discussed within the discourse on resilience in order to lend this fundamental dimension of structural social inequality, which to my mind has been overlooked to a great extent, a more effective role in the discourse (see Voss 2008).

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functional in making existence luxurious. However, the more these typical, ideal conditions soften and the more open, non-linear and complex—in another word, the more systemically—the system interacts, the stronger the effect of external conditions on the functionality of the system, the greater the risk of problems arising from the abstraction from this real complexity, the less resilience can be systematically defined, and the more we must attend to non-linear, non-deterministic, transcendental interconnections and processes in order to avoid damages that have become unacceptable (see Voss and Dittmer 2016). Forms of systematic resilience are hence—even when largely unnoticed—always embedded in comprehensive systemic-resilient conditions. Determinate systems process against a non-­determinate background (and are hence, strictly speaking, not determinate), even if this in many ways appears irrelevant for everyday practice or temporarily unimportant. A third way of responding to the demand for an de-essentialisation of the concept of resilience can begin at this point and argue that this has already been taken into account, since resilience is in many processes understood as a typical ‘wicked problem’—a problem which has to be evaluated in the everyday-world (Lebenswelt), and which hence requires specific governance procedures, in order to define resilience democratically. Because resilience—for example, that of a city or an indigenous group—cannot be determined essentially, citizens must be allowed to participate in evaluating resilience as it is being argued in related debates. However, this does not actually achieve the goal, the epistemological problem is not solved; rather, the implicit essentialism of the procedure is masked. In the ordinary participation process, a decision is only made about something that in many ways has already been shaped by discourse; countless essentialisations already flow into the description of the problem and provide governance with only a largely pre-formed space for decisions. Already in this upstream process of definition, then further in the various stages of analysis, countless strings are snipped that held the forms together in their transcendental interrelationship. And this loss is not a negligible residual value, but the relationships that connect everything with the human—the transcendences that found human resilience. Humans exist, so to speak, in that as humans, because phenomena meet them as symbolic forms. The symbolic formation of the world is the anthropological condition of possibility of humans, according to the assumption guiding my argument. The ‘theory’ of symbolic forms outlined here is hence not a demanding theory like others. With the word ‘theory’ I refer more to the Ancient Greek root (θεωρεῖν, theorein) and mean nothing more than a particular form to observe, to view, and indeed not simply following the discursive and practical forms of

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observation of a time which only sees what its perceptual schemas allow it to see—what from our western perspective are substances. The theory of symbolic forms transforms this essentialist thought directly into its opposite: it ‘observes’ each of its forms as something referring outside of itself, as undefined, as transcendent. Everything observed now appears more as a perspective of something, the totality of which withdraws itself. The position thus adopted here, according to the fundamental assumption of this article, opens up perception for the loss of resonance and resilience that results from essentialist closure: “Phenomenality, which is the matter in hand, does not simply mean the relativity of knowledge but its way of being, in which nothing is final, in which everything is a sign,” as Emmanuel Lévinas said (2002, p. 258, own translation). Thinking in symbolic forms places at the centre of the argument just what is withdrawn from the doxa of western scientific understanding and its common formal, logical principles, such as the law of the excluded middle. And it indicates the consequences of this withdrawal, which is nothing less than a withdrawal from the reality of humans or the withdrawal of humans from reality, which ultimately leads to the disappearance of humans and replaces them with an artificial world of substances interacting with each other according to physically describable laws. In the following, I will address what characterises the human as human in order to clarify exactly what I mean by the danger of the disappearance of the human being. This will not require any new grand theory; rather, we must take stock of what has already been said and observe it in an altered form.

3 Language, Discourse, Disaster The object whose resilience I am discussing is the human. When we talk generally of resilience, we are not always talking about humans—the concept is also used in physics and in economics, in dentistry and mathematics (see Wink 2016) and the objects under question can be all things that can vanish or at least change their state. Here, however, the issue is the human and the question of what makes humans resilient to disturbances of various kinds. To approach the question of the human I will discuss the extreme form of failure for the sake of illustration: disasters and catastrophes. At the same time, seen from the perspective adopted here, a reductionist conception of the resilience of the human has itself catastrophic potential in a totally existential sense. From the perspective of everyday life of a Central European, we live in a world full of disasters. Whether a tsunami in Indonesia, an earthquake in Haiti, a meltdown in Fukushima, a bursting clarifier dam in Brazil, a chemical e­ xplosion

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in China, Ebola in Congo, a tower-block fire in London—we constantly hear news of disasters, without yet anything being said about the type, the dimension, the quantity or quality of the causes and effects which make an event a disaster. It is usually sufficient for the media to name something a disaster for it to become ‘real.’ Just like resilience, the concept of disasters is everything but determined and hence can be applied to hugely diverse phenomena. Nonetheless, certain features can be determined that structure the everyday use of the concept: it usually involves sudden, rarely gradual, processes; usually a large number of people are directly hurt, and it is rarely a matter of long-term effects on their physical or mental health; usually there are images of destruction, and we rarely hear news of events that lack this visual power; usually there are high direct economic costs, whereas long-term effects on economic development, whilst being feared, are rarely made concrete; usually natural or physical processes are central, and we very rarely use the concept of disaster in relation to apparent social dynamics. From the angle of everyday life, it also seems important whether an event befalls people from outside—from nature or as the result of technical processes— or whether it was the intentional result of human action, for instance, a terrorist attack. In a word, from the angle of the phenomenology of everyday life, the spectrum of things we might term a disaster is very wide, but it is not arbitrary. What a society—or better: a culture—perceives as a disaster and what not, I understand first of all, anticipating the differentiated derivation of the concept I will go on to give, as the product of the discourses that surround and constitute the entirety of our world order which we continually produce. The world which we perceive is, following this fundamental constructivist understanding, not a given and the language that we use in order to speak about the world does not just portray the world as it is, it does not duplicate it through the arrangement of sounds and words, as Augustine said in his Confessions. It was William von Ockham first and later Immanuel Kant who criticised the Augustinian assumption of the independence of things from the entity that perceives them. Finally, Ludwig Wittgenstein and linguistic structuralism, in particular through Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, decisively shaped the philosophical and sociological thought of the twentieth century with the hypothesis that meanings arise firstly from the differences between linguistic signs—that is, from their position within a linguistic system (langue) which is actualised in spoken language (parole). There are no ideas underlying language that were already there before language (see Saussure 2001, p. 76); language is only a “system of bare values” (Saussure 2001, p. 132, own translation). Thus, all acts of knowledge are founded on structures of knowledge as conditions of the perceptible and expressible, as conditions of what can be a being, and which at the same time determine

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the modality of a being (Foucault 1973, p. 156). Hence, what we know and how we know is not the result of naked empirical experience; rather, we experience within discourses that form experience. Experience and the process of formation cannot be separated from one another: experience is formation, it is the positioning of a moment within a system of formation. Discourses, the systems of formation, are in themselves structured: what can be declared when, how and by whom as (legitimate) knowledge, what can be perceived as an object and how, what can be thought, felt, tasted and done in a certain way and what or how not—everything is underpinned by rules that have congealed historically and which, at the same time, are the continually dynamic product of discourse-immanent struggles about interpretative authorities and leaders of opinion, about hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci (1967) called it. Here, there is an unequal distribution of opportunities to influence this discourse to one’s own advantage; the discourse itself and what it allows us to think, feel and say, is correspondingly also always already the product of this inequality. This means that it helps some and hinders others. This is of great importance when we consider the question of resilience of the human. What a society, what a culture thematises as a disaster and the institutions it creates to manage or prevent such processes, is formed discursively. And what is produced by discourse is structured by social inequality. When we learn about disasters through the mediation of the mass media, the resulting report does not portray an process; rather, it modifies existing imaginations and hence creates a new imagination which has the character of an event for the receiver, which is real for him within his socially formed processes of meaning and interpretation, and which at the same time is real in a different way for others, without the realities of one group being congruent with those of another. When the media names something a disaster it can give the impression, despite the divergences between individuals and groups, that the phenomenon itself has been grasped. However, this practical functional illusion (Ricoeur 1973) masks the discursive and hence the power-related character of the designation. Discourse makes communication possible and hinders communication by defining the space of what can be thought, said, meant, felt and done. By naming, it evaluates and excludes, draws borders, and these procedures of exclusion and drawing borders imply distinctions into cultural spheres of values. Naming something a disaster evokes, for example, very different social effects than naming it a terrorist attack. Thus, a completely different kind of dispositive can come to work with far-reaching consequences for the future of a society. The discursively formed categories of everyday life structure the probable forms in which something is processed as well as who prepares for what—and who is responsible for what. Hence, they structure

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the reality of the future. This is true in all regions of society, as well as in politics and science. When we talk about resilience today, about the “ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner …” (UNISDR 2009, p. 24), every individual element of such a definition is the product of discourse—what a system is, what a hazard is, when recovery can be discussed, etc. The task of the social and human sciences is, as I understand it, to decipher the contingent character of such a central concept as resilience, particularly when it involves humans (although, strictly speaking, it always does!). For without this deciphering, the negotiation of human resilience takes place on the basis of completely unequal opportunities of influence (participative capacity, as I called it above). Furthermore, the progress of discourse is ultimately influenced to a greater extent by non-human actors than by humans—for example, through the logic of technology, of marketing and ‘big data,’—which, in contrast to humans, ‘live’ on the essentialisation of existence and function even better the more comprehensively humans and the cultural entities surrounding them become reified, objectified, quantifiable and thus ultimately controllable. The concept of discourse has now finally found a place within everyday language and this everyday understanding has a reciprocal effect on academic work, where discourse is often reduced to negotiation or discussion—on which point a short digression is necessary. The especially powerful definition of resilience given here by the UNISDR is in fact the product of processes of negotiation; many different actors have taken part in the discussion and hence given the result the aura of democracy. However, it should be emphasised once again that, from the perspective sketched here, it is not sufficient to think on the level of linguistic communication, on the exchange of arguments. The concept of discourse, in the sense in which it is fundamental to this paper, means something quite d­ ifferent— it means the epistemology that understands an individual being according to its concept as well as the meaning of its concept in the sense of Ernst Cassirer, which takes the conditions of constitution into account that separate a being— here, for example, the understanding of system or hazard as such—from something else, and which hence both distinguishes and at the same time forms the relief and the basis of what can be said within discourse—and what not. I think that an understanding of human resilience that abstracts from these conditions of constitution cannot grasp the resilience of the human, but at best the resilience of a particular hegemonically-shaped idea of the human, which need not have much or anything to do with, for example, the human who invented democracy. Within the academic discussion of resilience, humans are primarily

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objectified as a structure and a constitution without considering that this objectified structure and the constitution of humans are a product of a discourse that is full of pre-conditions and not, in fact, ‘the human’—precisely this is suggested, however, when resilience is discussed. Whoever speaks about resilience ought not to remain silent about these conditions of constitution—at the very least they must reflect on them. What, then, we now have to ask, makes the human into a human?

4 What is the Human? The thinking of philosophical anthropology of the early 20th century brought together the hermeneutic and phenomenological schools of thought. The approach of wanting to identify the thing that was the ‘essence’ (phenomenology) of being human, but at the same time to understand this being relationally embedded in a context of emergence which can only be grasped in a circular process (hermeneutics), led the philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner to devise a comprehensive theory of a human’s special form of being. Plessner (1981) originated the idea that the human has a sort of double existence. Humans are, in Plessner’s words, “eccentrically positioned” (“exzentrisch positioniert”): man experiences himself from the inside as a living body (Leib), essentially as a subject, and yet at the same time perceives his body as some external other, physical thing (Körper) from the outside in just the same way as he perceives all other things as externalities, i.e., as objects. These two perspectives cannot be brought into harmony with each other. Trapped in this ambiguity, the human being continuously comprehends the world and himself anew. Plessner does not attempt to reduce the problem of subject and object to a single time-independent solution, be it through the assumption of a material or mechanistic origin or a spiritual-immaterial, vitalist conception. Plessner understands subject and object as a relationship in tension, as two complementary ways of being, and the human as indifferent to this difference: it’s not that man is; rather, man continuously processes and (re-)invents himself anew. Yet he (re-)invents not only himself in this process but also his environment. The human stands in an indissoluble correspondence-relationship with his continuously re-forming environment which is closed to object concepts. He finds himself as a child in a world full of phenomena, full of implications, full of riddles and surprises, full of plausibilities and yet also full of incomprehensible elements which only order themselves slowly over countless reiterations as they gradually find their place in the wider societal discourses. In each moment of this development, his world, his perceived order,

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seems to him the only true one. Only when he reaches adolescence does man develop an understanding for the existence of different positions and worldviews of others, but even later this process of world-emergence does not come to an end. For the firewoman, the rubbish bin in the entry is a hazard, but for the residents it is a convenience; for the farmer on the slopes of the Merapi volcano in Java the rumbling of the mountain is a spiritual sign of the special connectedness of the human with the land, whereas for the disaster manager it is grounds for an evacuation; for one person the here and now is the place of fulfilment, while another person awaits paradise in the great beyond. Depending on the life situation and position, cultural characteristics and individual experience, as well as the motive situation of the actor, a different world appears—not as a substance that merely takes on a different aspect depending on the mood but which, from a phenomenological standpoint, is a new whole. Every human being defines himself in his socially developed subjective environment, creating himself and his world in an indissoluble process of mutual interaction. Man and environment(s) are mutually corresponding process phenomena. It is this indeterminateness and openness which distinguishes the human from other life forms; this is what makes the human being human from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. In other words, it is precisely the fact that it can not be positively determined what the human is; rather, the human is a meaning-generating and meaning-­ oriented process being. Meaning appears, says Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as a “phenomenon of the in-between” (1976, own translation): the body of permanent experience, the living body (Leib), is the locus of living meanings in which the other and the environment have become enmeshed just as the body itself affixes itself to the others and the environment; the living body mixes itself with the external as the external mixes itself with the body (see also Serres 1998, p. 103). In the complementarity of the inside and outside, in the continual experience of the unification of the incompatible, in the transcending into the social space and the transcendence of the space into the body, meaning is generated or reproduced. Thus, meaning always emerges at the intersection and simultaneously in the in-between space, be it between words, between interacting actors or between human agents and their objects, as a sort of profound success or accord (striving towards) holding together all perception, all thought and all action between process-based/practical, symbolically transcendentally generated expectations and experiences of the world. Thus, meaning would never be amenable to determination in a substantial context; it is, from an anthropological viewpoint, a process phenomenon that results precisely from the transcendence of forms, the experience of being interwoven, the sympathetic connectedness of forms symbolically revealing themselves to the human being, who coalesces the individual elements

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with the whole of the social space into an indissoluble unity. This may sound like a romanticising view, but it isn’t; rather, this phenomenological conceptualisation of meaning radically refrains from any valuations. It says, merely, that both things are a part of being human: the existential embeddedness in an overarching whole and the practical/process-based distinction and delimitation as a functional imagination of a well-ordered world. For plants and even animals none of this applies as such. Another of the central figures in philosophical anthropology alongside Plessner, Max Scheler, argues in his book Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1966) that only plants are “safe.” Plants, writes Scheler, respond with unambiguous reactions to unambiguous stimuli. Stimulus and reaction are secure circuits that do not vary in any way and therefore do not allow for any uncertainty. Plants, he argues, are secure so long as the environment does not change. Animals, by contrast, are already breaking away from this total dependence on stimuli. Moved by instinct, animals leave their original environments and expand their inhabited space. However, animals are therefore also exposed to influences that overwhelm their ‘instinct system,’ which is not prepared for them. They are therefore “less orientationally assured,” as Scheler says (1966, p. 26 ff., own translation). But animals then have stores of released energy at their disposal with which they can compensate for uncertainty. This leads to the emergence of a “swelling,” a “state of surplus,” that frees up the drive. This surfeit of drive compels a further differentiation, which produces larger and larger free spaces, which in turn cause the animal to receive more and different kinds of stimuli. For Max Scheler, only plants are safe because they are synchronised with the pace of environmental changes. By contrast, animals in motion themselves increase the variation in their environments, with the consequence that they need to deal more flexible with different conditions (see also Scheler 1966, p. 26). Human beings ultimately completely free themselves from this ‘natural’ dependence on drives and the environment, emancipating themselves from all limitations; as intellectual beings, they are “existentially unbound from the organic,” “open to the world” (“Weltoffen,” see also Scheler 1966, p. 32, own translation). From this “Weltoffenheit” of the human, Arnold Gehlen inferred a need for stabilising institutions: because man is eccentrically positioned and open to the world, he is, in comparison to plants and animals, a sort of extra-uterine premature birth and secondary precocial animal (Portmann 1958), a “deficient being” (“Mängelwesen,” Gehlen 1993, p. 31)—he must find the solutions to the questions that he encounters by himself. The human, he says, is thrown into an overwhelming environment that floods him with stimuli. In order to avoid completely losing themselves in this openness, says Gehlen, humans create institutions for

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themselves. It is only this development of complexity-reducing institutions such as the family, marriage and kinship networks, spokespersons and chiefdoms, belief systems and religions or the law, and ultimately the state and so on, that gives them an inner stability and form. In their initiation these institutions first respond to problem areas in this deficient being, the human, and then develop self-structuring potency through which their original function falls into oblivion or, as Gehlen puts it, into a state of “background fulfillment” (“Hintergrunderfüllung,” Gehlen 1986, p. 51 ff.). For human beings, there is therefore no such thing as stability in itself. But each social interrelationship generates its own conception of stability on the one hand and develops stabilising forms and practices that create fundamental order on the other. Humans are, according to Gehlen, “cultural beings by nature” (1993, p. 88, own translation).

5 Homo Sociologicus With his institution theory, Gehlen has contributed significantly to establishing the conservatism-inspiring image of the human as deficient being in need of external stabilisation and guidance. Yet this image does not delve deeply enough into the matter; it remains ontologically reductionist. A more differentiated analysis is needed in order to understand the multifariousness of the external stabilisation and thus the conditions of resilience. A combination of sociological-anthropological, phenomenological and practice-theoretical considerations may provide a foundation. In his sociological-anthropological classic Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte (1993), Dieter Claessens tapped Paul Alsberg’s “body-­ liberation principle” (“Körperausschaltungsprinzip”) and Hugh Miller’s “insulation from selective pressure” to create a compelling explanatory framework for the transition from animal to human and, in particular, for the creation of supra-individual forms of organisation. Building on Paul Alsberg’s “body principle,” Claessens, in his Instinkt, Psyche, Geltung (1970), characterises animals as follows: The body is used in the most effective ways (jaw, claws, tentacles, venom) and in highly specialised ways (reproductive/incubation systems, etc.) to conquer the resistance-generating world. […] Instinct is – via selection (Alsberg could only suggest the possibilities of mutation) – the most sophisticated form of individual, cooperative and/or collaborative use of the body. In the instinct system, the body principle is essentially elevated to its conclusion. (1970, p. 82, own translation)

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The body principle, or more precisely, the body-adaptation principle defined as the primary means of human adjustment to their specific environments is, for Claessens, now overcome by means of trial and error: a fleeing primate might unintentionally have set off a slide of rubble and thus kept a pursuer, hindered by the rocks, at bay. This unintentional, but secondarily accomplished purposefulness of using rocks as a means of keeping an enemy at a distance was then “imitated” and could successively harden into a principle, a sort of “technique.” The maintenance of this “distancing technique” meant the end of the previously fundamental characteristic of self-preservation against enemies as a being that flees. The successful employment of a “non-corporeal defence method” (Alsberg 1922, p. 378, own translation) creates the conditions that enable humans to be conscious of themselves. Thus, positive effects—again initially unintended, from the togetherness of multiple human forebears in the form of a horde—emerge: in a group of people, different methods of defence are available than for individual beings which can, under the proper corporeal-intellectual conditions, be noticed and retained. Hugh Miller (1964) called this concept “insulation against selective pressure” and applied the biological concept of “niches” to describe how this randomness could lead to the emergence of better living conditions that would relieve the adaptive pressure exerted on the bodies of the now more protected beings. “As previously with the body-liberation principle, this model, sociologically activated, leads from the self-defending group to the fence-protected village, the fortress and ultimately to the walled city” (Claessens and Tyradellis 1997, p. 36, italics in original, own translation). Taken together, the two organisation principles sketched here provide an organisational framework in which humans can ever more ‘luxuriously’ flourish and develop. The long-term securing of the group alliance (instead of the merely temporary horde context) which enables these factors will now have gained critical influence over the development of humans. The group and the conditions arising from it become a part of the human; “the group space and interior space gains a preconceptual value character” (Claessens 1993, p. 72, own translation). In short: humans now develop in increasingly large social aggregations, practically experience the associated necessities and shape further development with their own individual actions. But where there are groups, inequalities emerge, some people profit from the alliance more than others, etc. The group, then, is the advent of what Ralf Dahrendorf in his classic work Homo Sociologicus calls the “vexatious fact of society” (2010, own translation), i.e., the forced assumption of roles and associated limitation of the individual’s degree of freedom. Moreover, with the formation of organisational formats encompassing ever greater numbers of people, the collective space becomes ever further alienated from the concrete

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everyday references of the people organised in the group and this alienation generates pressure toward a vertical differentiation of the reference spaces, toward milieus and fields—a subject to which I will shortly return. The crucial factor here is that human beings are constitutionally social in nature; humans generate their external stabilisation in the socially experienced context and are in turn produced by it. Humans only exist through others, with their own form transcending into the social.

6 The Everyday Practical (Re-)Production of Meaning The established rituals, routines, behavioural prescriptions including the sanctions associated with non-compliance, and the oral and, much later, written transmission of knowledge about the nature of the world gradually and increasingly create the experiential context in which, drawing on the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann posited The Social Construction of Reality in their classic work from 1966. Berger and Luckmann analyse how the world encounters human beings prior to all academic and professional perception-forming and reflection, how humans assimilate the world, first forming themselves and yet also actively shaping the world in which they live. In the “natural attitude,” humans apprehend their own as well as the corporeal existence of other people who, like themselves, are equipped with consciousness, and regard and experience the world in a similar way (reciprocity of perspectives), which makes mutual understanding possible. Humans initially accept the world as it appears to them without question, accepting fundamental patterns by which the society that surrounds them ordered the world even before their time, such as the conceptualisation of space and time, or illness and health and so on. Moreover, society offers the individual human a comprehensive stock of knowledge in the form of customs (“this is how it’s done here”), practical knowledge (“always tighten screws in a clockwise direction”) and specific technical knowledge (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 63 f.). Humans find all of these types of knowledge in the world into which they are born, but not in the form of a library in which the knowledge could be absorbed by reading. Rather, it emerges in a largely indeterminate form, in many cases conveyed through practical action or speech and continuously changing through this practice, but thereby also as an indiscriminately transcendent and open-to-­ interpretation reservoir of possibilities and instructions that only takes on concrete (practical) forms in the act of communicative extrapolation of the world. At

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the very same moment these forms appear to the human observer as ‘really’ existing things, yet the patterns, typifications and instructions for action—the societal orders into which they are socialised—are the product of prior human action which in turn was also based on patterns, typifications and instructions for action that changed it and passed it down to the next generation. Thus, every practice is embedded in a genuinely practically constructed meaning horizon which is transcendent to the subject, binding it with the group and with the entirety of social history, and from which every practice draws its meaning and thereby simultaneously produces the meaning horizon by connecting to the previous one while updating and changing it. The conditions of human resilience constitute themselves in this practical symbolic-transcendental process. For this reason, practice, and thus also resilience, as particularly Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., 1998), or Anthony Giddens (e.g., 1997) and Bruno Latour (e.g., 2001) have amply demonstrated, is not amenable to theorisation in the conventional sense. The ‘theory’ of symbolic forms ties in with this line of argumentation and attempts to establish a supplementary bridge by shifting the way of looking. ‘Regular’ theoretical descriptions cannot, as I argue, capture the symbolic-­ transcendent thread constituting the practice. On the contrary, theory which makes use of substantialising concepts causes the thread to disappear by replacing the sympathetic interconnectedness of symbolic transcendence in its description with formal/logical principles resulting from a specific (occidental) scientific history and suggesting that it has thereby represented the practice in itself. Emphasising this is important not least because, out of this practical/processbased perspective, there emerges a more differentiated image of the human gradually constituting its world with respect to Gehlen’s deficient-being thesis, namely one that conceives of external stabilisation as an essential condition of the human, but which understands the internal stabilisation through external stabilisation as a process-based, multi-dimension-transcending, multi-level act. Humans are, in their world-openness, deficient beings, yet they already always and continually compensate for their ‘deficiencies’ in multifarious ways and not only through institutions,2 which are rather one form of external stabilisation among others and can only be adequately evaluated in this context. From an anthropological standpoint, humans constitute themselves qua praxis as a fluid, meaning-generating

2The

fuzziness and generality of the institution concept may, however, be due to the fact that from the standpoint of the external stabilisation thesis all forms of external stabilisation can be interpreted as institutions; in that case my critique would be moot, though the institution concept would also be empty and certainly no longer Gehlen’s concept.

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and meaning-interpreting homoeostasis, with a symbolic-transcendent environment (itself in a fluid state) in correspondence with their habitus (Bourdieu) that is practically formed and reproduced through perception-, thought- and action. Humans are therefore always substantially adapted to their environments; they are constitutionally resilient, one might say, but this does not mean that they are safe: the fact of mortality existentially challenges the world-open human, forces to compensate in the first place. The physical space harbours dangers and changes. And life itself in larger social formations and against the backdrop of social history that has congealed to take on object status also demands adaptation. But within a constant struggle between meaningfully structured expectations of the world shaped by everyday experience and demands made on the individual by supra-individually organising forms of civilising, disciplining and governing, which the individual himself contributes towards construing through his everyday practices, the individual also construes himself his subjective meaningful cosmology of a life worth living that ‘fits’ in with the experienced circumstances. He does so through continuous adaptation of his perception, forms of thought and practices, norms and values, and simultaneously using all the means that are constitutively available to him, of which the large majority are processed pre-­rationally. And he continually attempts to adapt the environment to the self-­ constituting conditions, for example, through shaping the biophysical environment, through changing his physical location (migration) or through changing his social position. The possibilities that present themselves to the individual with respect to the last strategy mentioned, namely changing one’s social position, were demonstrated in particular by Pierre Bourdieu with his habitus theory.3 Humans principally move within social milieus, self-chosen niches or interior climates in which they most likely meet others with similar interests, tastes, resources etc., in physical spaces that conform to them and with which they feel familiar. They do this because, here, habitualised expectations and the experienced world harmonise optimally; because here they find what they, or better put, their habitus has learned to appreciate or at least to accept as normality. Here they find the optimal distance between the possible and that which their socialising milieu suggests to them as the best possible; between that which others in the environment expect and allow and the solution options which the others have already found for problems resembling their own. They do so because qua praxis

3He

did this, I posit, notwithstanding all the rather superficial critiques concerning, for example, the structural conservatism of the habitus, with a depth and resolve not achieved by others.

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they experience the highest degree of fulfilment, hence, of meaning or, in other words: they experience themselves as being resilient here within the given conditions. The world is what fits with me and I fit with the world; the world and I are in a prestabilised harmony (that this tendency toward milieu-formation also impacts the research on resilience, to complete the arc opened in the introduction, is perhaps worthy of marginal mention in this regard). Related to the human, resilience is constituted practically in space-specific symbolic-transcendental relations. In a research project on the subjective sense of security and vulnerability in a medium-sized German city we found that residents of a particularly unsafe and vulnerable district—as determined using statistical criteria—manifested a complex spatial internal differentiation with respect to evaluating their own situation. Muslims, for example, expressed their fear of terrorist attacks, or more precisely that they, ‘the Muslims,’ would be regarded with general suspicion of having contact to terrorists and that wearing religious symbols would result in hostilities directed toward them. They therefore fear and avoid spaces in which Salafists on the one hand or right-wing extremists on the other are present. Their idea of unsafe spaces therefore differs fundamentally from that of non-Muslim inhabitants and from what the statistical evidence says about these districts. At the same time, they share this view with other Muslims, which has a community-building effect, which in turn is the basis for a whole series of everyday practices that have a meaning-generating function for them. But they also distance themselves as a group from others and regard their own vulnerability in relation to these other ‘vulnerables’ (see Seidelsohn, Voss and Krüger 2017). The strategies that they habitually use to reduce their perceived vulnerability can only be interpreted against this emic background, the situational, symbolic-transcendental normality constructs of the actors. In two studies, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand and in the Alps, we examined whether and how the people living there were adapting to expected climate-change effects. In the two very different study regions, we found that the scientific climate-change knowledge is interpreted in local narratives that structure the space-specific customs and construction of a meaningful life. Threats due to landslides, floods, earthquakes, avalanches or flash floods are evaluated against the backdrop of these constructs of meaning: “You pay (a) price to live in the Himalayas. Most times it gives you beauty. Sometimes it gives you hard times” (Interview, own material). The mountain environment is not perceived by its inhabitants as a static object but as something symbolically formed: every rock can have its own religious meaning; its defilement becomes every bit as much a cause of disastrous processes as do the crimes of the ski industry against ‘mother nature’ (see Voss and Schildhauer 2016). For others, by contrast, the space is a

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resource for securing their material livelihood and welfare, where the failure to use it would be the true ‘sin.’ For the Tao people of the Taiwanese island of Lanyu, a strict separation between the social, natural and supernatural worlds is a foreign idea; instead a belief in ghosts is fundamental to the culture of the Tao (see Voss and Funk 2015). Because they ascribe to words an intrinsic power to produce objects or circumstances they avoid even mentioning bad things, for their power would increase the more one spoke of them (Voss and Funk 2015, p. 263). For instance, people observe an approaching typhoon and the behaviour of others in silence until ultimately everyone has gathered at the boat launch to secure the boats together (Voss and Funk 2015, p. 264). In this tightly circumscribed context shaped by the interplay of various spheres of being—the preceding, contemporary and afterworlds flow into each other; the spirit can temporarily leave the body, etc.—it is not necessary to speak. In my view, these examples from empirical research demonstrate compellingly that resilience constitutes against the backdrop of the symbolic forming of the human world and the human and must therefore be evaluated in these completely relational terms. They also show that the text of a description should not be taken as equivalent to the reality of the practice. Turning this from a marginal issue to the main problem is the motive of the discussion about symbolic forms.

7 Research Praxis The work of Pierre Bourdieu has had a significant impact on cultural anthropological and sociological research on the practical constitution of society. For example, science and technology studies (STS) and the Actor-Network Theory have approached the issue not by attempting to illuminate practice deductively through theory that could never adequately address the conditions of practice, but rather by tracing the individual practices to reconstruct the networks of actants.4 Much earlier, drawing on George Herbert Mead, a broad research tradition developed which was dedicated to understanding symbolically transmitted communicative acts and practices. Since its inception, ethnology has fundamentally focused on understanding emic-practical processes that characterise being human

4The

term names the concurrence of human and non-human entities (see Latour 1999, p. 19).

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in highly heterogeneous spatial and cultural contexts. Over recent decades, the academic disciplines of history, communications and political science have extensively discussed the historicity of human beings and underscored their communicative openness as well as the genuinely political character of all forms of existence. In short: the human and social sciences have in many ways developed methods for understanding the conditions and consequences of eccentric positionality of the human on the level of practical actions. But, due to the lack of alternatives within language, they fall back on categories and terms that name objects and structures as if they already existed as isolated facts in the world, whether as social or natural facts, or at least as if it were only a question of method whether or not it is possible to approach this practically generated world. In all of this, in my opinion, structurally the existential transcendence of the being is lost in the fray, which recedes from the concept when it is not understood as meaning. Thus, meaning becomes an accident in the meaning of Aristotle on the ‘last mile,’ as it is often called in the disaster risk management jargon. This provides fuel for a structural shift whose magnitude can scarcely be exaggerated. The impression that the world in its main characteristics has been named and is therefore known and that individual solutions merely need to be adapted to specific contexts becomes the basis for all action. But the opposite appears to me to be the case: the world is indeterminate to human beings; the impression that we have already grasped the world, an artefact of observation, is a naturalist misconception that was perhaps decisive for the development of the existential problems with which humans find themselves confronted today. The world order into which humans are born is but one of many possible ones and it is by no means established that an unequally structured discourse will allow the now living generations to ascertain which form of conducting the economy or which type of politics or technologies will serve the long-term resilience of the human. The empirical record in development policy, for example, rather calls for restraint; indeed, only practice over an indeterminate time period provides insight into which farming techniques, which new technologies, which new medicines or teaching methods, which anti-famine strategies and which environmental measures have which consequences for the symbolic-practical, space-related constructs of meaning. From an essentialist perspective, this cannot be determined. But practice-based research alone is not an adequate basis for the examination of resilience: “Partial solutions don´t work” (Walker 2005, p. 77). There is also a need for an integrative, holistic approach that captures the various levels of aggregation of social life and practices in terms of their spatial and temporal reciprocal effects on vulnerability and resilience. Here, too, there are already some works from which to pursue further study (e.g., Turner et al. 2003; Voss 2008). But

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an adequate application of such approaches requires resources and institutional capacities, as well as sensitivity on the part of the researchers to the symbolically multivalent, transcendent modes of meaning construction. Here, there is the ever-present hazard of considering the model to be the reality and reifying named concepts as a description of the real complexity. It is the mode of observation, the attitude and manner of thinking of the researcher that makes the difference. Without a change in the manner of observation, research remains constricted by the confines of language. But it’s not only the researchers. I see a broad field of research on and a very fundamental contribution from the human and social sciences to resilience research, which ties it in with the idea of humans as meaningoriented social beings. The condition for this contribution bearing fruit, however, is the recognition of this contribution by other actors.

8 Conclusion Human beings create their own space as they are created by this space. This dual construction process forms the conditions of their resilience; humans adapt themselves to these conditions, habitually defining their goals, shaping their expectations and conditioning their feelings, norms and values. In these self-created contexts, humans develop capabilities to maintain the meaningful order of the realm of possibilities that present themselves to them. Those who speak of resilience must consider the entire spectrum of adaptive capacities and think about the transcendence of the observed forms. From the perspective of the theory of symbolic forms outlined here, they must not get stuck on the material or visible action strategies; they must not positively assume any (surrounding) world; they must not take any rationality assumptions for granted; they must refrain from any value judgements regarding what constitutes a good life; indeed, they must even discount their conviction that life in itself is worthy of protection per se. This consideration of the resilience discussion should therefore be read as a prolegomenon for the study of resilience. Following the hypothesis that meaning is primarily practical and generated in space-transcendent contexts and the symbolically transcendent generating meaningfulness of existence makes humans human, this paper refrains from all other normative assumptions, leaving it completely to the actors with their multidimensional habitual forms of adaptation and the construction of environments to decide how and what they perceive as relevant for themselves, how they value things, which paths they choose in order to meet the requirements of their habitual motives and so on. Approached in this manner, research on resilience begins with the recognition of the complete other, with the

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acceptance that life defines itself and that the evaluation of the forms always takes place discursively. Everything that follows is based on that and becomes a matter of negotiation: the world in which we live in in larger collectives today and wish to live in in the future is a value decision that cannot be circumnavigated through essentialisation. The perspective presented here thus demands extreme care: anyone who defines resilience for others attacks the most valuable of human ­possessions—the integrity of their constructs of meaning.

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Voss, M. & Schildhauer, S. (2016). Zivilgesellschaftliche Partizipation im Klimawandel. In C. Besio & G. Roman (eds.), Zum gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit dem Klimawandel. Kooperationen und Kollisionen (pp. 117–148). Baden-Baden: Nomos. Voss, M. & Funk, L. (2015). Participative vulnerability and resilience assessment and the example of the Tao people (Taiwan). In F. Krüger, G. Bankoff, T. Cannon & L. Shipper (eds.), Cultures and disasters. Understanding cultural framings in disaster risk reduction (pp. 255–276). London: Routledge. Voss, M. (2008). The vulnerable can’t speak. An integrative vulnerability approach to disaster and climate change research. Behemoth 1 (39), 39–56. Voss, M. (2006). Symbolische Formen. Grundlagen und Elemente einer Soziologie der Katastrophe. Bielefeld: transcript. Walker, B. et al. (2002). Resilience management in social-ecological systems: a working hypothesis for a participatory approach. Conservation Ecology 6 (1), 14. Walker, B. (2005). A resilience approach to integrated assessment. The Integrated Assessment Journal 5 (1), 77–97. Wink, R. (2016). Resilienzperspektive als wissenschaftliche Chance. Eine Einstimmung zu diesem Sammelband. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 1–11). Heidelberg: Springer VS.

Voss, Martin (Prof. Dr.) is an inter- and transdisciplinary working sociologist, university professor for social scientific disaster research, the head of the Disaster Research Unit (DRU) at the Freie Universität Berlin and CEO of the non-profit Company “Academy of the Disaster Research Unit (ADRU)”. His areas of Specialization encompass the whole disaster management cycle, beginning with the perception of existential risks and ending with sustainable practices to secure wellbeing. Relevant publications: Voss, M. (2006). Symbolische Formen. Grundlagen und Elemente einer Soziologie der Katastrophe. Bielefeld: transcript; Voss, M. & Funk, L. (2015). Participative vulnerability and resilience assessment and the example of the Tao people (Taiwan). In F. Krüger, G. Bankoff, T. Cannon & L. Shipper (eds.), Cultures and disasters. Understanding cultural framings in disaster risk reduction (pp. 255–276). London: Routledge; Voss, M. & Dittmer, C. (2016). Resilienz aus katastrophensoziologischer Perspektive. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 179–198). Heidelberg: Springer VS.

Part II Resilience Discourses

The Resilience Discourse: How a Concept from Ecology Could Overcome the Boundaries Between Academic Disciplines and Society Michael Meyen and Janina Schier 1 Goals, Theoretical Background and Research Design The notion of resilience has become a ‘buzzword’ with the potential to replace the concept of sustainability and to connect researchers of the natural and social ­sciences (Walker 2013). What are the reasons for this triumphal success and which consequences come with its usage? How did this term succeed in leaving the ivory tower (see Zolli and Healy 2013) and at the same time conquer not only bestseller lists in the literature (see exemplary Berndt 2013a, b; Rodin 2015) but also mass media? What does this success mean for the concept of resilience itself and for the description of society and its perception? To answer these questions, this chapter examines the resilience discourse in science, corporate ­communication and mass media. Four sources are selected in order to grasp resilience as a discursive ­formation, meaning, that a regularity between objects, types of statements, c­oncepts, or thematic choices can be found (Foucault 1972): academic ­journals, leading Germanlanguage media, popular scientific publications and d­ ocuments from three German companies. Thereby, the focus of this contribution is on German-speaking countries. However, as the scholarly discourse is strongly influenced by English-language

M. Meyen () · J. Schier  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] J. Schier E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_6

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publications, it was essential to include international publications as well. Finally, it should be noted that this chapter is an extended version of a German-language essay published in the journal Gaia in 2017 (see Meyen et al. 2017). With Michel Foucault, it is assumed that we always think within an anonymous, compelling system of thought that belongs to a time and a language (Foucault 2001, p. 666). The rules that determine what can be said by whom, where and how (and therefore what cannot be said) are called “discursive practice” (Foucault 1981, p. 171). A Foucauldian discourse analysis, as presented here, expects that such discursive practice systematically forms the objects of which they speak. In relation to this matter: resilience only exists in discourses—in the set of statements which belong to the same discursive formation, i.e., relate to the same object. The object of investigation is therefore (at least theoretically) the totality of all effective statements on resilience (Foucault 1981, pp. 41, 49, 74, 170). With Foucault and according to approaches of critical discourse analysis which are based on his ideas (see van Dijk 1993; Fairclough 2012), this study focuses on interests, power and the impact of discourses at the same time. These may be, for example, reallocations in research funding, changes in health insurance funds and in workplace health promotion, the shift of responsibility from corporate management to employees, subjective interpretation or the channeling of individual and collective action. Resilience is understood as a “nodal discourse”—a discourse in which numerous other discourses bundle together and the complex social realities are inevitably simplified, highlighting certain aspects and moving others into the background (Fairclough 2012, p. 463). In order to detect this discourse, the four “rules of formation,” proposed by Foucault, are transformed into categories of analysis (Foucault 1972, pp. 40–70): • Topics and objects: what is talked about when the concept of resilience appears? What are the relationships between these topics and objects, and in which contexts are they mentioned? • Enunciative modalities: who (status) speaks, where (place of publication) and from which perspective? • Concepts: in which sequence, with which rhetoric and with which supporting documents (sources) is spoken of? • Strategies: which theories are used and who can claim to be a legitimate speaker? Which functions does the resilience discourse have for science, business and society? Which discourses does it follow and which discourses does it suppress?

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As it is not possible to fully grasp a discourse (the totality of all effective statements) (see Foucault 1981, p. 95), the selection of material follows the principle of centrality. The more prominent a statement is placed, the greater its significance in the discourse. Following Foucault, truth is produced and distributed under the predominant control of some large political and economic apparatuses—­including universities, army, press, mass media. He justifies this with the “need for truth of both economic production and political power” (Foucault 1978, p. 51) and thus legitimizes the concentration on prominent discourse components: • Key texts from the disciplines of origin (environmental science, psychology, physics) as well as from other natural and social sciences (determined by citation frequency); • 18 articles on resilience published in the eight leading management journals between 2000 and 2016 (determined by Harzing’s Meta-Ranking: Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal); • 51 documents from three DAX companies (internal and external communication from BMW, Siemens and Deutsche Telekom; company health insurance funds of BMW and Siemens; see Maier 2015) and • 60 articles from German leading news media (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel). The sequence of this list was not left to chance. Following Foucault, this study assumes that the resilience discourse depends on the place of publication. On the one hand, experts, PR specialists and journalists form a concept like resilience according to their own rules which also depend on the type and size of the audience to which they speak. On the other hand, corporate communication and mass media draw on the scientific discourse. Topics which are not present here cannot be picked up by PR and journalism. On the contrary, it can be assumed that the logic of action of these systems shortens and changes any scientific discourse. In order to understand this process for corporate communication, special emphasis was put on management research. The presentation of the findings follows this argumentation and begins with the scientific resilience discourse. In that regard, it should be mentioned that the scope of this chapter allows only limited illustration and documentation of assumptions with excerpts from the material.

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2 The Academic Discourse on Resilience and Its Implications In the academic discourse, resilience describes the ability to remain stable and to maintain the respective functionality under adverse external conditions or in times of crisis. This applies for materials that can be compressed or stretched without consequences in physics (e.g., rubber), for ecosystems in environmental science and for humans in psychology (see Folke et al. 2010; Masten 2001). The proof follows with only six important definitions from different disciplinary contexts (formation of topics and objects, enunciative modalities and concepts): • Ecology: “measure of the persistence of systems and their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables” (Holling 1973, p. 14); • Social ecology: “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2004, p. 4); • Social geography: “the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political, and environmental change” (Adger 2000, p. 347); • Economics: “the ability of the system to withstand either market or environmental shocks without losing the capacity to allocate resources efficiently” (Perrings 2006, p. 418); • Comparative economics: “the ability of a social system (society, community, organization) to react and adapt to abrupt challenges (internal or external) and/ or to avoid gradually drifting along destructive slippery slopes” (institutional resilience, Aligica and Tarko 2014, p. 56); • Child and youth psychology: “a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity” (Luthar et al. 2000, p. 543). The more recent definitions show that the initial formula (persistence) of C ­ rawford Holling (1973) is supplemented by adaptation and transformation (“adaptive cycle,” Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, p. 7). This is a consequence of transferring the term to mental and social systems and its potential to replace the sustainability norm. This expansion is supported by the many adjectives that are now used in connection to resilience (e.g., personnel, organizational, institutional, social) and a debate that calls for a clear separation: a term to operationalize for environmental science on the one hand (“descriptive concept”) and a means of communication for interdisciplinary dialogue as well as for the exchange between research and practice on the other (“boundary object,” see Brand and Jax 2007).

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Nevertheless, the core of the term has not changed. Whoever speaks of resilience, firstly, has a threat in mind (external, internal, from both directions at the same time), secondly, has to determine the function(s) that (for example) a social functional system has for society and then search for weak points and strengths of this system, and, thirdly, concentrates consequently on system maintenance, survival and improvement. Even catastrophes are no longer perceived as hopeless but as opportunities for learning (see Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, p. 9). Resilience also aims for measurability (this is a fourth implication of the term), whether it is about general resilience (the ability of a system to cope with very different threats and still continue to function in all aspects, Walker 2013) or very concrete threats. Holling (1973, p. 14) does not conceal this implication (“measure”), but terms like “ability” or “capacity” also call for quantification. The question of the resilience of social unity in these disciplines does not permit a philosophical answer and obviously not even one that is based on material collected by qualitative empirical methods. “There are no absolutes in resilience, no binaries, just measures of more or less” (Zolli and Healy 2013, p. 260). This focus on counting and calculation can be explained by the origin of the term. Quantification is of great importance for engineers who deal with material properties as well as for ecologists and psychologists. There is hardly any text on resilience that does not mention either Crawford Holling, Brian Walker or Emmy Werner. If the concept is incorporated into social sciences and humanities, it strengthens the position of natural sciences and their scientific ideal alongside the three original disciplines. Conversely, this is a (maybe unconscious) strategy of social sciences and humanities to benefit from the reputation that comes with all the objects investigated at the power pole of the scientific field. At the same time, the four implications just outlined are likely to be important reasons for the career that the concept of resilience as a means of communication has made for interdisciplinary dialogue. As academia can define and possibly even measure threats, system functions and weaknesses, resilience enhances scientific knowledge over other forms of knowledge—also because the findings consistently describe scientific research as a “resilience generator” (Sommer and Welzer 2014, p. 116). In other words: the term serves the interests of the scientific and academic system. In addition, there is an important difference to concepts of social change which either know the target state (revolution) or have already found it (modernization, transition, transformation) and thus supply a complex evaluation scale like sustainability (this is how the world should look like). To put it pointedly: if resilience becomes the guiding principle of social development, completion seems to be excluded (unlike in the case of sustainability). On the one hand, we do not know when and how circumstances will change (it seems inevitable that they will change), and on the other hand, people or social systems can

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be resilient against some threats and not against others. Perhaps strengthening one area may weaken another (see Walker 2013). Critics of this view will argue that the academic resilience discourse is far more multifaceted and by no means exclusively affirmative, application-oriented and fixated on measurability, especially beyond the scientific power pole. In addition to the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, which will be published in its fifth year in 2017 and considers itself as a forum for dialogue between the disciplines as well as between science and society, reference is made here to corresponding works from the social sciences, philosophy and theology (see for examples the contributions in Vogt and Schneider 2016). The academic resilience discourse includes the warning that concepts from the natural sciences should not simply be applied to social phenomena (Cannon and Müller-Hahn 2010, p. 623). Nevertheless, in the social sciences, there are attempts to publish on resilience initially in anthologies (the form of publication with the lowest reputation) or in journals with lower reputation (see Endress and Maurer 2015; Wink 2016) and to discuss the (often hidden) implications of the concept. These implications range from the rejection of the idea that human coexistence can be planned or controlled to a tendency towards stability and optimization fetishism and to normative decisions: what exactly threatens social unity (an individual, an organization, a community, a functional system) and which functions of this unity are worth preserving in any case? Rungius and Weller (2016) speak of a “form of postmodern conservatism that has become uncertain of the reasons for its values.” With Foucault and the knowledge of the structures of the scientific field, such differentiations can be understood as a struggle for power of definition, the outcome of which is fundamentally open on the one hand and which, on the other hand, does not remain inconsequential for the hegemonic position. Brian Walker (2013), for example, one of the pioneers in the field and head of the influential Resilience Alliance in Stockholm (formation of enunciative modalities), now claims that the concept is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ in itself, but that it is (in the conceptualization of Foucault) a strategy, because dictatorships or salt landscapes can of course also be resilient (these are the two examples that Walker mentions). His proposal to reduce the resilience of such systems fails to address the problem. Literature shows that resilience research does indeed learn from pathogens, criminals or terrorists (for example, from networks for which one single major attack has been sufficient to keep the enemy in suspense for years, and which can sometimes even restrict themselves to announcing an action, see Zolli and Healy 2013). This section can be summarized as follows: Resilience as a perspective for social change has not only consequences for science (for its view on society

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as well as its methods) but also for human coexistence and politics. Anyone who asks for vulnerability, for threshold values and for the consequences of transgression, loses, on the one hand, sight of everyday life and ‘normality’. On the other hand, the concept of resilience, for example in developmental psychology, has changed both the prevention and treatment of adolescents and has given the field of positive psychology the status of an alternative paradigm (see Masten 2001, p. 34 f.).

3 Management Research As in social sciences, the topic of resilience is still in the discovery phase in management research (see Gibson and Tesone 2001). Although the annual output in the entire field (including specialist journals of all quality levels) has increased more than tenfold since the year 2000, only the 18 selected articles for this discourse analysis have met the demands of best places of publication (eleven of them are empirical studies). Ten of the 18 articles focus on individuals, seven on organizations and one on teams. These different focal points imply that management research takes approaches from ecology and social-ecology (organizations) as well as perspectives of positive psychology (employees, workgroups) into account, which turns away from pathologies, directs the focus on positive experiences and wants to develop such strengths (formations of objects and terms). When it comes to employees, however, the definitions of resilience differ: Wanberg and Banas (2000) and Shin et al. (2012), for example, see resilience as a relatively fixed character trait that helps people in general to be less burdened by adverse situations. In contrast, Luthans and Youssef (2007) argue that resilience implies changeability and thus also the possibility for companies to develop this ability. Employees can use resilience as a resource to overcome difficult workplace situations (Gabriel et al. 2011). Spreitzer et al. (2005) distinguish resilience from other positive states (flow, thriving), Stajkovic (2006) sees resilience as part of a fundamental self-confidence that contributes significantly to employee motivation, and Green et al. (2011) even speak of career resilience, which leads to employees being less affected on their career path. All these approaches evaluate the resilience of employees positively (formation of strategies). Resilient executives, for example, facilitate corporate performance (Peterson et al. 2008). Even in times of organizational change, resilience of employees helps companies, because resilient employees are more open to change (Wanberg and Banas 2000) and support this rather than their non-resilient colleagues (Shin et al. 2012). However, resilience is also desirable for the employees themselves, as

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it increases the satisfaction with their job and work situation (Gabriel et al. 2011; Youssef and Luthans 2007). In the only (theoretical) paper on teams by Lawrence and Maitlis (2012), resilience is seen as a collective ability to recover from setbacks and failures. The authors emphasize caring relationships at work. An appropriate culture can help the team to develop a belief in itself as well as collective hope. Generally spoken, management research on organizations assesses resilience as also being positive (formation of strategies). On the one hand, organizational resilience means withstanding external shocks and, on the other hand, the ability to adapt and develop (Lengnick-Hall and Beck 2005; van der Vegt et al. 2015). Researchers question here how organizational crises arise (Rudolph and Repenning 2002), and what strategies and resources a company can develop to cope with them (Carmeli and Markman 2011; Whiteman and Cooper 2011). Especially organizations operating in critical contexts (such as airlines or hospitals) have to be able to work reliably in the event of a disaster (Rudolph and Repenning 2002). The focus on prevention goes beyond risk management approaches (van der Vegt et al. 2015). Related discourses here are sustainability (Ortiz-de-Mandojana and Bansal 2016), governance (Carmeli and Markman 2011) and the family. Kahn et al. (2013) demand above all cohesion and flexibility. Crises and disasters are unavoidable in the discourse on organizational resilience. As organizations interlink individuals and society by creating jobs, for example, it is important that companies are resilient (van der Vegt et al. 2015). First, this outline shows that management research has not yet developed a uniform understanding of resilience. However, second, it can be noted that resilience is considered desirable because it provides added value for individuals, teams, companies and ultimately society as a whole. Third, it is important that managers and companies (and not so much the employees themselves) are generally seen as being responsible, for example by creating an appropriate working climate.

4 Corporate Communication and Communication of Company-Related Health Insurance Funds In contrast to management research, corporate communication of BMW, Siemens and Deutsche Telekom, however, reduces resilience to mental resistance preventing stress at work and places it as a (positive) counterpart to burnout (May 2015). Corporate communication not only adopts the health of employees and their ability to adapt to changing conditions from management research but also resilience as a career factor. A threat, however, is not the organization at home or even the employer but globalization, technical progress and economic crises (formation of strategies). The resilience discourse thus helps companies to shift responsibility for well-being to the employee and thereby save costs (see Maier 2015).

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The concept of resilience as an ability and characteristic of personalities from developmental psychology can be found in seminar descriptions of all three companies examined. In 2014, BMW defined resilience as “the ability to cope with crises, failures, defeats and traumatic experiences in an optimal way,” the Health and Safety Management of Deutsche Telekom termed resilience as “the ability to cope with difficult life situations and crises by relying on one’s own resources” and Siemens defined it as “the ability to not only ‘control’ uncertain situations and crises but also to emerge from them in the best case even stronger” (Maier 2015, p. 48). The company health insurance funds recommend yoga, progressive muscle relaxation and tai chi in order to strengthen the “mental tension force” and thus be able to cope better with work (BMW). Furthermore, they mention “mental stability and resilience” as a selection criterion for management positions (Siemens, Maier 2015, p. 50). Recommendations and seminars on resilience have replaced burnout prevention measures. Although the Siemens company health insurance fund describes the “types of stress” that are found in the burnout literature in detail (formations of objects), it does not mention the notion but rather advises to build up resilience instead (formations of concepts and strategies): “Practice letting go. You should loosen up and allow others to be more relaxed. […] Become more flexible. You should work on seeing the positive in new situations and regaining confidence” (Maier 2015, p. 58).

5 Popular Science and Mass Media Mass media are not the driving force behind the resilience discourse but rather cherry pickers. They take up what they find in science written on the concept (formation of objects). The psychological approach dominates, as in corporate communication, but other perspectives are also taken into account (socio-ecological, economic, philosophical, social-ethical), and the discursive practices from science and business are deconstructed (formation of strategies). Therefore, as discourse observers, mass media are a resilience factor themselves. In Germany’s leading news media outlets, resilience has only gained momentum since 2013—long after the notion was first used as a “boundary object” in science (Brand and Jax 2007) and was then heavily used by corporate communication. As resilience is not (yet) part of the basic vocabulary in Germany, journalists and non-fiction writers translate the term (usually with resistance) and use scientific literature explicitly as a source: referring in general to current research, quoting concrete investigations (especially the Hawaii study by Emmy Werner)

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or giving experts a voice (formations of the modalities of expression and strategies). Next to scientists and science journalists, such as Christina Berndt, who has not only published a bestseller on the subject (2013b) but also several longer relevant texts in Süddeutsche Zeitung, resilience coaches have a special power of ­definition—for example Sylvia Kéré Wellensiek, a non-fiction author (see 2011) and at the same time a sought-after interview partner for journalists. Christina Berndt writes in the newspaper not only about strokes of fate, everyday life and stress at the workplace (the topics of her book) but also about the resilience of rural districts in terms of flooding (2013a). The translation services of journalism and non-fiction writers include memorable images (such as bamboo, vaccination, impregnation and armour, and beading) as well as attributes that do not simply represent resilience in a positive way but elevate it to the rank of the extraordinary (formation of concepts). The Munichbased Riemann Verlag published the book “Resilience: Why things bounce back” by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy with the German title “Die 5 Geheimnisse der Überlebenskünstler” (The 5 Secrets of Survival Artists). Eva Heidenfelder (2014) spoke of an “invisible power” in the FAZ, Robert Kaltenbrunner (2013) in the same place of publication of a “magic word” and Christina Berndt (2010) in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of the “secret of a robust soul” as well as “that mysterious psychic resistance that protects people from mental illness, nagging self-doubt and even from slipping into the criminal milieu” (Berndt 2014). In academia, however, resilience is qualified as a so-called ordinary magic (Masten 2001, p. 227); i.e., as a normal process or ordinary characteristic. Part of this aura surrounding resilience is that beyond the academic sphere, both the differences in use of concepts that exist even within academic disciplines, such as management research as well as the doubts that belong to researchers’ habitus and include the contextualization of terms (formation of objects) disappear. To put it pointedly: in the general public, resilience becomes a recipe for each unity—for individuals, organizations and communities as well as for natural systems (see Zolli and Healy 2013; Amann and Alkenbrecher 2015; Rodin 2015). This includes that the findings from the very different academic disciplines are put seamlessly side by side and thus seem transferable. The context in which the term is used is correspondingly broad: on the one hand, threats to individuals, such as stress, burnout and burdensome experiences are mentioned, and, on the other hand, threats and crises for community and society (energy and oil, euro-currency, floods) are brought up. The resilience discourse thus ties in with threat scenarios and current experiences but offers a positive interpretation and a recommendation for action: we are not victims of the circumstances (neither as individuals, nor as a group or as

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a society), but we can do something—everyone, now and here. Moreover, in the resilience discourse, failure is the normal case and standing up is the first civic duty (formations of objects and strategies). In 2014, for example, three people share their personal story on “how they started over after hard setbacks” on an entire newspaper page in the FAZ (Kallwitz 2014). The tenor of all these texts: if you don’t do anything about your situation, it’s your own fault. This matches with the discourse also fostered by BMW, Siemens and Deutsche Telekom which shifts the responsibility of collective or corporate actors to individuals, and also applies to social threats and experiences. With Foucault, this can also be observed in the formation of enunciative modalities (who speaks where and from which perspective): Philipp Krohn (born 1977), who, according to self-disclosure, completed his studies with “a linguistic thesis on the limits of growth,” wrote twice in the FAZ in a detailed and benevolent way about “transition initiatives” which want to live without oil and have committed themselves to resilience (Krohn 2013, 2014). Besides the request to take things into our hands, the resilience discourse includes (here: in the formation of strategies) a debate on values (how should we live? what is a ‘good’ life today) and the rejection of the idea of wanting to preserve the current state and not to consume more than can grow back or made available again (the original meaning of sustainability, see Grunewald and Kopfmüller 2006). On February 1, 2013, for example, the FAZ promotes the movement of the Novel Ecology under the heading “The advantages of artificial wetlands.” A movement which defends interventions in natural systems with the argument that mankind, as a “gardener of the world,” has “changed nature forever anyway” (Lenzen 2013). Change yourself and your environment in order to survive: what fits better into a world where everything seems to be connected to everything and nobody really knows what the next day will bring? The logic of action of the mass media system, which favors exclusive and original (previously unprecedented) perspectives (see Karidi 2017; Karidi and Meyen 2018; Meyen 2018), leads at the same time to criticism of the discourse itself (­formations of objects and strategies). For instance, Christina Berndt reported in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on March 14, 2015 on an entire page about “a shabby turn.” The concept of resilience has not only reached the population but also employers. More and more companies are using concepts to increase mental resistance. However, the principle of resilience is actually not meant to “train people for the office” (Berndt 2015b). Shortly afterwards, Berndt placed resilience in the same newspaper in the context of sustainability, comprehensiveness and mindfulness and spoke of “ego-techniques,” which in the end only help “late capitalism” (Berndt 2015a). At the very same place and on the same day, Bernd Graff (2015) also used the notion “ego-techniques” (“to increase resistance, coping and self-preservation”),

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spoke of “private strategies, to overcome one’s own vulnerability,” and labelled the lifestyles of the “urban cultural creatives” (“sustainability, wholeness, mindfulness, resilience”) as “system-capable and—preserving.” With a view to science, Robert Kaltenbrunner had already described resilience as an alternative to sustainability in the FAZ on November 6, 2013—as a buzzword and in response to the obvious inability of modern societies to maintain the current state or even to propagate it as a goal (Kaltenbrunner 2013). Two and a half months later, the Süddeutsche Zeitung head of science, Patrick Illinger, expressed an accusation which was still outstanding: what was once nano, gender and vulnerability (“an open sesame” in the case of applications for third-party funding), is now resilience (“this inspires researchers on vulnerability as they can revitalize their old applications with sign reversal,” Illinger 2014). A functioning mass media system is thus, at least in terms of the resilience discourse, what all scientific studies call the condition of resilience: a structure that addresses weaknesses (see Zolli and Healy 2013, p. 261).

6 Conclusion The public resilience discourse is inextricably linked with individualism and selfresponsibility as well as with the assumption that the future is not controllable, and that the norm of sustainability has lost its meaning. Resilience glasses can be used to justify interventions of all kinds if they serve survival. In times when political and religious ideas have become less attractive, at least in the western world, resilience not only makes sense but also stimulates debates on values: what do we want to preserve, how do we want to live, how can personal happiness be achieved? In the general public, responsibility is shifted from corporate actors (state, parties, churches, companies) to the individual. If resilience is desirable and achievable for everyone, then those who will not reach this condition come under pressure. Thereby, resilience directs the error discussion from social and structural causes to personal decisions (see Wink 2016) and suggests that despite all complexity, networking and uncertainty can be recommendations for action. In mass media and popular science, the differentiation of academic discourse gets lost. However, management research is well aware of the responsibility of companies and managers. In particular, the latest research underlines that employees are not acting in isolation but are embedded in a larger corporate context and therefore cannot be solely responsible for their resilience. Nevertheless, science is not only the creator of this discourse but also its beneficiary. In public, resilience is provided with the aura of solving problems and

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coupled with academic knowledge. Research can help to identify weaknesses and strengths of individuals, teams and organizations, regions and communities, social and environmental systems, while offering recipes for tomorrow. As this applies to very different objects (which at least is suggested by the presentation in mass media and non-fiction books), the resilience discourse promotes the perception of academia as a unity and thus counteracts the image that numerous individual disciplines work unconnectedly next to each other which helps the system of science. Furthermore, it opens up the opportunity to enter an interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic of resilience on the one hand, and to be present in the public eye on the other hand and thus to legitimize public funding. In addition, scientific research becomes an imperative if resilience becomes the norm. Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy (2013) summarize their tour d’Horizon through research as follows: “Surprisingly few communities or organizations have any kind of structure in place to think broadly and proactively about the fragilities and potential disruptions that confront them. This has to change.” The present discourse analysis is also a lesson on enunciative modalities and communication strategies. The larger, the less specialized and the more interestguided the public is, the blurrier conceptual differentiations and reflections become. These mechanisms are likely to have contributed in a similar way to undermining sustainability as a norm.

References Adger, N. (2000). Social and ecological resilience: Are they related? Progress in Human Geography 24, 347–364. Aligica, P. D. & Tarko, V. (2014). Institutional resilience and economic systems: Lessons from Elinor Ostrom’s work. Comparative Economic Studies 56, 52–76. Amann, E. & Alkenbrecher, F. (2015). Das Sowohl-als-auch-Prinzip. Resilienz: Mit Sicherheit stark durch die Krise. Berlin: Pro Business. Berndt, C. (2010). Das Geheimnis einer robusten Seele. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30. Oktober 2010, 24. Berndt, C. (2013a). Die Kunst des Aufrappelns. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19. Juni 2013, 5. Berndt, C. (2013b). Resilienz. Das Geheimnis der psychischen Widerstandskraft. München: dtv. Berndt, C. (2014). Stress lass nach! Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18. Januar 2014, V2/1. Berndt, C. (2015a). Illusion der Stärke. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6. Juni 2015, 49. Berndt, C. (2015b). Menschen fürs Büro dressieren. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14. März 2015, Leben & Stil. Brand, F. & Jax, K. (2007). Focusing the meanings of resilience: Resilience as a descriptive concept and a boundary object. Ecology and Society 12, 23.

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Spreitzer, G., Sutcliffe, K., Dutton, J., Sonenshein, S. & Grant, A. M. (2005). A socially embedded model of thriving at work. Organization Science 16, 537–549. Stajkovic, A. D. (2006). Development of a core confidence-higher order construct. Journal of Applied Psychology 91, 1208–1224. van der Vegt, Essens, G. S., Wahlström, P., M. & George, G. (2015). Managing risk and resilience. Academy of Management Journal 58, 971–980. Vogt, M. & Schneider, M. (eds.). (2016). Theologische und ethische Dimensionen von Resilienz. Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 67 (3). Walker, B. (2013). What is resilience? Project Syndicate. http://www.project-syndicate.org/ commentary/what-is-resilience-by-brian-walker (accessed on 7 January 2015). Walker, B., Holling, C., Carpenter, S. & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9 (2), 5. Wanberg, C. R. & Banas, J. T. (2000). Predictors and outcomes of openness to changes in a reorganizing workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology 85 (1), 132–142. Wellensiek, S. K. (2011). Handbuch Resilienz-Training. Weinheim: Beltz. Whiteman, G. & Cooper, W. H. (2011). Ecological sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal 54, 889–911. Wink, R. (ed.). (2016). Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Youssef, C. M. & Luthans F. (2007). Positive organizational behavior in the workplace: The impact of hope, optimism, and resilience. Journal of Management 33, 774–800. Zolli, A. & Healy, A. M. (2013). Resilience: Why things bounce back. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Meyen, Michael  (Prof. Dr.) is Professor of Communication at the University of Munich. His research interests include media freedom, media systems, media discourses, the history of media and communication and the history of Communication Research. Schier, Janina  (M.A.) is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Department of Communication Studies and Media Research at LMU Munich. Her research interests include Crisis Communication and Change Communication. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on the development of the research field of Crisis Communication.

Resilient Cities: Theoretical Conceptualisations and Observations About the Discourse in the Social and the Planning Sciences Gabriela Christmann, Heiderose Kilper and Oliver Ibert 1 Introduction: On the Challenges of Developing Resiliencies in Cities Modern societies have developed an increasingly growing awareness of possible threats. On the one hand, this may be said to be a consequence of constantly extended possibilities of measuring and visualising threats. On the other hand, it can be observed that at the same time technological and institutional possibilities of preventing and reducing threats have considerably increased, while however many man-made arrangements have proven to be less controllable than expected

This contribution is a substantially reduced, updated and translated version of a report written on behalf of the “Forschungsforum Öffentliche Sicherheit” at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. The original report has been published in German language in the context of the “Schriftenreihe Sicherheit,” No. 19, under the title “Die resiliente Stadt in den Bereichen Infrastrukturen und Bürgergesellschaft,” February, 2016. It is online available at http://www.sicherheit-forschung.de/publikationen/schriftenreihe_neu/sr_v_v/sr_19.pdf. We express our thanks to the Forschungsforum Öffentliche Sicherheit for the kind permission to publish the contribution in the here presented way. G. Christmann () · H. Kilper · O. Ibert  Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung e.V. (IRS), Erkner, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] H. Kilper E-Mail: [email protected] O. Ibert E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_7

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at the time of installing them. Expected securities turned out to be insecurities (Evers and Nowotny 1987). Since the 1980s, extensive discourses on risks and sustainable action provide ample testimony to this increased attention for threats and counteractive measures. Ulrich Beck´s book on the “Risikogesellschaft” (Risk Society) (Beck 1992[1986]) or the report by the Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987) on the necessity of sustainable action may be considered key works in this context. Meanwhile, however, it seems as if both the concept of risk and that of sustainability have become unfashionable (see Jakubowski and Kaltenbrunner 2013, pp. I–II). At least concepts such as vulnerability and resilience have been on the rise (see Pelling 2003; Medd and Marvin 2005; Coaffee and Wood 2006; Janssen and Ostrom 2006; Adger 2006; Birkmann 2007; Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010; Kuhlicke 2010; Goldstein 2012; Christmann and Ibert 2012; Endress and Maurer 2015; Wink 2016; Kusenbach and Christmann 2017). Given the complicated interdependencies of multiple hazards and given the different chronological structures of both disruptive and creeping threats it is pointless to conceptualise potentially dangerous threats as ‘risks’ and—according to common definitions of the concept of risk—to calculate them in the form of probabilities and potential consequences. And notwithstanding all appreciation of the idea of ‘sustainability,’ it can no longer be overlooked that the sustainability paradigm is subject to fundamental criticism: quite fundamentally, sustainable action is oriented at forestalling or preventing dangerous events (see Christmann et al. 2012, pp. 9–12). But certain dangerous events—such as in the context of climate change (severe storms, heavy rains, floods, heat waves)—can no longer be prevented at all. Rather, we must brace ourselves for the fact that in the future they will definitely come and that they will be repeated by longer or shorter intervals. Thus, societal actors face the challenge of on the one hand forestalling certain dangerous events—as far as this is possible at all—and on the other hand of being prepared for living with certain other dangerous events, particularly to adapt to them and to alleviate their consequences. In this respect, the concept of resilience covers more than that of sustainability. For in literature resilience, as already said, does not only refer to the prevention or forestalling of potentially dangerous events but also to hopefully harmless ways of dealing with and (constantly) adapting to dangerous events.1 In particular cities are potentially endangered in very many respects—due to their density, i.e., the great number of people living in a relatively small area, due

1“Resilience

requires sustainability. Sustainability, however, does not require resilience” (Sieverts 2013, p. 318).

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to a number of complex and interwoven infrastructures, due to their dependence on fragile technological, political as well as social structures and processes, and due to basically being exposed to natural phenomena. They are so to speak burning lenses where the different vulnerabilities of modern societies are concentrated (Amin 2014). In this context, the concept of vulnerability does not refer to everyday problems but to crises, to hazards perceived as being grave or to disasters threatening the very existence. Such hazards are thus fundamental, and when they have actually happened in the form of a violating event—no matter if these events are temporary or permanent—urban actors perceive them as breaks of normality and of everyday routines, in the worst cases as a matter of life or death, in other (less severe) cases as the collapse of an important structure, as severely disabling the stability of an existing structure, as a severe damage or as a considerable loss of value, as economic and/or social decline, as a health hazard, as a massive loss of the quality of life, and/or as a severe disturbance of everyday life which is difficult to cope with, etc. We may suppose that there is hardly any city in the world in the course of whose history its citizens have not made such experiences, either directly or indirectly: may it be as a result of natural disasters (most of all of extreme weather events), of grave technological accidents, or of longer failures of critical infrastructures (e.g., in water supply and waste water disposal, traffic infrastructure, energy supply, etc.), may it be as a result of the large-scale loss of financial means in the context of economic and financial crises and the thus connected loss of previously common elementary services (e.g., social infrastructures), may it be as a result of (violent) troubles caused by cultural differences, social inequalities and experiences of exclusion, or may it be as a result of terror attacks. We may even suppose that some cities have experienced several or all of the above mentioned events, most of all if they are big cities. Certain dangerous events may even cause chain effects, for example if extreme weather comes along with elementary failures of technological infrastructures. Predictions by experts indicate that in the future such events will happen more frequently to cities, that their intensity will increase and that most probably they will cause chains of subsequent events (e.g., epidemics after floods). Against this background, urban actors thus face multiple threats and are confronted with the challenge of protecting themselves against dangers whose kind and extent cannot be fully anticipated and with which they have as yet made no experiences. In short: they must build resilience. However, what exactly is meant by vulnerability and resilience? And what characterises resilient cities? In the here presented contribution, at first concepts of vulnerability and resilience as they are discussed in international social-science based expert discourses

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shall be sketched, whereby their current limitations and crucial desiderata shall be worked out (Sect. 2). In the course of this it will become obvious that existing concepts are of an essentialist nature, in so far as dangers are considered to be quasi-objectively given. We, on the other hand, are going to argue that, seen from a scientific point of view, such approaches fall short of the issue: their problem is that they neglect fundamental social-science based insights on—differences and selectivity in—the ways of perceiving vulnerability in societies. Against this background, in Sect. 3 we will make a suggestion about how previous socialscience based approaches on vulnerability and resilience may be theoretically extended by a constructionist and at the same time socio-spatial perspective.2 In Sect. 4, by the example of Germany, we will then present the core topics on resilient cities which can be found in the discourses of social and planning sciences. We will give a topically broad, however concise overview of what is typically discussed in this context and of what is meant by the “resilience” of cities. The contribution will be topically topped off by a conclusion (Sect. 5).

2 Vulnerability and Resilience: Previous Concepts and Criticism Vulnerability and resilience concepts were becoming ever more social-­ science based A thorough analysis of conceptual approaches at vulnerability and resilience in different societal fields makes obvious that over time these approaches—even if in most cases they refer to social risks resulting from natural hazards—have been ever more rooted in social-science based thinking: they have ‘grown beyond’ simple analogies to vulnerability and resilience concepts of natural systems, and they have been further developed by reflecting features of social systems. Examples of this are, e.g., the socio-ecological systems concept (in short: SES; see Holling and Gunderson 2002; Berkes et al. 2003; Folke 2006; Gallopín 2006) and the approach of coupled human-environmental systems (in short: CHES; see Turner et al. 2003; Adger 2006) which—without presenting them in detail in the following—are characterised by describing bio-­physical, geo-physical and social factors as being mutually interacting and by taking

2This

approach was developed in the context of a research project titled “Vulnerability and Resilience in a Socio-spatial Perspective” at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) between 2010 and 2012. The project was funded by the Leibniz Association (Christmann et al. 2012; Kilper 2012; Christmann and Ibert 2012).

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i­nterfering action by social actors into consideration. This increasingly socialscience based thinking becomes particularly obvious by the approaches of social vulnerability and social resilience. Based on experiences most of all from the research of developing countries, the concept of social vulnerability (see Bohle et al. 1994; Bohle 2002; Prowse 2003; Wisner et al. 2004; Birkmann 2007; Birkmann and Fernando 2008; Cutter and Finch 2008; Voss 2008; Boykoff 2008; Morrow 2008; Kusenbach et al. 2010; Zehetmair 2012) takes the fact into consideration that dangers for social entities also depict social inequalities (in view of factors such as economic situation, age or gender). One is also aware of the fact that different social entities, for example due to their different socio-economic situations within socio-spatial contexts, are in most cases not equally vulnerable and not equally capable of building resilience. Morrow (2008, p. 4) says on this: “Simply stated, social vulnerability occurs when unequal exposure to risk is coupled with unequal access to resources.” As an example of social vulnerability one often gives the frequently observed phenomenon that in most cases it is certain categories of people with little economic capital who live in territories threatened by certain dangers, that often they are exposed to several dangers at the same time, however that usually they have neither the economic nor the cultural and/or social capital to do anything about their situation, i.e., to move away, to protect themselves, to cover, prevent, minimise or repair potential damages. Accordingly, these categories of people are in several respects considered more vulnerable than others. The concept of social resilience (see Adger 2000; Bohle 2002; Davoudi et al. 2012; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013) includes that it depends quite essentially on the capabilities of social entities—such as individuals, organisations, or entire societies—if dangerous events of various kinds can be coped with and if existing social systems will survive (Adger 2000, p. 361; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013, p. 8). Among these capabilities there count, among others, learning from earlier experiences with previous events, adapting to changed conditions, and successfully driving on necessary transformations of the social system (Keck and ­Sakdapolrak 2013, p. 5). There is thus a variety of efforts to grasp concepts of vulnerability and resilience in terms of the social sciences. However, as will immediately be exemplarily shown by one example of a typical definition, they are rather still of an essentialist nature since constructionist perspectives are lacking. Example of a far-reaching and integrative definition of vulnerability and reslience  Typical for the inclusion of social science aspects is the definition by Birkmann et al. (2011). This definition represents a very comprehensive

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u­ nderstanding of vulnerability and resilience, as different approaches are integrated (see also Walker and Salt 2006; 2012). According to this definition, vulnerability applies to “conditions and processes that determine the exposure and susceptibility of a system or object to hazards, as well as its capabilities to respond effectively to them […]. In this context physical, social, economic and environmental factors play a role” (Birkmann et al. 2011, p. 25). Here, not only externally given natural dangers are considered to be responsible for a certain vulnerability but at the same time internal societal factors are taken into consideration. This definition of vulnerability explicitly addresses the “reaction capacities” of a system, a factor which—by the way—can also be separately defined as an aspect of resilience. The inclusion of this factor however, thereby allows for conceptualising the extent of vulnerability, since the levels of vulnerability are essentially determined by a system’s capability of dealing with dangers. Accordingly, even if being highly exposed, the vulnerability of a system may be low if at the same time its reaction capacities are high. Elsewhere Birkmann et al. (2011, p. 17) give a separate definition of the concept of resilience, where it is described as the capability of systems “to absorb shocks and disturbances and to continue its existence with the least possible damage.” The authors name three different aspects of resilience: a system’s resilience against certain shocks or creeping changes, a system’s capacity of learning, and a system’s capability to adapt to changing conditions. For this they refer to Folke (2006) who pointed out to the necessity to consider resilience not a state but a process and to accordingly take processes of adapting, learning and innovation into account (see also Pike et al. 2010). Still there are research desiderata Nevertheless, even the far-sighted and integrative concepts such as that of Birkmann et al. (2011) are still limited. Usually, they are inductively derived from various practices of assessing vulnerability and building resilience both in the context of coping with natural disasters and of development aid. In most cases they tacitly adopt many assumptions and blind spots of these specific practices. This is why many of these social-science based concepts still have an essentialist perspective and not least a normative attitude. Normativity is certainly indispensable for short-term action in everyday life, but when it comes to strategic long-term action and scientific analysis it comes along with considerable limitations because in short-term action vulnerability is only understood as a factual endangerment of a system (not as a chance for change) and thus as negative, whereas resilience is considered as an actual coping capability of a system and therefore as something which is per se positive (however

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h­ iding problems such as endangering other systems while constructing resilience of the own system). Despite all efforts of including aspects of the social, current concepts of vulnerability and resilience still show the following desiderata. • The social construction of vulnerability and resilience is insufficiently taken into consideration. According to considerations from social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann 1966), it would have to be taken into account how social entities—such as different social sub-groups, organisations, cities, regions or entire societies—construct vulnerability and resilience, i.e., how they develop particular ways of perceiving current hazards, of interpreting hazards in the past, or of perceiving indicators for future hazards. And if aspects of social and cultural differentiation are included, it must be considered that social entities from different socio-cultural contexts may develop different constructions of their ‘own’ vulnerability, which would also affect the construction of their ‘own’ resilience. After all, even a scientifically calculated potential vulnerability of a specific socio-spatial entity is constructed by social actors, i.e., by scholars who are characterised by limited knowledge, pursuing their own as well as collective interests, and drawing upon shared values and norms. All this produces the result that vulnerability analyses are necessarily incomplete, show blind spots, reflect individual and collective interests, and are thus disputed among societies. If it is possible that on the one hand one social entity (e.g., a certain group of citizens) attributes little significance to a hazard which might threaten their own space, whereas on the other hand another social entity (that is another group of citizens) from the same space believes this potential hazard to be highly significant, this may result in social conflict affecting coordinated action, such as governance processes. • Insufficient connection between materiality and immateriality. If social entities are able to construct their own social reality when it comes to a potential material hazard, i.e., if something immaterial (such as ways of perceiving) is connected to materiality (such as a potential flood), it must be conceptually clarified how the connection between the immaterial and the material can be grasped. For the time being there are theoretical approaches attempting to overcome the materiality-immateriality dichotomy and to assume hybridity (see, e.g., Görg 1999; Fischer-Kowalski and Erb 2003; Berkes et al. 2003; Walker et al. 2006; Brand and Jax 2007). Paradoxically, the different approaches have in common that—due to considerations on interactions between the two spheres—they actually still keep the different spheres apart

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from each other (Christmann et al. 2012, pp. 16–21). The actor-network theory provides a promising solution for this dilemma. • Spatiality is insufficiently taken into consideration. Most contributions to resilience from a spatial perspective pursue the approach of analysing the “resilience of places” (Pike et al. 2010, p. 63). Their analyses focus on territorial systems such as cities or regions (Fox Gotham and Campanella 2013; Amin 2014). However, vulnerability and resilience do not only result from a dangerous event or a pre-emptive action at a certain place. Rather, they are included into the complex social, economic, political and institutional structures of a cultural space. In this respect, the contribution of an extended social-science based spatial research to the resilience discourse could be that it explicitly focuses on the—so far mostly neglected—socio-spatial and culture-spatial contextualisation of vulnerability and resilience. Furthermore, it may provide additional insights by moving the scalar embeddedness of resilience practices into the focus as well as by discussing kinds of relational closeness and distance in the process of the social construction of resilience. • Taking temporality insufficiently into consideration. Most definitions of the concept also lack the factor of time—apart from the general understanding of resilience as an adaption process. Here the temporality of resilience cannot be systematically discussed. Nevertheless, some important dimensions of temporality and their implications shall be shortly hinted at. • The normativity of the use of many concepts. As already mentioned above, other than assumed by conventional reading it is not necessarily the case that vulnerability must always be considered negative and resilience always positive. For example Stark (2014) understands vulnerability to be a basic constitution of human existence as such, and by the metaphorical example of the immune system he explains that a certain degree of vulnerability is a precondition for the development of resilience—the vaccination principle. Furthermore, some threats which actors consider dramatic at the time may be considered the trigger of important developments if the observer takes some distance and judges from a long-term, historical perspective (see Schott 2013; Walker et al. 2004), for example as triggering the invention of new technologies. Vulnerability may thus also be considered an opportunity of bringing on necessary developments. Vice versa, the development of resilience is not necessarily positive. Certain resiliencies may even cause negative effects, such as over-adaptation (Grabher 1993; Grabher and Stark 1997), the exaggerated prioritisation of security aspects over other values of a society (security state), often coming along with an unbalanced trade-off of employed resources for the purpose of increasing resilience as well as for other purposes. Finally

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r­esilience strategies often cause unintended or accepted negative effects on third parties or at other places, e.g., if alternative solutions or the interests of certain groups of people are neglected (see Coaffee et al. 2008; Hodson and Marvin 2008; Sondershaus and Moss 2014).

3 A Suggestion for the Extension of Previous Conceptual Approaches Theoretical considerations for an extended approach Against this background, Christmann and Ibert (2012) have suggested a theoretical concept which aims at addressing the above mentioned desiderata in vulnerability and resilience research and at extending previous social-science based approaches. For that end, they take four different theories into consideration—namely social constructionism, communicative constructionism, actor-network theory, and relational spatial theory—from which they integrate their main premises. As already indicated above, the approach is first of all oriented at Berger’s and Luckmann’s (1966) social constructionist premise according to which subjects (and entire societies, after all) construct their own realities by attributing meaning to objects (see also Endress and Rampp 2014; Endress 2015). Furthermore, according to communicative constructionism (Keller et al. 2013) special attention is given to the fact that constructions of social reality happen quite essentially by way of communicative action. Keller et al. (2013) understand communicative action as social actions which are reciprocally related to each other while making use of different kinds of signs, not only verbal but also nonverbal signs, including material objects such as bodies, objects, media, technological or cultural artefacts (see Keller et al. 2013, p. 14; see also Christmann 2016). This conceptual orientation—which also adopts considerations of practice theory and actor-network theory—moves the focus much more on the physical-material dimensions of social constructions than it has been with social constructionism. As already hinted, by way of this theoretical reorientation, communicative constructionism has built a bridge to Latour’s actor-network theory. Although actor-network theory, in contrast to constructionist assumptions, starts out from diminishing the importance of the subject’s ascription of meaning towards objects, it is nevertheless inspiring for the question of how the existing dichotomy between immateriality and materiality could be overcome. Based on the idea of “flat ontology” (DeLanda 2004, p. 58), Latour (2005) demands that not only interactions between the various social actors must be taken into consideration but also those happening between actors and objects. Only the latter’s

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existence allows for or supports certain human actions. Since objects—according to actor-network theory—contribute to action processes they must be attributed agency: “Objects too have agency” (Latour 2005, p. 63). Christmann and Ibert borrow from this idea, but without adopting the whole logic of flat ontology. Apart from this, they furthermore refer to relational spatial theories (Bathelt and Glückler 2003). It is a crucial feature of these theories that they do not consider space as a subject of research (e.g., as a territory) but rather as a research perspective, typically by analysing the multi-facetted spatialities of social action, social relations, and objects. Connecting to this, Christmann and Ibert (2012) conceive vulnerability and resilience—in the sense of communicative constructivism and of actor-network theory—as constructions being the result of interactions in a relational network comprising both social actors and objects. In the sense of relational spatial theories, they make use of spatial categories for specifying the nature of the relations between different (endangered and endangering) elements of a relational network (Yeung 2005). And in the sense of social constructionism, they include the idea that there is no objectively given vulnerability or resilience to societal actors (e.g., in a flood-prone area of a city). The authors rather take into account that according to the belonging of societal actors to certain social resp. cultural groups, different actors may develop different ways of perceiving vulnerability and resilience, and that they thus may construct different relational networks with different endangered and endangering elements as well as with different ways of responding to the perceived endangerments. Alternative definition of vulnerability and resilience  In this context, a definition of vulnerability and resilience has been suggested which integrates the above mentioned conceptual facets, while particularly including a socio-spatial perspective and thus paving the way for a better understanding of the construction of “resilient cities” (Christmann and Ibert 2012, p. 266 f.). Vulnerability  is considered accordingly as the result of a social construction process where potential threats are collectively assessed and communicatively negotiated by members of a society. Any kind of element can be assessed by these members, be it a subject, a group, an organisation, a cultural artefact, a technical, economic or ecological system or a territory. Constructing vulnerability means that a collectively selected element, which is defined as being valuable and to be preserved, is delimited and located at the centre of a relational network (with its inherent social, immaterial, material, and/or spatial structure) at a certain point of time. In this relational network, ‘objects too have agency.’ The central element

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is related to other material as well as immaterial elements which are collectively defined as being part of the network, whereby the interdependences between the centrally located and the other elements are analysed in terms of their injurious effects for the central element. They are collectively brought into a causal association by the actors and are viewed to affect one another. As already indicated, all the parameters in the collective vulnerability analysis—the central element, the other elements as well as the interdependences between them—are not to be seen as being quasi naturally given, rather they are an active and selective construction process of the social actors and they may even change in time. Resilience  is understood as a construction process which emphasises the possibilities of action and reaction within the relational network. It is based on the existing common perceptions of vulnerability at a certain point of time. The intention is to implement more or less far reaching changes within the relational network (and its inherent social, immaterial, material, and/or spatial structure) in order to reduce the vulnerability of the centrally placed element by protecting its functions and ensuring its integrity. Also, in the case of resilience constructions, ‘objects have agency.’ Furthermore, the forms of action or reaction may change over time. Basically, the following operations or modifications of the relational network are possible in the context of resilience constructions: • The position of the centrally placed element can be changed within the relational network. This may involve an increase in distance from or proximity to other (e.g., endangering or protecting) elements. For example, the perception of a household being endangered by a flood may be countered by relocating it into a territory which is considered little flood-prone or not at all. • Other elements of the relational network can be changed, so that they will be less or not at all endangering for the centrally placed element, e.g., by the increasing the height of dykes or by topping up an insurance policy. In case of the first example the range of the source of danger is changed, in the second case the negative economic consequences are reduced. • Elements can be removed from the relational network so that the threating effects defuse. For example, the demolition of a steep staircase in a city will eliminate the danger of possible injuries of passersby. • Elements can be added to the relational network, for example by way of installing fire doors as well as fire exit stairs, fire extinguishers and smoke detectors in order to reduce fire hazards for buildings.

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• The kind and/or intensity of the way in which the elements within the relational network interact with each other can be altered. For example, as a result of perceiving a future vulnerability due to shortages of a city’s food supply (against the background of international flows of goods being interrupted) actors may establish cooperative relations with a rural environment. • The level on which vulnerability is analysed can be put into question and shifted. This way the previously perceived elements appear in a different light, suddenly others do not appear as significant as before, and new elements suggest themselves as important (see, e.g., Ibert and Schmidt 2012). For example, the endangerments caused by potential heat waves can be upgraded, whereas the attention for flood events can be downgraded. Usually resilience constructions are not limited to individual options for action. Rather, they attempt to combine several of the above mentioned ways of proceeding. They thus have a high degree of complexity, since very different elements interact with each other. For instance, changes in the built structure can be combined with the addition of other elements, and the purposeful change of perceptions (e.g., increasing the complexity of previous resilience constructions; see Evers and Nowotny 1987). Christmann and Ibert (2012, p. 264), by the way, were furthermore aware of the fact that resilience building has a time structure. Thus, resilience research is less about the analysis of static states but rather about a deeper understanding of the dynamics of change, of unfolding, growth and decay. What is conspicuous is that resilience must basically be understood as a process, i.e., as a change along a time axis. At the same time every process is embedded in historical time, consisting of a stream of events. History provides a context as well as an opportunity structure for resilience practices. As indicated above, resilience is a process and subject to the logics of open processes. Accordingly, resilience building never ends, except in the case of the collapse of a system. Even the assessment of a hazard and the respective resilience construction happening at a given time will change throughout the history due to a growing historical distance to the event (see Schott 2013). This means that historical sequences of specific resilience constructions are probably to be seen as unique since the specific historic conditions, events and constellations are unrepeatable. Not least it should be mentioned that the approach by Christmann and Ibert (2012) avoids the common normative thinking about vulnerability and resilience which can be even found in the scientific context. In terms of methodology, they conceive scientists as observers observing everyday actors during the construction of their own vulnerabilities and resiliencies (Schütz 1953). This observer position

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provides them with the necessary distance for working out the normative orientations on which the constructions by the everyday actors are based in different empirical fields, however without sharing them. This way, scientists are able to observe how different actors and/or societies construct their ‘own’ vulnerabilities and their ‘own’ resiliencies, i.e., how they selectively perceive specific endangering and endangered elements, how they arrange them in specific relational networks and how they respond to them.

4 Resilient Cities: Typical Topics of the Discourse in the Social and the Planning Sciences in Germany After having analysed the theoretical conceptualisations of vulnerability and resilience in general while—at one point or another—having already had the endangerments of cities in mind, we will particularly show now how the subject of “resilient cities” is typically discussed in the social as well as planning sciences. What we observe is that from 2005 on, with the publication of studies such as The Resilient City—How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (Vale and Campanella 2005) and Resilient Cities—Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change (Newman et al. 2009), the broad concept of resilience has now been transferred to cities or city regions. And what is conspicuous is that in the discourse—that was about to begin at that time—it was typically natural hazards, in particular those resulting from climate change, which were in the focus of the discussion (Jakubowski 2013, p. 375). However, it became apparent that at the same time a growing awareness of economic crises has emerged, in the context of which often not only cities but entire regions were the primary spatial references (Pike et al. 2010; Plöger and Lang 2013; Wink 2014). What resilience thereby means for cities is defined as follows by Plöger and Lang (2013, p. 327): “In the context of urban development, resilience may be considered the systemic capability of complex urban systems to cope with problems in a way which allows a long-term stable development. Resilient cities may be understood to be cities which recover from shocks within a comparably short period of time.”

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Accordingly, in the discourse on resilient cities, which has unfolded also in Germany since about 2010, it is asked very pragmatically how—given a perceived increase and higher frequency of crises (Jakubowski and Kaltenbrunner 2013, p. I; see also Balducci 2012)—diverse planning stakeholders can contribute to developing crisis-proof cities.3 The struggle is about clarifying what the characteristics of resilient systems are and most of all how the measures which are to be taken for resilient cities should look like. Jakubowski (2013, p. 377) estimates in 2013 that there is only very little relevant knowledge on these subjects.4 And Müller (2010, p. 5) states that “there is still a lack of understanding of the processes and factors that make some cities and regions vulnerable and others ­resilient.” “Resilience of what to what”? To which dangers are cities potentially exposed? If it is about making a city more crisis-proof, that is more resilient, by help of concrete measures—and a great variety of authors agree on this—it must at first be clarified which dangers these steps are supposed to respond to. The formula “resilience of what to what” by Carpenter et al. (2001, p. 767) points out to this. In literature there is a long list of potential hazards. A great variety of authors usually identify potential endangerments for cities in the following fields (see, e.g., Beckmann 2013b, p. 8 f.; Jakubowski 2013, p. 375; Hitthaler 2011, p. 44; Floeting 2013, pp. 14–16): • Nature: natural disasters and, in times of climate change, most of all extreme weather events such as storms, heavy rains, floods, heat. • Environment: the handling of natural resources, emissions, conflagrations, accidents at industrial sites. • Economy: the collapse of certain economic branches, productivity problems, problems in goods and services markets, labour markets.

3See

most of all Müller (2010) with the focus on “Urban Regional Resilience: How do Cities and Regions Deal with Change” in “German Annual of Spatial Research and Policy,” the Special Issue “Vulnerabilität und Resilienz in sozio-räumlicher Perspektive” of the journal “Raumforschung und Raumordnung” (2012), the Special Issue “Resilienz” of the journal “Informationen zur Raumentwicklung” (2013), Beckmann’s (2013a) volume on “Resilienz” in the “Difu-Impulse” series, and Kegler (2014). 4This is somewhat astonishing, as over their long history cities have always found ways to survive all kinds of catastrophic events. Only a few cities have really disappeared. Thus, it seems as if cities, even if they do not perform it purposefully and strategically, are provided with an astonishing degree of resilience (on this see Vale and Campanella 2005, p. 3; ­Beckmann 2013a, p. 5).

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• Finances: financial crises, public debt, increase of the financial problems of municipalities. • Politics: lacking capacities for problem-solving. • Infrastructures: default of supply units in the fields of energy, traffic, water, information and communication technologies, health. • Demography: over-aging of societies resulting in health-care crises. • Social affairs: individualisation vs. community spirit and solidarity, growing social polarisation resulting in the danger of social conflicts, privatisation of public services, segregation and negative images of urban sub-spaces (see Bürk et al. 2012; Schmidt 2012). • Security: international terrorism, transnational organised crime, everyday crime. • Public order: dilapidation of buildings, depositing waste at public sites, ­vandalism. Furthermore, there is an awareness that different dangerous events may be mutually interdependent, i.e., that they can mutually cause themselves and not least that they can mutually aggravate the situation of each other. For example financial crises may increase the financial problems of municipalities, they may result in the dilapidation of buildings, they may result in certain neighbourhoods suffering from a deteriorating image, they may increase social conflicts in a neighbourhood, etc. Such interdependencies make dangers for cities a complex thing. Complex hazards thereby require complex resilience approaches (see Müller 2010, p. 3). Another challenge for resilience building is the fact that potential hazards in the future must be prevented in the present time, that is that measures must be immediately started, before the dangerous events happen, in particular if these measures will have effect only in the long run, such as if heat events are supposed to be countered by way of urban landscaping (see, e.g., Kaltenbrunner 2013, p. 293). Vulnerability analyses are indispensable for the development of resilience In the opinion of a great variety of authors it has become clear that for the resilience building in cities it is indispensable to start out from vulnerability analyses: potential hazards must be identified and assessed on time, possible interdependencies and domino effects must be identified, and not at last the potentials and means must be defined by help of which the perceived hazards may be countered (see Jakubowski 2013, p. 376; Plöger and Lang 2013, p. 334; Libbe 2013, p. 33). Since hazards usually cannot be assessed and prevented by one type of

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actor alone (such as by urban planners), there must be a cooperation of different types of actors or stakeholders. In this context, it must be taken into consideration that—as emphasised by Libbe (2013, p. 33) who refers to Christmann et al. (2012, p. 7 ff.)—different perceptions of hazards by different social groups may result in insecurities and make resilience processes more complicated. Libbe (2013, p. 33) concludes from this that “insecurities when it comes to actual hazards as well as to their potential impacts […] [can] after all only be minimised by the widest possible degree of participation and involvement of relevant stakeholders.” In order to minimise insecurities, by the example of flood hazards, Birkmann (2008) suggests still another strategy. He opts for developing measures for a standardised vulnerability analysis which include, the following steps, among others: • “the development of standards for the recording, measuring and assessment of vulnerability in the context of planning, in particular for spaces which are probably particularly exposed; • the development of standards for the depiction of natural hazards and the possible spatial pattern of their spread […]; […] • furthermore, advice and hints for citizens should be developed in the context of participation procedures which allow citizens to assess in how far the plans for flood-adapted land use and construction measures actually have been implemented in land-use planning.” (Birkmann 2008, p. 19)

Basic features of resilient systems in the view of experts  To be able to make cities more resilient against potential hazards it is helpful to know about the features of systems which have proven to be resilient—even if relevant resilience factors may vary, each according to kinds and contexts of vulnerability. In the discourse on resilient cities, scholars from the social and the planning sciences typically discuss the following factors as being the most fundamental and important factors for resilience building: redundancy, variety, flexibility or adaptability, and in this context also innovativeness. • Redundancy: Redundancy is the existence of various similar elements, each of which being capable of fulfilling one and the same function (e.g., railroad, tram, underground, bus). A breakdown of one of these elements can at least partly be compensated for by other elements which take over its function (see

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Grabher 1994; Beckmann 2013b, p. 10). Also the redundancy of almost equal elements is of significance, as by way of the doubling or addition of elements or by exchanging them the function of a system can be maintained. Also here we may refer to the example of rail replacement services which can only be effectively guaranteed if a sufficient number of buses are employed. • Variety: Apart from the redundancy of similar elements, the parallel existence of different elements is of significance. For example the existence of different branches of an urban economy may have the effect that a city is less affected by losing one business branch. Variety is also helpful for information and communication media, social networks etc. (see Grabher 1994; Hitthaler 2011, p. 44; Beckmann 2013b, p. 13). • Flexibility or adaptability: For a long time interdisciplinary resilience research assumed that a resilient system is characterised by bouncing back to its initial state after a malfunction and by being able to maintain the status quo before the malfunction. Meanwhile it is put into question if the previous state is necessarily always the best. One has also recognised that it is a mistake to attempt long-term robustness by help of inflexible measures. The castles of the Middle Ages lost their robustness after the invention of cannon balls. And levees (such as in the Netherlands) lose their effect if the sea level is quickly rising while at the same time the landmass is sinking. Thus, there is agreement that resilient systems must be capable of reacting flexibly, of dynamically adjusting to changing conditions, and of developing further (see Hitthaler 2011, p. 44; Jakubowski 2013, p. 375 f.; Beckmann 2013b, p. 7; Schnur 2013, p. 338). Beckmann explicitly points out to the fact that this capability to adapt must also include immediate response and prompt action. • Innovativeness—knowledge, learning, experimenting: Another typical topic in the discourse on resilient cities is that resilience building requires the capability to overcome the status quo, to be innovative and to develop new solutions. It is the capability to transform an existing system into a new system which will be able to meet new demands (see Beckmann 2013b, p. 10). “Planning is thus about being prepared for innovative transformation at times of change and in the face of inherent uncertainties” (Davoudi et al. 2012, p. 304). Accordingly, ‘lock-ins’ are to be avoided. Rather, there must be possibilities of the constant generation of novel knowledge, of learning from mistakes and successes as well as of creatively experimenting with novel approaches (see Jakubowski 2013, p. 375 f.; Kaltenbrunner 2013, p. 293; Plöger and Lang 2013, p. 327).

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Other factors which are seen as characteristic features for resilient systems in the discourse of social sciences as well as planning sciences are the following: • Economical use of resources: a resilient system saves resources such as energy, water, fuel etc. The recycling of resources (e.g., from waste) is part of this strategy (see, e.g., Beckmann 2013b, p. 10). • Preparedness or strategies of removing faults: a resilient system is aware of the most different crises and hazards that could occur in the future, it faces them reflectively and comprehensively, it develops strategies both to avoid hazards and to effectively as well as rapidly remove faults in case of a crisis—be it by way of contingency, emergency, and/or recovery plans or be it by different ways of providing information (see, e.g., Davoudi et al. 2012, p. 303; Beckmann 2013b, p. 10; Sieverts 2013, p. 320). • Cooperation and communication: different actors from the sciences, politics, administration, economy and civil society cooperate with each other in the context of processes of urban development, in order to achieve “preparedness” (see, e.g., Medd and Marvin 2005). There exist effective communication formats for this cooperation. Furthermore, there exist effective communication formats for informing and advising the people (see, e.g., Beckmann 2013b, p. 10f.; Jakubowski 2013, p. 376). • Decentralisation: resources and supply structures are spatially distributed, so that in case of a default it is easier to maintain the supply (see Hitthaler 2011, p. 44). As they are easier to handle, small and decentralised units are furthermore a basis for improved adaptability to new conditions (see Sieverts 2013, p. 320). • Networking: however, decentralised and small units are not isolated but networked with each other, they are in an ongoing exchange and assist each other in case of a default. There is also networking in the social context (e.g., family/household, neighbourhood, quarter), based on the principle of mutual support (see Hitthaler 2011, p. 44; Beckmann 2013b, p. 10). • Identification of windows of opportunity: responsible actors of the system are capable of identifying and exploiting windows of opportunity which are favourable for the implementation of large-scale transformations (see, e.g., Sieverts 2013, p. 320). At first sight, the characterisation of resilience factors present in the discourse on resilient cities seems to be convincing. This is due to the fact that the factors are diversified, comprehensive, logical and related to each other. Closer examination shows, however, that the discourse is based on the assumption that features of

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resilient cities are of a universal nature. Vale and Capanella (2005), however, were right to point out from a historical point of view that the development of resilient cities in the past (after crises or catastrophes) always resulted from the context of the specific history and (political) culture of each city and that it cannot be understood without this context. Furthermore, they state, that the development of resilience has always been disputed (see also Berking et al. 2006). Also Ungar (2011, p. 162) emphasises that attempts at developing resilience may be quite different in the various cultural contexts. These authors sense that resilience in cities is not only achieved according to universal resilience features but that urban resiliencies are rather complex socio-cultural constructs based on negotiation processes.

5 Conclusion The here presented contribution was meant to shed a critical light on previous social-science based and at the same time still very essentialist concepts of vulnerability and resilience (Sect. 2). Furthermore, it strived to theoretically extend such concepts by constructionist premises and socio-spatial perspectives (Sect. 3). Not least, it aimed at sketching core topics of the discourse especially on resilient cities which happens in the social as well as in the planning sciences in Germany since 2010 and which—as is shown—is still influenced by essentialist and universal concepts of resilience (Sect. 4). Section 2 made obvious that the increasing use of the concepts of vulnerability and resilience in the social sciences comes along with making these concepts increasingly more social-science based. Against the background of the insight that not all groups of society are to the same degree exposed to certain hazards and that they are not to the same degree capable of developing resilience, it is particularly social inequalities that previous social-science based approaches have taken into consideration. As a result, concepts of social vulnerability and social resilience have been developed. However, even in case of comprehensive socialscience based concepts of vulnerability and resilience there still remain desiderata. This is most of all due to overlooking the fact that different societal actors may perceive the vulnerability and resilience of one and the same entity in different ways. It is thus argued that the social construction of vulnerability and resilience has to be taken into account. This includes that not only the different ways of socio-cultural contextualisation, but also the thus connected different temporalities of the social construction of vulnerability and resilience are to be considered. The alternative definition of vulnerability and resilience suggested in Sect. 3 addresses these desiderata. Vulnerability is conceived as resulting from a process

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of social construction, in the context of which members of society assess and communicatively negotiate selected potential hazards at a given time. Resilience is understood to be a social construction describing proactive or reactive action by way of which members of society attempt to safeguard the functioning of those entities they perceive as being vulnerable. In Sect. 4 it was reconstructed how vulnerability and resilience is typically understood in the discourse on resilient cities which is happening in the social and the planning sciences. It became obvious that the concept of resilience is closely connected to making cities ‘crisis-proof.’ In this context, there is an awareness of the complexity and the interdependencies of hazards. Thereby, interdependencies are considered to be a particular challenge for the development of resilience. It is systematically discussed that there exist different kinds of potential vulnerabilities of cities, such as in the fields of nature and environment (including climate change), of economy, finances, politics, infrastructures, demography, social affairs, security and public order. When speaking of resilience, as is the tenor in the discourse, one thus must always differentiate for which field of society or which kind of hazard resilience is supposed to be built (‘resilience of what to what’). In this context, it also became obvious that careful vulnerability analyses are considered indispensable for the development of resilience. Making cities resilient also requires knowledge of the typical features of resilient systems. In the discourse on resilient cities, according to the opinion of a variety of authors, these typical features are most of all the following ones: redundancy (the existence of similar elements which are capable of taking over the functions of other elements in case of default), variety (the parallel existence of different elements, such as different urban business branches, which reduces damage in case of losing one of the elements), flexibility or adaptability (the capability of dynamically and rapidly adapting to changing conditions) as well as innovativeness (being able to create solutions for creative adaptations). To conclude, it can be stated that the discourse on resilient cities in the social and the planning sciences is of a very application-oriented nature. It provides basic knowledge for resilience building by stakeholders from the fields of urban planning, but also of urban development and urban politics. However, it has implicitly become obvious—and this does not come as a surprise—that in this discourse the concept of resilience is also considered something universal or something which can be objectively produced. Only seldom are developments of resilience seen as social constructs and in the context of the many different sociocultural contexts within which they appear. Whereas in Sect. 2 we argued that for the time being approaches of vulnerability and resilience in the social sciences suffer from conceptually neglecting social-constructionist insights on d­ ifferent

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and selective perceptions of possible hazards, now we would like to extend the argument by stating (as scientific observes who observe stakeholders such as urban planners) that the conceptual negligence of the constructionist character of vulnerability and resilience may also affect the practical action of stakeholders in the context of developing resilience (on this see Christmann and Heimann 2017). If we neglect that perceptions of vulnerability may be selective, even if they are developed by collective actors (from the fields of urban planning, development or politics), the respective developments of urban resilience will be also selective. Against this background, the here presented contribution does not only draw conclusions concerning the social-science based conceptualisation of vulnerability and resilience (see Sect. 3), it also makes fundamental suggestions concerning the practical action of stakeholders. The first suggestion is to overcome, in the context of the developing resilient cities, local blind spots and selectivities when it comes to perceiving hazards and, in this context, to also consider socio- and cultural-spatial differences (e.g., by way of becoming networked with other cities, in order of guaranteeing the extended consideration of possible threats and measures). A second suggestion is to consider the temporality of resilience an open process. Resilience is a continuous adaptation process which never comes to an end. It should be made a constant task of a variety of social actors, not only since hazards may change, condense, extend or eclipse but also since the perceptions and assessments thereof constantly change over time (see Christmann et al. 2016).

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Christmann, Gabriela  (Prof. Dr.) is a sociologist. She is the head of the research department “Dynamics of Communication, Knowledge and Spatial Development” and Deputy Director at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner. At the same time she is an Extraordinary Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin. Before that, she worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Konstanz and as an Assistant Professor at the Technische Universität Dresden. She took on Deputy Professorships at the Kiel University and the Technische Universität Dresden. From 2013 to 2016 she was part of the expert panel “Climate Change” of The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning in Stockholm, Sweden. Since 2013 she works as a section editor for the currently emerging “Encyclopedia for Urban and Regional S ­ tudies” which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2019. Moreover, she serves a scientific board member of the journal “Urban Planning”.

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Kilper, Heiderose  (Prof. Dr.) is a political scientist. Before her retirement, she was the director of the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner and was a Professor of Urban and Regional Development at the Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU) in Cottbus-Senftenberg. Previously, Heiderose Kilper held an Interim Professorship in Municipal and Regional Development Policy and Infrastructural Planning at the University of Konstanz. Furthermore, she acted as managing director of the Institute of Development Planning and Structural Research (IES) at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, where she also held a Professorship at the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Sciences. Since joining the IRS, Heiderose Kilper has headed the institute’s cross-departmental projects which are financed by the IRS. They explore issues which link the research departments’ various lead projects. One of these projects was on “Vulnerability and Resilience in a Socio-spatial Perspective”. Ibert, Oliver  (Prof. Dr.) is an economic geographer. He is the head of the research department “Dynamics of Economic Spaces” at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner since 2009 and at the same time Professor of Economic G ­ eography at the Freie Universität Berlin. Oliver Ibert previously worked as a Research Associate in the “Working Group on Urban Studies” at the Institute for Sociology at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Subsequently, he was affiliated with the working area “Socio-­ Economics of Space” (SECONS) at the University of Bonn, initially as Research Fellow, later as Assistant Professor. In summer 2014, Oliver Ibert was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Toronto. He is a member of the editorial board of Palgrave Communications and acts as a spokesperson of the project group “Experts in Crises” as a part of the Leibniz Research Alliance “Crises in a globalized world”.

The Emergence of Resilience in German Policy Making: An Anglo-Saxon Phenomenon? Jonathan Joseph 1 Introduction In this chapter it is argued that resilience is a strongly Anglo-Saxon idea which is, nonetheless, gaining influence in other countries, albeit in selected areas. Focusing on its emergence in two different areas of German policy making—national infrastructure protection and overseas disaster and humanitarian intervention—we here compare German understandings of resilience with the more established discourse in the UK and US. Here we will look at differences of emphasis in the German and Anglo-Saxon approaches to infrastructure resilience as well as identifying similarities, particularly in overseas intervention where an Anglo-Saxon approach is more widely accepted by the main actors in the field. The chapter opens by explaining how resilience has acquired a certain meaning that fits with an Anglo-Saxon, neoliberal understanding. This neoliberal understanding is explained through the idea of encouraging self-regulation and limited government intervention that operates ‘from a distance’ while making use of monitoring tools and indicators. This is likened to a form of governmentality as outlined by Michel Foucault and various interpreters of his work. Following this discussion of the philosophy or rationality that lies behind the rise of resilience, the focus I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Martin Endress, Marie Naumann and Benjamin Rampp and participants at a resilience workshop in Trier. I am grateful for a fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen which allowed me the time to research this in more detail. J. Joseph ()  Univerity of Sheffield, Sheffield, England E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_8

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turns to two areas of policy-making—critical infrastructure protection and overseas humanitarian policy. These are two areas where a strong notion of resilience is developing. It is argued, however, that in the area of infrastructure resilience, German approaches lack the Anglo-Saxon focus on self-regulation and awareness through individual and community resilience. In the field of overseas policy, the German approach is more ready to embrace an Anglo-Saxon notion of resilience, probably due to this field already being dominated by Anglo-Saxon thinking.

2 Resilience as an Anglo-Saxon Idea The idea of resilience has been around for a while, but has spread rapidly across many policy areas in recent years. Scholars of resilience may now declare resilience a global discourse given its prominence in areas such as climate change and disaster risk reduction and humanitarian intervention. However, this is not entirely true. Resilience has certainly proliferated in the United States and especially the United Kingdom. In Germany and other European countries resilience has been slower to develop. Indeed there are a range of areas such as security strategy, civil protection and counterterrorism strategy where resilience has become an accepted way of thinking in the US and UK, but where this is only just emerging in Germany and elsewhere (Federal Ministry of Defence 2016). Here, this is explained as a consequence of particular approaches to governance. The Anglo-Saxon approach has a stronger element of governmentality as explained in the rest of this section. In particular, this means that resilience is promoted as a means of governing populations, or more precisely, of getting populations to govern themselves through showing enterprise, reflexivity and awareness, while being flexible and adaptive in their behaviour. The origins of current resilience discourse lie in ecological and psychological discussions. The ecology literature in particular has played a leading role in introducing the idea of complex systems. These systems have multiple equilibria and t­ipping points, but are able to reorganise themselves when faced with different shocks and stresses. The work of C.S Holling has been particularly influential in making the argument that ecological resilience should focus on how instabilities can change a system through reorganisation and renewal. For Holling, the constancy of a system is less important than the ability of its essential relationships to withstand these shocks and persist (1973, p. 1). Resilience comes to be contrasted with stable equilibrium with emphasis now placed on change and heterogeneity (Holling 1973, p. 17). Ecological and social components are linked by complex resource systems such as economic systems, institutions and organisations. While the ecology l­iterature looks at such things as global environmental change, societal resilience extends to such things as economic shocks, terrorist threats and new security challenges.

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The ability of societies to cope with such things depends upon the nature of their institutions and their adaptive capacity (Berkes et al. 2003). For Adger, social resilience can be defined as the ability of communities to withstand external shocks to their social infrastructure and that this will inevitably require innovation, social learning and coping with change (2000, p. 361). Institutions are here understood both as formal structures of governance or law and in the broader sense of norms and socialised behaviour. This places resilience in cultural and political context and gives it a stronger normative element in terms of assessments and judgments on what ought or ought not to be, as well as the promotion of resilience as a desirable thing. The meaning of societal resilience is disputed because of where to place emphasis. Should resilience be about returning to normal functioning, or ­embracing the need for change? An influential pamphlet from the British think-tank Demos argues that resilience should be seen not only as the ability of a society or community to ‘bounce back,’ but as a positive process of learning and adaptation (Edwards 2009, p. 10). Chandler (2014, p. 6 f.) insightfully suggests a distinction between older, classical understandings of resilience which place emphasis on preparedness, ‘bouncing back’ and the restoration of operational functioning, and a post-classical understanding that takes a more relational, non-linear and adaptive view of the complex social world in which we live. As we shall see, the Anglo-Saxon approach is able to present itself as more radical by focusing on the adaptive capacities of communities and the potential to harness unique human capabilities. This makes it more representative of a governmentality approach, but not necessarily a more radical one. While the latter approach is presented as more radical, it is based on neoliberal assumptions about human behaviour and the wider social environment. It ­presents itself as emphasising change, but this is about changing individual behaviour rather that attempting to change the system. Indeed, resilience presents a very pessimistic picture about our (lack of) ability to change or control systemic factors. Resilience thinking tends to present macro level shocks as things beyond control. Not only natural disasters and ecological crises but also economic shocks and terrorist threats are regarded as too complex to manage. Emphasis is on how to deal with complexity and deep uncertainty. Rather than trying to bounce back or restore functioning, adaptability is the key idea. Hence resilience promotes an ontology that presents the wider world as beyond control, and urges us to turn instead to considerations of our own subjectivity, awareness, adaptability and reflexive understanding. It promotes self-management through making risk assessments, aquiring knowledge and engaining in responsible decision-making. In Anglo-Saxon policy making, there is a fairly swift move from thinking about the dynamics of systems to emphasising individual responsibility, adaptability and preparedness. For all the systemic arguments of the ecology literature, as far as

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policy makers are concerned, governance now works more through the adaptation of subjects rather than systems. This can be seen as a form of governmentality because it is attempting to responsibilise individual conduct. O’Malley (2010) argues that resilience, rather than being a reactive model that teaches us how to ‘bounce back,’ works to create subjects capable of adapting to and exploiting situations of radical uncertainty. Zebrowski talks of resilience as an enframing of life correlated to neoliberal governance and looks at “the politics constitutive of resilient populations as a referent of governance” (2013, p. 170). Resilience, as a form of governmentality, works first to frame the world in a certain way so that various problems and compexities come to the fore. This is a word that we can neither control nor properly understand. Such conditions require resilience to work, secondly, as a means of constructing a particular type of subject that operates according to the norms and values of such a framing. This subject will be evaluated according to its resourcefulness and ability to cope in the face of adversity. These subjects have to be created and this is done through active state intervention that seeks to responsibilise individual actors. The Anglo-Saxon approach to resilience thus constitutes an active intervention by the state into civil society and the private sphere. The UK’s counter-terrorism strategy, for example, while talking of protecting physical infrastructure, places more focus on building more resilient communities through cohesion-building, education, sharing information, planning for business continuity and working with the private sector (Home Office 2011). All this is premised on a certain view of the relationship between state, society and its citizens, of the duties and responsibilities of each, of the role of government, civil society and the private sector, of the means by which information is shared, the public informed and their roles understood. The governmentality perspective highlights the way resilience places emphasis on such things as awareness, preparedness, information sharing, informed decision-making and adaptability. Neoliberal governmentality constitutes us as ‘free’ subjects who nevertheless have the responsibility to governing ourselves in an appropriate manner (Foucault 2008, p. 63 f.). Governance operates through normalising the logic of the market through ideas such as public—private partnerships, networked governance and an individualised conception of civil society based on mobilising active citizens. This helps embed a rationality of competition, enterprise individualised responsibility. Resilience, seen in relation to neoliberal governance, is about encouraging active citizenship where people, rather than being dependent on the state, take responsibility for (if not necessarily control of) their own well-being. In particular, this relates to the risk and security aspects of governance and it operates through an appeal for preparedness, awareness and reflexive monitoring of our situation and our ability to respond to crises.

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The main argument of this chapter is that the Anglo-Saxon approach to resilience places much more emphasis on the building of resilient communities which, on the face of it, would appear to be an important and radical understanding of resilience. However, this focus on community is infused with neoliberal assumptions about individual behaviour and shifts responsibility downwards away from the state and on to the populations themselves. As well as seeking to create ‘active citizens’ in civil society it embraces the private sector as more efficient and enterprising. In the UK the private sector is presented as better able to “bring professionalism, leadership and management and best practice tools for driving efficiency and managing risk,” with better access to the latest information and technology (Ashdown 2011, p. 37). Finally, the governmentality approach reinforces resilience measures through widespread use of indicators. Ironically, therefore, the more uncertain we are about the world around us, the more emphasis is placed on gaining information at the micro level of everyday interaction.

3 Resilience in Infrastructure Protection: The Anglo-Saxon Approach Critical infrastructure is defined by the British government as “those facilities, systems, sites and networks necessary for the functioning of the country and the delivery of the essential services upon which daily life in the UK depends” (­Cabinet Office 2010, p. 8). Nine areas of Critical National Infrastructure are identified—energy, food, water, transportation, communications, emergency services, health care, financial services and government. The UK’s Critical Infrastructure Resilience Programme seeks better communication, cohesion and planning across these different areas and across different sectors of government. It promotes a ‘joined-up’ approach to assess vulnerability and minimise disruption, involving other government programmes including protection against terrorist attacks and climate change. Alongside this programme is the National Resilience Capabilities Programme which covers most types of civil emergency including accidents, natural hazards and human-made threats. Here particular emphasis is placed on raising public awareness in order to protect communities from potential threats. These resilience programmes display strong elements of Anglo-Saxon governmentality. Where possible, governance should occur ‘from a distance’ though voluntary cooperation, information sharing and raising awareness. Responsibility is devolved, wherever possible, to a range of actors who must familiarise themselves with their risks and responsibilities. A policy of subsidiarity works in relation to coordination strategy and engagement with local actors. The government will play

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a supporting role in this process with emphasis placed on ensuring that objectives are agreed and understood by all involved. In this way, the government seeks to responsibilise a range of local actors and organisations, with stricter legislative powers available if necessary. There is also widespread use of monitoring and information gathering in order to enforce discipline. The programmes establish various standards, time frames and measurement tools in order to implement resilience building measures and benchmark business continuity plans (Cabinet Office 2010, p. 7). Different tests for resilience will be carried out to gain an understanding of local response capabilities and these will be fed back into government understanding of the UK’s ability to deal with civil emergencies. If governmentality is to be understood as governing from a distance through devolving responsibilities and encouraging self-management, then seeking to build community resilience is an essential part of this strategy and is evident in both UK and US approaches. Indeed, the UK has a Strategic National Framework on C ­ ommunity Resilience, defining community resilience as “[c]ommunities and individuals harnessing local resources and expertise to help themselves in an emergency” (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 11). Getting people to help themselves is the key governmentalising aspect of this strategy and the government plays the role of facilitator in encouraging selfmanagement. It is noted how in many areas people are already taking responsibility for their own resilience and recovery, working with decision makers to determine the allocation of resources, making preparations and determining the recovery process (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 7). Resilient individuals are defined as those people able to develop an informed understanding of the risks they face and their likely impacts and who are able to reflexively assess their vulnerability to risks, using this as motivation to act and be prepared (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 11). The recovery phase offers most opportunities for individual and community initiative and enterprise. Recovery from disasters is “most effective when conducted at the local level with the active participation of the affected community and a strong reliance on local capacities and expertise” (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 11). Best results occur when the community exercises a high degree of ‘self-determination,’ although this should be in collaboration with the voluntary sector, private sector and the statutory agencies. Again, this is presented as a more dynamic approach to resilience with local communities being empowered through opportunities to transform and revitalise their area, engage in new commercial activities, improve their environment, develop skills and raise aspirations (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 83). The approach in the United States places a similar emphasis on the role of individuals and communities, particularly in the recovery phase. The National Disaster Recovery Framework seeks to enhance the ability of individuals and families to “rebound from their losses in a manner that sustains their physical,

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emotional, social and economic well-being” (Department of Homeland Security 2016, p. 5), while helping the recovery of the wider community. In return, it is important that individuals can draw on community support. As with governmentality in the UK, the Federal Government will act as a partner and facilitator, promoting a distant form of governance, but strengthening its intervention where this affects national security (Department of Homeland Security 2016, p. 6). To summarise the National Disaster Recovery Framework and indeed the Anglo-Saxon approach to resilience more generally, five areas of governmentality can be identified. Firstly, as we saw above and have continually emphasised, it is about governing populations from a distance. The US approach, while emphasising communities, also places strong emphasis on individuals, families, faith-based and other community groups and local businesses. The second and related aspect of governmentality is the strategy of devolving responsibility and attempt to reach right down to the individual. The key issue with resilience is the ability of people to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and this “begins with the individual and integrates with the larger responsibility of the community” (Department of Homeland Security 2016, p. 26). The third element of governmentality present in these strategies is the appeal to the private sector. We saw this in the UK approach and we clearly see it in the US where the private sector is seen as a vital source of resilience through its provision of infrastructure services and other essential commodities. Private sector intervention is regarded as the best way to solve local problems and it plays a key role in ensuring the ‘viability’ of a community. Recovery depends, as we have seen in the case of the UK as well as the US, upon the private sector, working hand-in-hand with the community and various local organisations (Department of Homeland Security 2016, p. 14). Relatedly, the private sector is seen a source of dynamism and the fourth e­ lement of governmentality is the promotion of initiative and enterprise and for creating ‘resilient subjects’ who are active citizens within their communities and who are reflexive, risk-aware and enterprising in their approach to the challenges they face. This links to the fifth element of governmentality that can be identified in the Anglo-Saxon approach which is the more transformative view of resilience as an opportunity. Rather than simply returning to a previous condition, recovery offers “unique opportunities to reduce current and future risk and contribute to a more sustainable community” (Department of Homeland Security 2016, p. 8). The US approach argues that communities “can capitalize on opportunities” during the rebuilding process, improving their sustainability and ‘livability’ goals, promoting future growth, improving economic competitiveness, enhancing the health and safety of the neighbourhood and making smart energy choices (Department of Homeland Security 2016, p. 8).

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4 German Infrastructure Protection It is immediately noticeable that while the Anglo-Saxon approach emphasises communities and the private sector, the German approach refers more to society as a whole. Hence infrastructure is considered critical “whenever it is of major importance to the functioning of modern societies and any failure or degradation would result in sustained disruptions in the overall system” (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2009, p. 7). Protecting critical infrastructure “is a task of society as a whole, which calls for coordinated action supported by all players—government, business and industry, and the general public” (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2009, p. 10). Technical infrastructure—including power supply, information and communications technology, transportation and water supply—is distinguished from socio-economic infrastructure such as public health, food, emergency and rescue services, disaster control and management, government, public administration, law enforcement agencies, finance, insurance business, media and cultural heritage objects (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2009, p. 7). It is accepted that the ownership and operation of this infrastructure is moving into the private sector so that the responsibilities and functions of the state or public authorities are mainly to ensure the safety and control of the supply of goods and services in times of crises when market mechanisms might not be reliable (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2009, p. 8). Hence privatisation trends are taken for granted, but the limits of the market are recognised far more than they are in the Anglo-Saxon discourse. The ­German approach continues to emphasise the central role of the state, but notes the need for better cooperation and partnerships with other public and private actors. The state may do this as a moderator, or by rulemaking and regulating measures for safeguarding the ‘overall system’ and its procedures (Federal Ministry of the ­Interior 2009, p. 3). This contrasts with the Anglo-Saxon approach because of the much greater backing provided by the legal system. It is noted in policy documents that compared to other countries, Germany has a good record of security of supply because privately organized power supply companies are under a legal obligation to operate a secure, reliable and high-performance supply network (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2009, p. 4). A neoliberal approach is nevertheless in evidence, albeit in a contradictory sense. The infrastructure protection strategy includes an argument for developing a ‘novel risk culture’ which would produce a “greater and self-reliant self-protection and self-help capability of individuals or institutions affected by the disruption or

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compromise of critical infrastructure services” (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2009, p. 11). This is certainly closer to the Anglo-Saxon model in seeking to promote private initiative, while responsibilising operators and individuals. It ­governs from a distance through promoting better risk assessment and risk awareness. However, the fifth—dynamic—element of governmentality is missing and instead, the German approach aims, not at reorganisation, but for a more robust and resistant society. Moreover, the aim of crisis management “is to deal with a crisis while maintaining the greatest possible ability to function, and/or recovering critical functions as quickly as possible” (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2008, p. 22). The Anglo-Saxon understanding of resilience would regard this as a conservative approach that seeks to keep things as they are and to resist rather than adapt. The idea of resilience is implicit in German infrastructure protection policy with little explicit mention of the idea. There is also a much weaker sense of communities and individuals as actors. This can be seen positively or negatively depending on point of view. It could be claimed that the Anglo-Saxon approach places the resilience of communities and individuals centre stage, or it could be claimed that this is a strategy of devolving responsibility away from the state by governmentalising the population. The lack of discussion of community resilience in the German literature might be seen as indicating lack of dynamism. Or it might be that this lack of emphasis on the role of communities occurs because German policy making retains its strong emphasis on the role of the state as the main responsible actor that people ultimately depend upon for protection and that the lesser emphasis on communities and individuals is due to a greater emphasis on society as a whole.

5 Building Resilience Overseas Applying the Anglo-Saxon model of resilience to international interventions presents some difficulties because of the different nature of the terrain and the various actors involved. Nevertheless, resilience has risen to prominence among most international organisations, agencies and ministries and indeed the main argument of this section is that the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, AA), Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung, BMZ) and Agency for International Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, GIZ) are far more willing to promote neoliberal governmentality than are their domestic equivalents. We will outline this below, but will first re-state the Anglo-Saxon approach by looking at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

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The first element of governmentality has been identified as governing populations from a distance. DFID’s stated aim is to help countries prepare themselves to withstand shocks and disasters (2011a, p. 1). While the international community can help support national governments and local actors, it is ultimately the responsibility of that country’s government to develop its population’s capacity to resist and adapt to shocks (DFID 2011a, p. 1). The international community will help to facilitate this process through coordination with governments, civil society and the private sector while offering expertise and other forms of support. As previously noted, this form of distant governance is backed up with a system of monitoring and assessment to make sure that countries receiving international support make use of it in the proper way. DFID departments and country offices will decide upon appropriate indicators and DIFID is in the process of developing progress indicators to measure how well resilience is being locally embedded (DFID 2011b, p. 14). The second and related aspect of governmentality is the strategy of ­devolving responsibility and attempting to reach right down to the individual. The way this is promoted in current international development parlance is through capacity building. Specifically, resilience is about developing adaptive capacities: The adaptive capacities of actors—individuals, communities, regions, governments, organisations or institutions—are determined by their ability to adjust to a disturbance, moderate potential damage, take advantage of opportunities and cope with the consequences of a transformation. Adaptive capacities allow actors to anticipate, plan, react to, and learn from shocks or stresses. (DFID 2011b, p. 8)

Recent shifts in emphasis do tend to emphasise the importance of individual or human capacities, although whether in fact such interventions can successfully enhance capacities at the individual level is a matter for debate (see Joseph 2016). Third, overseas resilience building strongly promotes the role of the private sector and public—private partnerships are promoted as the best way to share risks, credit and investment. Such partnerships are seen as means for actors like DFID to operate in an “increasingly complex humanitarian system” (DFID 2011c, p. 1). This partly connects to the more general development aim of making poorer countries more open to market forces, partly to the neoliberal assumption that the private sector offers more dynamism, particularly in managing risk (Ashdown 2011, p. 37). The fourth element of governmentality is the promotion of initiative and enterprise and for creating ‘resilient subjects.’ Resilience encourages innovation so that people can learn from experiences and adapt their behaviour in appropriate ways.

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A USAID report argues that innovation “allows institutions, communities, and individuals the opportunity to think critically and to challenge existing structures that are in place and create new ideas in order to ‘bounce back better’” (Bujones et al. 2013, p. 13). These human attributes are especially important when existing service delivery is poor and communities need to think critically about their situation and develop new coping mechanisms. This connects with the final element which is the more transformative view of resilience as an opportunity. For the World Resources Institute, people can actually thrive in the face of a crisis (WRI 2008, p. 49). We have noted how the Anglo-Saxon view claims a more radical understanding of resilience as transformative. Enhancing the adaptive capacity of communities and individuals means “the ability to quickly and effectively respond to new circumstances [based on] … ensuring that social systems, inclusive governance structures, and economic opportunities are in place” (USAID 2012, p. 61). The USAID approach makes much mention of ‘adaptive facilitators,’ understood as “intangible elements of social capital and patterns that create an enabling environment for institutions and resources to mitigate shocks, recover from them and potentially ‘bounce back better’ after a shock occurs” (Bujones et al. 2013, p. 12). Reform of the German ministries has given the Federal Foreign Office control of emergency aid and BMZ responsibility for what has become known as ‘Transitional and Development Assistance’ (TDA) which takes a longer-term approach to building the resilience of populations with a focus on fragile states and countries at risk from climate change and natural disasters. Building resilience is central to the new approach, summarised in the main strategy of the Federal Foreign Office: The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development has at its disposal the newly developed recovery and rehabilitation instrument, which being part of development cooperation follows the principles of that sphere. Recovery and rehabilitation is aimed at strengthening the resilience of local communities, civil society players and (state) institutions at the dynamic interface between the Federal Foreign Office’s humanitarian assistance and long-term development cooperation through recovery and rehabilitation. (2012, p. 7)

This restates many of the resilience themes discussed so far and is outlined in detain in the new approach to Transitional Development Assistance, outlined in a BMZ strategy paper. The above point is restated—the need to strengthen the resilience of individuals, local communities, civil society actors and state institutions— in relation to natural hazards and climate change. The context is set out as one of complex crisis of a non-linear character (BMZ 2013, p. 5). The multi-dimensional nature of these crises requires effective coordination of inter-connected measures

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bridging the short, medium and long-term in line with the established approach of Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development (BMZ 2013, p. 12). As with the Anglo-Saxon approaches discussed above, the argument for resilience takes a capacity-building approach, reaching right down to the individual. Building human capacities is combined with the more traditional focus on institutional capacity-building. Local capacity building requires longer-term measures, allowing people to improve their livelihoods through their own efforts. This is in order to enable people and institutions “to cope with situations and adapt accordingly” (BMZ 2013, p. 8). TDA seeks to strengthen the capacities of state, civil society and private-sector actors and facilitate their better working together. We also find the theme of a flexible and pragmatic approach, taken in response “to the uncertainty and challenges that affect planning and implementation in fragile contexts” (BMZ 2013, p. 8). In this sense, the arguments for resilience are rather similar to other international organisations, although these are presented as a radical reorganisation of German overseas policy. BMZ acknowledges that it takes its definition of resilience from DFID (2011a), arguing that it is “the ability of people and institutions—whether individuals, households, local communities or states—to withstand acute shocks or chronic stress caused by fragile situations, crises, violent conflict or extreme natural events, and to adapt and recover quickly without compromising their medium and longer-term prospects” (BMZ 2013, p. 7). This is a rather banal definition of resilience, but its entry into the German discourse has opened up some space for a discussion of where the emphasis should lie. BMZ commissioned the Humanitarian Policy Group to write a paper on the challenges of promoting resilience in places where strong institutions and governance practices are absent. In such cases, resilience must focus much more on the role of people rather than at the level of systems. The starting point is to look at people’s exposure, vulnerabilities and coping abilities. This raises issues such as how people adapt to problems, their ability to maintain an acceptable level of well-being and how they might recover an acceptable level of welfare following a crisis (Mosel and Levine 2014, p. 3). This focuses more on the social, political and economic aspects of people’s lives, rather than purely technical issues that, for example, dominate discussion of domestic infrastructure protection. However, this response to BMZ’s work reflects tensions in the resilience debate. On the one hand it is quite critical of technical and institutional approaches that overlook genuine human needs. On the other hand, pursuing this human turn makes the German approach more susceptible to tendencies to governmentalise recipient populations. It is noted that resilience can open up new human potential through an examination of how people make choices and what constraints they might be under. However, this is considered within the framework of human

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capital and individual autonomy. People’s vulnerability is considered at the micro level, while macro conditions are considered as both an ‘enabling environment’ and as a constraint on human capacities (Mosel and Levine 2014, p. 11). The solution is not to try to change such conditions, but to turn away from generic institutional solutions and to focus more on local institutions, particular governmental agencies and human capacity building. Ultimately this human turn is also a pragmatic turn, more realist in the sense of “having less ambitious objectives, being more modest about the ability of external actors to effect change on their own and being much more open about the degree of risk that must be run” (Mosel and ­Levine 2014, p. 16). Such arguments, while recognising human potential and local capacities, ultimately accept much of the Anglo-Saxon discourse outlined at the start of this section. They remain narrowly focused on human capacities and indeed, even more narrowly, on adaptive capacity. The broader context is understood as “ensuring that development policy and interventions support people’s own ability to deal with unknown futures or, to use the current jargon, their ‘adaptive capacity’” (Mosel and Levine 2014, p. 12). As Mosel and Levine’s report of BMZ elaborates: Adaptive capacity means people’s ability to make and realise well-informed decisions in the future. Adaptive capacity is important in all development situations, but it is especially critical in difficult places, which are typically rapidly changing situations, where the ability to cope with change is key—and where people may not be able to rely on others (e.g. their state, elites) without exploitation. Supporting adaptive capacity is slower and more difficult than transplanting new technologies or providing assets, and it needs very different skills from the ones technicians generally possess. It will thus have significant implications for staffing and resources. (2014, p. 12)

Elsewhere in Government strategy, the adaptive capacity approach is understood as ‘self-help,’ so the Federal Foreign Ministry talks of measures to boost self-help capabilities through the involvement of local stakeholders and aid recipients (Federal Foreign Office 2012, p. 4). The German Red Cross, a major partner in German resilience strategy also emphasises self-help, but talks of this in relation to the “underlying general social, cultural, environmental, physical, financial, and political conditions” (2014, p. 15). All these discussions point to a complex picture in Germany where the AngloSaxon language of capacities and self-help, normally understood as a means of governmentalizing populations through shifting responsibility onto communities and individuals, is being gradually introduced. Yet at the same time, there remains a tension in the discourse and the persistence of arguments for a focusing on

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people’s real needs, on social conditions and on the importance for protection. This comes out in debates about the role of civil society where again there is a clash between the more established socio-cultural framework, and the new AngloSaxon discourse. The BMZ approach emphasises the importance of civil society’s active involvement in political decision-making, arguing that state structures can only be resilient if they are in constructive dialogue with society, responding to people’s needs. These relations should be understood as ‘inherently political processes’ rather than purely technical ones (BMZ 2009, p. 15). To summarise: German development cooperation therefore does not limit its support to state institutions, but also regards their roots in society, the legitimacy of state actions, society as a whole and the interfaces between state and society as central elements in sustainable state-building processes. In this sense it is linked to the promotion of political involvement in all its dimensions of cooperation. (BMZ 2009, p. 15)

This is significant and reflects a more social understanding of these issues, placing greater emphasis on “different political and social situations, the socio-cultural settings and the individual needs of the partner countries” (BMZ 2009, p. 13). However, alongside this social understanding lies a much more instrumental account of civil society: Strengthening civil society enables it to better fulfil its role as a critical but constructive watchdog and as a lobby. It also promotes democratic consciousness among the citizens, promotes the integration of disadvantaged groups and helps to bring greater transparency to policy-making. (BMZ 2009, p. 8)

Here civil society, rather than being an important socio-cultural context, becomes an instrumental means for ensuring that states adhere to a good governance agenda as determined by international organisations like the World Back. Civil society is regarded as a ‘watchdog’ for holding the state to account in such areas as democracy and the rule of law, efficiency and transparency and cooperation with the international community (BMZ 2009, p. 14). This is ironic given that the same document later notes the problematic relationship between certain civil society actors and external funders where dependence on external funds leads such groups to assume the priorities of the donors rather than representing the concerns of the local people in political processes (BMZ 2009, p. 25). Again, we might note the tensions in German overseas policy between a genuine concern for social and political processes, and a more instrumental approach that reflects the pervasive influence of neoliberal governmentality within the wider field of international development and the Anglo-Saxon dominance of the main international organisations and donors.

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These arguments sum up the significant tensions in the emerging German approach to resilience in overseas humanitarian and development policy. As resilience becomes increasingly influential in this field, so it brings with it certainly Anglo-Saxon arguments and assumptions that sit uncomfortably with more established understandings of international intervention. We have seen that the German approach, both here and at home, places strong emphasis on society. Yet while, on the one hand, the German approach recognises that change should come from within society and that we ought to value those initiatives that come out of civil society (BMZ 2014, p. 5), on the other, openness to an Anglo-Saxon view of resilience leads such an approach in the direction of a more instrumental view of civil society and an individualistic view of human capacities. The German approach to overseas resilience also accepts the techniques of monitoring and assessment that accompany ‘governing from a distance.’ In line with accepted international practice, BMZ suggests that the quality of transitional development assistance is maintained though compliance with international standards and principles of cooperation, particularly those of the OECD. This covers mechanisms of planning, implementation and evaluation based on an analysis of needs, effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability. Moreover, these are in line with the PostHyogo Framework for Action and the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, on the basis of the Principles of Good Humanitarian Donorship (Federal Foreign Office 2012, p. 5; BMZ 2013, p. 9). TDA compliance with international standards requires detailed analysis of its effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability with all results and impacts subject to an ongoing monitoring process (BMZ 2013, p. 9). Such compliance with the techniques of Anglo-Saxon governmentality suggests that the current approach might be a somewhat radical reorganisation of German overseas policy, but certainly not a radical challenge to existing international practice.

6 Conclusion It is currently the case that while the resilience discourse is spreading rapidly, it remains a strongly Anglo-Saxon notion, much more significant in the US and UK and with a particular meaning related to a more privatised and individualised approach to governance issues. It is certainly spreading to other countries including Germany, as has been shown, and this process will no doubt continue. However, this development is occurring in an uneven sense and a number of problems of understanding and contradictions in interpretation have arisen as a result of different social and political cultures and approaches to governance.

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This unevenness is demonstrated by comparing different areas of German policy making. The idea of resilience is currently absent from national security strategy at a time when it is highly visible in equivalent US and UK approaches. The idea of resilience is implicit in German infrastructure protection, but it lacks the AngloSaxon focus on building individual and community resilience. It is, however, increasingly prominent in overseas strategy, although not without contradictions. The rather cynical explanation for this is that it is easier to export neoliberal governmentality to others than to force it on people at home. Germany has a strong domestic political culture that regards the state as responsible for protecting German people, backed up by a strong legal and regulative system, something that makes the more individualised and devolved Anglo-Saxon approach problematic at home. Globally, this is different and the dominant role of international organisations like the World Bank and UNDP means that Anglo-Saxon thinking is much more readily accepted as normal. This raises questions about how German policy makers see their country’s role on the international stage. The emergence of resilience discourse does indeed represent a more neoliberal understanding of international development and humanitarian intervention. Is Germany to follow DFID and USAID and fully embrace this Anglo-Saxon view? Does Germany, like the EU, claim to have a more normative understanding of its global power? Can it develop a more distinctive and inspiring notion of resilience that avoids the rather dull, technical approach to infrastructure protection and seeks genuine, rather than instrumental, engagement with local communities in need of international support?

References Adger, W.N. (2000). Social and ecological resilience: Are they related? Progress in Human Geography 24 (3), 347–364. Ashdown, P. (2011). Humanitarian emergency response review. London: Department for International Development. Berkes, F., Colding, J. & Folke, C. (2003). Introduction. In F. Berkes, J. Colding & C. Folke (eds.), Navigating social-ecological systems: Building resilience for complexity and change (pp. 1–29). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bujones, A., Kubitschek, K. J., Linakis, L. & McGirr, M. (2013). A framework for analyzing resilience in fragile and conflict-affected situations. Washington DC: USAID. BMZ. (2009). Promoting resilient states and constructive state-society relations – Legitimacy, transparency and accountability. Bonn: BMZ. BMZ. (2013). Strategy on transitional development assistance: Strengthening resilience – shaping transition. Bonn: BMZ. BMZ. (2014). Strategy on government-civil society cooperation in post-2015 development policy. Bonn: BMZ.

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Cabinet Office. (2010). Strategic framework and policy statement on improving the resilience of critical infrastructure. London: Cabinet Office. Cabinet Office. (2011). Strategic national framework on community resilience. London: Cabinet Office. Chandler, D. (2014). Resilience: the governance of complexity. Abingdon: Routledge. Department of Homeland Security. (2016). National disaster recovery framework 2016. Washington DC: FEMA. DFID. (2011a). Defining disaster resilience: What does it mean for DFID? London: Department for International Development. DFID. (2011b). Defining disaster resilience: A DFID approach paper. London: Department for International Development. DFID. (2011c). Humanitarian Emergency Response Review: UK Government Response. London: Department for International Development. Edwards, C. (2009). Resilient nation. London: Demos. Federal Foreign Office. (2012). Strategy of the Federal Foreign Office for humanitarian assistance abroad. Berlin: Federal Foreign Office/ Auswärtiges Amt. Federal Ministry of Defence. (2016). White paper on German security policy and the future of the Bundeswehr. Berlin: Federal Ministry of Defence. Federal Ministry of the Interior. (2008). Protecting critical infrastructures – Risk and ­crisis management: A guide for companies and government authorities. Berlin: Federal Ministry of the Interior. Federal Ministry of the Interior. (2009). National strategy for critical infrastructure protection (CIP Strategy). Berlin: Federal Ministry of the Interior. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. German Red Cross. (2014). The resilience framework of the German Red Cross strengthening resilience through the international cooperation of the GRC. Berlin: German Red Cross. Holling, C.S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1), 399–423. Home Office. (2011). CONTEST: The United Kingdom’s strategy for countering terrorism. London: Home Office. Joseph, J. (2016). Governing through failure and denial: The new resilience agenda. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44 (3), 370–390. Mosel, I. & Levine, S. (2014). Remaking the case for linking relief, rehabilitation and development: How LRRD can become a practically useful concept for assistance in difficult places. London: Humanitarian Policy Group/ BMZ. O’Malley, P. (2010). Resilient subjects: Uncertainty, warfare and liberalism. Economy and Society 39 (4), 488–509. USAID. (2012). Building Resilience to Recurrent Crisis USAID Policy and Program Guidance. Washington: USAID. World Resources Institute in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme, UnitedNations Environment Programme, and World Bank, World Resources. (2008). Roots of resilience – Growing the wealth of the poor. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Zebrowski, C. (2013). The nature of resilience. Resilience: International Practices, Policies and Discourses 1 (3), 159–173.

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Joseph, Jonathan (Prof. Dr.) is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, UK. His latest book “Varieties of Resilience: Studies in ­Governmentality” (Cambridge 2018) compares resilience in policy making across national security, civil protection and overseas intervention in the UK, US, Germany, France and the EU. His previous book “The Social in the Global: Social Theory, ­Governmentality and Global Politics” (Cambridge 2012) explores the relation between social theory and hegemony, governmentality and global governance. He also works on the themes of ­European integration theory and critical realist philosophy. He is an editor of the Review of International Studies.

Resilience, Resistance, Infrapolitics and Enmeshment Philippe Bourbeau and Caitlin Ryan

1 Introduction A great deal has been written in the International Relations (IR) literature about the role of resilience in our social world. Resilience has been employed to examine the response of international institutions and regimes in the face of exogenous challenges (Hasenclever et al. 1997), to explain the actions and attitudes of individuals caught up in violent conflicts (Davis 2012), to study societies’ responses to new inflows of asylum seekers (Bourbeau 2015a), to criticise liberal international intervention (Chandler 2015), and to revisit critical security studies (Dunn Cavelty et al. 2015). A facet of the literature that has attracted increasing interest lately—especially in critical theory-attuned scholarship—concerns the connection between resilience and resistance. Resilience is often contrasted with resistance, and many scholars consider the relationship between these concepts to be one of mutual

An earlier version of this article was published in: European Journal of International Relations 2017, p. 1–19. For useful comments on previous versions of this article, we would like to thank Olaf Corry, Graham Denyer Willis, Ayse Zarakol, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the EJIR. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. P. Bourbeau ()  Université Laval, Laval (Québec), Canada E-Mail: [email protected] C. Ryan  Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_9

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exclusivity. We disagree. We contend that resilience and resistance are engaged in mutual assistance rather than mutual exclusion. Part of the debate on this issue stems from the literature on the relationship between resilience and neoliberalism. Scholars attuned to Michel Foucault’s (in Burchell et al. 1991) governmentality thesis argue that resilience is a product of contemporary neoliberalism. For these scholars, beneath resilience lurks a dehumanising political agenda and the continuity of a state’s dominance (Duffield 2012; Walker and Cooper 2011). For example, for Brad Evans and Julian Reid, resilience distinguishes between those who have the ability and the power to secure themselves from risk and those “who are asked to live up to their responsibilities by accepting the conditions of their own vulnerability and asking not of the social” (2013, p. 14). Similarly, Jonathan Joseph contends that resilience is best understood in the context of “rolling-out neoliberal governmentality” (2013a, p. 51); he argues that current governmental policies of resilience constitute a strategy for states to abdicate responsibility in crises, thereby displacing the burden of responsibility from social institutions to the individual. As he understands resilience as a by-product of neoliberalism, Joseph predicts that resilience “may well disappear as the language and techniques of governance change,” and hopes “that communities around the world … will continue to show a lack of interest in the idea of being resilient. Better still, they might even show an interest in a much more inspiring French word—resistance” (2013b, p. 11). In sharp contrast, Philippe Bourbeau (2015b) offers a broader socio-political view of the connections between resilience and IR, arguing that reducing resilience to a neoliberal product provides an incomplete and biased understanding of resilience in the context of world politics. Olaf Corry (2014) does not rule out completely the resilience—neoliberalism nexus, but underscores that resilience can be part of other governmentalities that deal with uncertainty and risk. From a slightly different angle, Peter A. Hall and Michele Lamont (2013) contend that resilience has been developed and strengthened as a societal response to the challenges provoked by neoliberalism. They employ social resilience to demonstrate that the capacity to adapt in the face of neoliberal governance is an essential characteristic of societies that advance collective well-being. Jessica Schmidt (2015) also contends that resilience is not necessarily a continuation of the neoliberal paradigm, but rather a response to its inherent frustrations and associated governance dilemma. Several scholars from this latter camp have increasingly raised doubts about the deterministic viewpoint that Evans and Reid, as well as Joseph, present. The argument that communities should opt for resistance over resilience invites the obvious question: resistance to what? How exactly would a community ‘resist’ a

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catastrophic natural event such as a tsunami? Should communities opt for resistance to state counterterrorism programmes, to terrorism itself or to neoliberal governance or youth radicalisation? Is resilience a by-product of neoliberalism in all locations, places, cultures and expressions? Has neoliberalism permeated and contaminated the full set of behaviours of social groups and individuals around the globe (from those living in an isolated Tanzanian village, to those on the Peruvian coast, to those in some particular neighbourhoods of Birmingham, UK) with the same strength and comprehensiveness? These questions are important and remain unanswered. The present article, however, raises a complementary set of concerns. We argue that conceptualising resilience and resistance as mutually exclusive reflects a substantialist ontological position rather than a relationalist one. Substantialism postulates that entities exist prior to their relations with other substances, a position that allows scholars to identify these fixed entities as primary units of analysis in research. In sharp contrast, relationalism posits that entities gain their meaning through their processual relations with other entities. Entities shape and are shaped by the dynamic and ever-changing relations among entities. Obviously, the expressions of the relationships between resilience and resistance can take several expressions and forms, including a sequential relation in which resilience strategies would lead to resistance (and vice versa). Yet, the focus of this article is on what precedes an analysis of the forms of relationship. We believe that it is essential to first debate how the interconnections between resilience and resistance are approached and studied before embarking on an analysis of the particular forms that the relationship might take. When approached from a relational perspective, the current literature on the resilience—resistance debate appears to suffer from three (substantialist-attuned) problems. First, the current literature treats resilience and resistance as binary concepts rather than processes. Second, it presents a simplistic understanding of resilient subjects as apolitical subjects. Third, it eschews the renewal and transformational aspects of resilience. In a bid to resolve some of these issues, we put forward two propositions. First, we postulate that by conceptualising the zones of contact between resilience and resistance from a relational perspective, we can move the scholarship away from an understanding of the two concepts as competitive and mutually exclusive. The relational approach opens up our perspective on the processes of resilience and resistance. Second, we suggest that resilience and resistance are engaged in mutual assistance rather than mutual exclusion. We contend that the dynamic and fluid processes of resistance and resilience are so enmeshed that treating them as

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mutually exclusive entities makes little sense; on the contrary, analysing them via instances of connections and mutual assistance is a more fruitful research path. Our call to highlight the mutual assistance between resilience and resistance instead of their mutual exclusivity does not mean that we are treating these concepts as synonymous. We concur with the largely accepted definition of resilience as the process of seeking to maintain or transform a referent object in the face of exogenous and endogenous shocks, and of resistance as organised and principled contestation of power and domination. The body of this article is organised as follows. The first section opens with a theoretical critique of the substantialist position, which is followed in the second section by a discussion of our proposal for a relational understanding of resilience and resistance. The third section illustrates the preceding set of arguments through an analysis of the case of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Our concluding remarks sum up our argument.

2 Entities, Mutual Exclusiveness and Problems This article builds on Mustafa Emirbayer’s (1997) distinction between substantialism and relationalism in social theory and on Patrick T. Jackson and Daniel Nexon’s (1999) application of this distinction to world politics, followed more recently by Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver Neumann’s (2015) edited book. Substantialism postulates that substances or entities (such as states) should serve as units of analysis in research and that the existence of such entities precedes interaction. Substantialism takes two forms: self-action substantialism posits that things or substances act under their own powers while interaction substantialism argues that substances remain fixed and unchanging throughout their interaction with other entities. For a substantialist, “entities are already entities before they enter into social relations with other entities … units come first, like billiard balls on a table, they are put into motion and their interactions are the patterns we observe in political life” (Jackson and Nexon 1999, p. 292). In contrast, relationalism posits that relations make the world hang together, to paraphrase John Ruggie (1998). For relationalists, the dynamic and ever-changing relations among elements are the appropriate units of analysis in research. Relationalism postulates a processual understanding of our social world: entities or substances acquire their meaning and significance through their transactions and relations with other entities or substances; the relations are seen as constitutive of the entities. For Sending et al., “agents, objects, and structures emerge from transactions and connections, that is, relations” (2015, p. 7). As several relationalists

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highlight, Norbert Elias’s example (quoted in Emirbayer 1997, p. 283) of wind nicely illustrates this point of view: “We say, ‘the wind is blowing,’ as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a given point in time, begins to move and blow. We speak as if a wind could exist which did not blow.” Obviously, the expressions of the relationships between elements can take several forms. In the context of this article, we might consider, for example, a sequential understanding of the relationship between resilience and resistance in which prolonged acts of resistance in the face of a series of disturbances would lead to the necessity of developing resilient strategies. Alternatively, we might pursue the opposite approach and propose that expressions of resilience can be observed right after a shock and before strategies of resistance are deployed. Yet another potential avenue would be to study the triangular relationship among resilience and resistance and other concepts, such as vulnerability, trauma and traumatic memories, and path dependence—to name just a few.1 Important as these questions are (and we believe that they will inform much of the literature for some years to come), our argument precedes an analysis of the particular form that the relationship between resilience and resistance takes. We postulate that before digging deeply into the particular forms that the relationship between resilience and resistance takes and investigating how resilience and resistance relate to other concepts, scholars need to think about how the interconnections between resilience and resistance should be approached and studied. Specifically, we believe that it is essential to first debate whether resilience and resistance gain their meaning in isolation as fixed entities or through their processual relationship with one another. From this relational perspective, we problematise the conceptualisation of resilience and resistance as distinct entities that are mutually exclusive. In particular, three major substantialist-attuned problems arise. First, the literature treats resilience and resistance as binary concepts rather than as processes. For many IR scholars, a given society (or individual) either is resilient or is not. Similarly, the same society either is engaged in acts of resistance or is not. The unit of analysis in each case (i.e., resilience or resistance) is fixed and unchanging. Evans and Reid encapsulate an understanding of resilience and resistance as fixed and mutually exclusive entities when they posit that resilient subjects are “subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist” (2013, p. 85). For them, a resilient subject is a subject that cannot “conceive of changing the world, its structure and

1We

thank one reviewer for suggesting that we discuss this point.

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conditions of possibility” (2013, p. 85). If our world is now in a constant state of emergency, Mark Duffield argues, “then resilience has become a monotonous characteristic of everything” (2012, p. 481). Resilience is treated as a totality, as a fully formed strategy of governance. In addition, many scholars hold that resilience and resistance, as units of analysis, act under their own power. For Joseph, “the idea of resilience does two things. It supports the organisational structure of the advanced liberal societies” and “it supports the idea of an individual neoliberal subject” (2013a, p. 262). Similarly, resilience possesses its own “logic,” according to Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose (2009, p. 243). That is: a systematic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective and material arrangements … [that] aspire to create a subjective and systematic state to enable each and all to live freely and with confidence in a world of potential risk. (2009, p. 243)

Resilience and resistance are thus seen as a one-size-fits-all concept—a rather surprising attitude given that one of the greatest strengths of the critical theory tradition in IR is its willingness to embrace the complexity of our contemporary social world, to shy away from deterministic and totalising standpoints, and to reject an oversimplifying representation of world politics. Second, some scholars view resilient subjects as apolitical subjects that cannot participate in changing the world, but must accept the constraints imposed on them as a condition of the social world. Evans and Reid contend that “the real tragedy for us is the way the doctrine [of resilience] forces us to become active participants in our own de-politicisation” (2013, p. 85). A narrow substantialist conceptualisation of resilience is implied when the resilience literature frames ‘resilient subjects’ as apolitical since they are subjects upon whom resilience is imposed. Within this logic is the contention that resilience is something that is brought about as a result of a ‘resilience-building’ project, or in the service of neoliberal governance. As argued by Bourbeau, this “makes the mistake of equating a particular government’s use of resilience with the concept of resilience” (2015b, p. 379). In focusing on how governments have recently deployed resilience as a tool and concept, there is a risk that the myriad forms that resilience takes are subsumed. Further, the privileging of the state through implying that it is the state that is ‘making’ resilient subjects makes it extremely difficult to ‘see’ the agency of subjects who can be resilient, but who may also be more than exclusively resilient. There is an important critique within the literature that problematises the resilience approach for facilitating the adjustments to a given situation/shock without challenging the underlying conditions that make it necessary to adjust.

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For example, one can clearly see the problem with a ‘resilience-building’ programme that tries to make the poor ‘adaptable’ to the effects of poverty, and, in so doing, ignoring the root causes (Hillier and Castillo 2013; Walklate 2011). However, in such a case, it is also important not to overlook that the ‘resilient subjects’ may fully comprehend the root causes of their own subjugation. While coping and adapting to the symptoms, they may also be engaged in resistance to the underlying causes, or to the ‘resilience-building’ itself. As mentioned earlier, Evans and Reid argue that the resilient subject has “accepted the imperative not to resist” (2013, p. 85); however, this reflects an understanding of resistance as underpinned by a state-centric logic of resistance. In this context, treating resilience and resistance as opposing forces results in a reductive view of a society’s/ individual’s available choices: since you cannot be both resilient and resistant to states’ policies, being resistant is thought to be the best strategy. James Scott (1985), in contrast, argues that subordinate groups usually fully understand the material and ideological conditions of their subordination. While they may not engage in overt revolt, they are also unlikely to fully adopt the hegemonic ideology responsible for their subordination. Such examples of refusal to acquiesce are not easily seen from a top-down or state-centric view, which is why we argue that greater attention must be paid to the complementarity between resilience and resistance, and the instances wherein resilience is a condition for resistance. Third, many scholars eschew the renewal and transformational aspects of resilience. Resilience is not only about maintaining the status quo (of an individual’s or a society’s way of life), but also about transforming and remodelling an individual or social structure. The transformational aspect of resilience implies the introduction of novel vectors of response that will (implicitly or explicitly) change existing policies and set new directions for governance in this field (Bourbeau 2013). Scholarship in disciplines for which resilience is a central concern has highlighted, consistently and for many years, the transformational nature of resilience. In psychology and in social work, pioneers of resilience studies have highlighted that resilience “involves the potential for personal and relational t­ransformation” (Walsh 2003, p. 3), noting that resilience is about bouncing back as well as bouncing forward (Sleijpen et al. 2013; Walsh 2002). Many have equally underscored that resilience, as a dynamic process, comprises some level of transformation and reconfiguration (Lepore and Revenson 2006; Luthar 2003; Masten and ­Cicchetti 2016; Rutter 1987). In ecology, several leading figures have pointed out that transformability is an integral part of resilience; consider, in this vein, Brian Walker et al.’s (2004) seminal article, “Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems,” Carl Folke’s remark that “there is an increased

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emphasis on transformability” (2006, p. 262) in resilience studies, and Boyd and Folke’s postulation that resilience is, in part, about “innovating and sowing the seeds of transformation” (2011, p. 266). Accepting the renewal and transformational aspects of resilience does not mean that one has to accept psychology’s normative tendency to treat resilience as inherently positive or ecology’s assumption of equilibrium; indeed, scholars have theorised the transformational aspect of resilience without reverting to either an equilibrium-based or a priori normative stance (Berkes and Ross 2013). Furthermore, even though IR is a latecomer to resilience studies, some have already pointed out that resilience is about persistence and transformation (Edwards 2015; Malkki and Sinkkonen 2015). It is unclear why and for what purpose IR scholars ignore these vast swathes of literature on resilience. Certainly, though, the consequence of this choice is obvious: ignoring the renewal aspect of resilience solidifies the substantialist position of treating resilience as fixed and unchanging. By eschewing the relational nature of resilience, scholars not only isolate themselves analytically, but also limit themselves from entertaining points of contact between resilience, resistance and contemporary politics.

3 Contestation, Infrapolitics and Enmeshment In a bid to resolve some of these issues, we put forward two propositions. First, we postulate that understanding the processes of resilience and resistance from a relational perspective can move the scholarship away from a default understanding of the two processes as competitive and mutually exclusive. We place the relationship between resilience and resistance within the rubric of infrapolitics and hypothesise each process as a strategy for contesting a situation that is deemed inappropriate. Since, in our understanding, resistance and resilience are not inherently competing concepts, they can be brought together to examine how a given situation is politically debunked and contested. As mentioned earlier, the focus here is not on the actual form that the relationship between resilience and resistance takes (e.g., sequentiality), but rather on the idea that the meaning of both resilience and resistance is acquired and evolves through the relationship between the two concepts. Second, the strategies and experiences of contestation demonstrate slippage and interaction between resilience and resistance. Resistance and resilience can assist and support one another. In broader terms, adopting a more inclusive approach allows us to appeal to both resilience and resistance as tools for understanding certain features of world politics. Embracing this shift in focus allows

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our analytical framework to give much greater credit to populations/communities/ individuals who cope during chronic adversity or protracted conflict. The concept of infrapolitics helps to demonstrate how resilience and resistance are relational rather than mutually exclusive because the form each takes shapes and is shaped by the other. According to Scott (1990), infrapolitics describes the ways in which subordinate groups can continue to wage a struggle against their subordination, but in a way obscured from the view of the dominant power. Scott goes on to point out: “That it should be invisible, as we have seen, is in large part by design—a tactical choice born of prudent awareness of the balance of power” (1990, p. 183). It is crucial to note that infrapolitics provides the foundation upon which other, more visible, resistances rest. Scott (1985) initially observed infrapolitics in the rice-growing Malaysian village of Sedeka during the Green Revolution. He observed the ways in which the poor of the village, and especially the poor with very small landholdings, had to adapt to and adjust their farming in the context of the rise of combine harvesters and the decline of available land to rent. Here, resilience and resistance are not mutually exclusive, but rather mutually assist each other. The resilient strategies of Sedeka’s poorest farmers shape the form that resistance can take, but it does not exclude their resistance to the effects of the Green Revolution. Their material conditions necessitated profound adjustments to ensure the endurance of their daily life and limited their ability to engage in open revolt, and, at the same time, their engagement in infrapolitics of resistance sup- ported their capacity to continue farming. The farmers demonstrated traits easily characterised as ‘resilient’ as they were faced with numerous shocks and rapid changes to their material environment and economy. They adapted their agricultural and economic habits to the rapidly changing reality in their village. At the same moment that they were adapting to their new reality, they engaged in a sustained infrapolitics of resistance to it, which challenged the social legitimacy of the village rich, who were profiting from the Green Revolution. The village poor did not engage in open revolt, but they did find ways to make their challenge to the Green Revolution known to the rich, such as through false deference, pilfering, slander or evasion (Scott 1985). Engagement in this infrapolitics of resistance helped poor farmers to adapt to the rapid change to their material conditions, but, in turn, these adjustments do not imply agreement. First, acts of resistance such as pilfering did produce some (albeit small) actual material gain that could increase the ability of poor farmers to adjust to the disturbances. Second, the poor farmers’ adaptation does not “confound what is inevitable with what is just” (Scott 1985, p. 317). Slander, for example, provides an example of resistance to the social conduct of members of the ruling class. When the poor of Sedeka identify behaviours that violate the

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social norms of generosity and fair treatment, character assassination/slander of the perpetrator represents a form of resistance to the changes in social practices brought about by the Green Revolution (Scott 1985, p. 235). Adapting strategies to the ‘inevitable’ change of the Green Revolution does not mean that the poor farmers of Sedeka are willing to see it as just, and so they engage in the forms of resistance most conducive to their material and social conditions, their need to survive, and their ideological refusal to fully submit to their ‘fate.’ The result is that infrapolitics in Sedeka is shaped by the material and social conditions of the Green Revolution, the ideology of the poor and the basic need to adapt and maintain a ‘certain’ way of life. Having put forward our arguments for a relational approach to resistance and resilience, we also defend a second, more controversial, contention: we suggest that, on some occasions, resistance and resilience engage in mutual assistance. Our contention is that the dynamic and fluid processes of resistance and resilience are so enmeshed that treating them as mutually exclusive, fixed entities makes little sense. Instead, we propose that an analysis that takes into account the mutual entanglement of resilience and resistance will be more fruitful. It is through this mutual assistance that expressions of resilience and of resistance gain their meaning and importance. Resistance is an extremely demanding course of action, with numerous impediments and difficulties. Not only can resistance require months, years and even decades of struggle, but setbacks and obstacles often accompany every gain. Resistance, then, is itself a processual path paved with disturbances and turbulences. As a result, the process of resisting—and especially of resisting against one of the most powerful political organisations in the history of humankind (i.e., the state)—is a course of action that, by its very nature, demands resilience to ensure its continuity. Seen in this light, resilience, rather than a mere annoying noise in the ears of resistance, becomes a crucial vector for explaining why some resistance movements manage to persevere despite heavy hurdles and setbacks, and while others do not. Resilience demands extraordinary acts of willpower, dedication, determination, resourcefulness and creativity—all traits that can be deployed in furtherance of strategies of resistance. Where the substantialist standpoint sees resilient subjects as apolitical, we contend that a resilient subject (or society) can be neither apolitical nor politically passive. To seek to maintain a perceived status quo in the face of disturbance is inherently a highly political move, just as it is a highly political and deeply active move to adjust to change by seeking to transform a policy. As mentioned earlier, resilience is the process of seeking to maintain the status quo in the face of shocks, but it also refers the idea of transforming a referent object. As such, communities

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developing strategies to adjust to difficulties are also potential sites of resistance to the structures, inequalities or injustices that have necessitated these adjustments. Enacting resilience can mean that you find a way to ‘get on’ with daily life without acquiescing to the political, economic or social situation that you are in. In situations that necessitate that you ‘get on’ with daily life and adapt to stress, and particularly in contexts of protracted conflict or structural upheaval, communities or individuals may engage in resistance that is assisted by resilience (Ryan 2015). Writing from within the literature on non-violent resistance movements, Kurt Schock (2005, 2013) argues that the success of civil resistance relies, in part, on resilience. This is also expressed by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who see resilience as one “mechanism necessary for success” (2011, p. 10). In the context of Colombian civil resistance to state and non-state (National ­Liberation Army) violence, Annette Idler et al. (2015, p. 157) found that resilience was a positive characteristic of communities in the Samaniego region, which helped contribute to their successes by keeping resistance alive during difficulties. Discussing resilience in the context of longer-term interactions between movements and adversaries, Schock (2005) argues that resilience was highly important in the success of civil resistance movements in South Africa, the Philippines, Nepal, Thailand and Poland, and that a lack of resilience in Burma and China was an inhibiting factor in the movements’ success. In this sense, resilience can assist resistance strategies. This is especially true for a resistance movement that endures for a long period of time, and therefore faces numerous attempts by its opponents to quash or undermine it. This might be seen as a form of sustained infrapolitics of resistance that relies on and is assisted by resilience. One might add that our argument of mutual assistance could be pushed ­further to encapsulate situations in which resilience becomes the mode of resistance, in which resilience subsumes resistance. In the context of civil resistance movements, the adversary (usually, but not always, the state) seeks to eliminate or disempower the movement. In situations where the threat is defined and framed as a threat to coping itself, resilience may represent resistance insofar as it constitutes a counter-challenge to the adversary’s attempts to squash the movement or to make the idea of living in one area so intolerable that individuals/communities seem to have no other choice but to leave the area. Staying and seeking to maintain a ‘normal’ life might, in fact, be a mode of resistance.2 To be sure, these hypotheses are important and evaluating them would push the study of

2We

thank one reviewer for suggesting this.

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the relationship between resilience and resistance many steps forward. Yet, we believe that it is beyond the scope of the article to investigate the varied forms that the relationship between resilience and resistance might take (e.g., sequentiality or subsumption). If anything, these hypotheses highlight the importance of investigating how the relationship between resilience and resistance should be approached and studied before seeking to lay out, catalogue and discuss the full range of potential forms.

4 Resistance and Resilience in Action: The Palestinian National Liberation Movement The most obvious example of where resilience and resistance acquire meaning through each other is within the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Internal Palestinian discourses and narratives about armed resistance and unarmed resistance have shifted and morphed throughout the duration of the Palestinian national struggle (Pearlman 2014). At the height of the Second Intifada, popular support for armed resistance was at its peak, due to a wide variety of factors that have been documented elsewhere (Abufarha 2009). Although there have been several periods of open revolt by Palestinians, such as the First and Second Intifadas or the violent conflict between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israeli forces during the Lebanese civil war, the majority of the years between 1948 and today have been characterised more by resilience and an infrapolitics of resistance than open revolt. Within the Palestinian context, resilience is complementary and relational to overt resistance. Furthermore, resilience is used by ‘ordinary’ Palestinians to sustain daily life. In the context of the unpredictable and ever-changing occupation of the Palestinian territories, Palestinians must be flexible and adaptive in their daily lives, such as when crossing new ‘flying’ checkpoints or finding ways to access economic opportunity amid closure and restriction. They must also demonstrate traits of endurance and perseverance in order to maintain the hope of Palestinian liberation amid the ever-increasing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Overt revolt against one of the most well-armed militaries in the world would have been impossible to sustain for 68 years. During multiple periods where the leadership of widespread resistance has been fractured, or absent, resilience has been a necessary tactic of the Palestinian population, especially in the context of an occupation that has changed over time. The continuation of a Palestinian liberation movement for that period illustrates how resilience is necessary to sustain resistance through its ebbs and flows over decades. Adaptation and

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flexibility are necessary to ‘get on’ with daily life and to survive the occupation, while perseverance and endurance are necessary to maintain hope for the future in the midst of situations that may appear ‘hopeless,’ such as the recent wars in Gaza or the disappearance of land for a viable Palestinian state. Palestinians have a word to describe their adaptation, coping and perseverance: sumud. Sumud translates as ‘steadfastness’ or ‘resilience,’ and it is a word commonly used by Palestinians to explain how they continue to live under occupation. The existing literature on sumud argues that it describes the daily-lived practices of Palestinian resilience under occupation, as well as functioning as a social practice that Palestinians can reference as one of their defining traits (Halper 2006; Hass 2002; Richter-Devroe 2011; Singh 2012). Pearlman (2014) situates the emergence of sumud in Palestinian discourse during the late 1970s/early 1980s. During this period, while the PLO was ‘in exile’ (first in Jordan, and then in Lebanon), the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank passed hundreds of military orders to ‘govern’ Palestinians. Political activism was severely punished, with house demolitions, administrative detention and curfew. During this time, the PLO encouraged Palestinians to remain resolute by focusing on sumud (Pearlman 2014, p. 95 f.). When opportunities for organised political struggle were constrained by the nature of the occupation, sumud was framed and encouraged as a means of resistance that Palestinians could enact when they ‘stayed put’ on their land. This is also reflected in the popular Palestinian sentiment that ‘to exist is to resist.’ When discussing sumud in interviews, women frequently expressed that to stay in their homes was sumud: Sumud means that we should, even if it is difficult, stay. This is our land. Where to go? We don’t know America or Australia. This is my land. I know that I am from Bethlehem. I am Bethlehemian people. And my roots are here, my parents, my grandparents, so I should stay. I keep telling my children the same. Even with all these difficulties we can. (Interview 4, Bethlehem, December 2011) Sumud is an authentic Arabic word. You know? It represents the steadfastness of the Palestinian people. And it represents also the will of keeping the community, the Palestinian community, safe. And to reduce emigration, and you know. (Interview 7, Bethlehem, December 2011) We resist in, uh, in our way of living, let’s say. In our resilience. In our being here, refusing to emigrate, this one thing. Encouraging our children to stay here, and study here and work here. Staying in Palestine, enduring all the difficulties that we mention, the lack of freedom, the restrictions placed upon us, the wall, not going to Jerusalem, this is resilience, this is sumud, what we call sumud. (Interview 2, Bethlehem, December 2011)

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For these women, staying in Palestine despite hardship and keeping one’s home and land is one way of acting with sumud. One can also act with sumud in other ways, such as through the reproduction of Palestinian culture. Sumud, in this sense, reflects action, but there is also a great deal of space within the definition of sumud for it to be used differently by different people: “Sumud is not only about being in a place, it’s a journey or a process. Sumud is not static, it is action, life” (Palestinian peace activist, cited in Van Teeffelen 2011, p. 41). Here, sumud is not only a trait, but also a self-reaffirming practice that is relational—how one enacts it depends on one’s own circumstances, as well as the broader circumstances of the Palestinian national struggle. There is some debate in the literature over whether sumud is a form of resistance. On one side of the debate, Amira Hass (2002) contends that sumud is not a form of resistance, and Rashmi Singh (2012) suggests that sumud is ‘passive’ resistance. We, and other scholars, stand on the other side and argue that sumud is, in fact, a form of resistance. Sophie Richter-Devroe frames sumud as “a form of infrapolitics, or everyday resistance” (2011, p. 33; see also Halper 2006). ­Following the logic of our argument in this article, sumud as resilience is engaged in mutual assistance with resistance. This builds upon the work of Caitlin Ryan (2015), who suggests that sumud is a form of “resilient resistance.” While Palestinians frequently refer to sumud as a sort of national trait, it also functions in the form of daily-lived practice, which takes the form of adaptation to the shocks and unpredictability of the occupation. In the context of the ever-shifting occupation, one can frame one’s daily activities as sumud, particularly when those daily activities aim to make life ‘normal’ in the context of the ‘abnormal’ occupation. Resilience and resistance acquire meaning through each other in practices of sumud. One example of such adaptation can be seen in the high proportion of women who have taken up previously ‘male’ roles as breadwinners and heads of household. A substantial share of the male population has spent time in prison. The numbers of men in prison were particularly high during the First and Second Intifadas (Pearlman 2014). As a result, women bear increased responsibility for generating income and maintaining the family. This represents adaptation of daily-lived practice and of perceived gender roles, and hence a form of resilience necessary to ‘get on’ with daily life. Women whose husbands are in jail have to adapt to changed circumstances, and can frame these adaptations as a form of resistance. Such resilience does not exclude the possibility of resistance, but instead supports the ‘overt’ resistance of the broader national liberation movement by ensuring the continued functioning of social and communal networks. Furthermore, given that Palestinians in Israeli prisons are seen to be ‘political prisoners,’ the adaptation and coping of their family members is more easily framed within a

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logic of resistance to the occupation. In narrative interviews conducted in the West Bank, women frequently discussed how they found ways to adapt to seek to maintain the status quo while their husbands were in prison3: After my husband was arrested and put in jail, I had to work. I found work in a Palestinian nursery school, working with children. We were building our home at the time. With the small salary I earned, I continued to have work done on the house. So he spent the eight years in prison. (Interview 5, Dheishah Refugee Camp, December 2011)

The occupation disrupts daily life and restricts freedom both within and outside of the occupied Palestinian territories. A complex and ever-evolving system of checkpoints, the separation wall, settler-only roads and settlement boundary areas disrupt and interrupt freedom of movement (Parsons and Salter 2008; ­Weizman 2007). These disruptions can be short-term, such as in the case of ‘flying’ or temporary checkpoints, or they can be more long-term, such as in the case of the separation barrier. These disruptions have to be negotiated in one’s daily life, depending on the context in which they are located. For example, the path of the separation barrier diverges considerably from the 1949 Armistice line, creating what is referred to as the ‘Seam Zone.’ In some places, the barrier cuts ­Palestinian communities off from the rest of the West Bank, enclosing them on the ‘Israeli side’ of the barrier. Maintaining access to other Palestinian communities, friends and family, as well as to goods and services, requires a continuing process of access negotiation, in the form of applying for permits and using access gates. The ‘normalcy’ of daily life in these communities may include only being able to come and go at predesignated times when the access gates are open, or having to apply for permits to have friends and family to visit. When it comes to an access and permit system that designates what time you can or cannot enter your community, adaptation to the disruption of daily life does not imply acquiescence. One might expect that under such circumstances, individuals change and alter their daily schedules to ensure that they are home before the access gates are closed for the night, or that applications are filed for visiting family members well in advance of celebrations or holidays. People subjected to such a system of access restrictions will make necessary adaptations and

3This

in no way suggests that women are only ever still in the home while their husbands are in prison. There are also a substantial number of women who have been imprisoned during the course of the occupation.

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adjustments to their schedules in order to facilitate a degree of ‘normalcy’ in their daily lives. However, such adaption should not be taken as a sign that Palestinians in the Seam Zone have ‘given in’ to the occupation, and these adaptations help give meaning to Palestinian definitions of resistance. According to Laleh Khalili: the efficacy of sumud is not in its ability to beget political cataclysms, but rather in its cumulative force over decades resulting in incremental changes, which may not substantially alter societies, but which provide a breathing space for those who are most often trampled in the stampede of history. (2007, p. 225)

Sumud opens up space for strategies of adaptation and coping to be framed as resistance to the occupation so that one’s adaptation is not to be confused with acceptance. The attempts of Palestinian women to make life ‘normal’ for their children also illustrate resilience in the context of the occupation. As a tactic, sumud functions in the realm of the ‘everyday’ through attempts to make life under occupation ‘normal’ despite the stress and struggle (Richter-Devroe 2011; Ryan 2015). The occupation disrupts daily life and restricts freedom both within and outside of the occupied Palestinian territories. One example of disruption faced by children comes during ‘night raids,’ wherein the Israeli army enters a home or a series of homes within a village. During these raids, children are awoken and photographed. In some villages, such as Nabi Saleh, these raids are frequent and the children are photographed repeatedly, even if the army has recent photos of all the children in the house. Families report that even babies and toddlers are photographed. Women whose children experience this type of disruption on a semi-regular basis seek to make their children’s lives as ‘normal’ as possible as a means of adjusting to these disruptions. However, attempts to make daily life under ‘occupation’ normal should not be read as acceptance of the occupation: It’s a problem to say that it’s [the occupation is] normal, because it’s not, and it shouldn’t be. At the same time, it’s a problem not to say it’s normal, because if we don’t say it’s normal and try to live it, it will devastate us, and break us. (Interview 13, Nabi Saleh, January 2012)

Richter-Devroe found similar sentiments among her research participants, who claimed that ‘getting on’ with life and trying to find ways to be happy and ‘­normal’ are essential to deal with and live under occupation. In her case study of women who travel around the West Bank or East Jerusalem during their free time, RichterDevroe found that the women saw their day trips as “their right to have fun and relax in life” (2011, p. 38). This affirmation of a right to have fun and enjoy one’s

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life does not imply acquiescence to the occupation, as the women also framed their travelling as a “form of defiance against Israeli control” (Richter-Devroe 2011, p. 40). Here, again, resilience and resistance are in mutual assistance insofar as Palestinians frame their resilience as a form of resistance at the ideational level. Daily struggles to secure adequate water also represent the adjustment necessary to make life ‘normal’ throughout the West Bank. Access to water is strictly controlled by Israel, and 80% of the water pumped from aquifers in the West Bank is distributed to Israelis—either in Israel or in settlements (Amnesty ­International 2009). Palestinians living in ‘Area C’—particularly Bedouins—are prevented from connecting to a water supply, and, as a result, they live on less than 20 litres of water per day, considered by the World Health Organization to be a crisis level (UNOCHAOPT 2012). Water shortages were evident during the stay of one of us in the West Bank. Twice over a six-week period, the family that Caitlin lived with ‘ran out’ of water, the result of the water supply being turned on for only a few hours per week and the storage tanks on the top of the house running dry (B’Tselem 2000). In one interview, a woman living in a small village explained how access to water was an important element of how the occupation affects daily life: Even water, we have a problem with water, we only have water 12 hours per week, so, ah, for the 12 hours, we have to fill the water tanks on the roof so we can make sure we have water for the rest of the week. The settlers are enjoying our water 24/7. (Interview 14, Nabi Saleh, January 2012)

The example of access to water demonstrates only one element of how the occupation seeps into daily life, and how it presents Palestinians with pervasive problems that they must deal with and adapt to. As with the example of the travelling women from Richter-Devroe, women framed their adjustment to water shortage as resistance to or defiance of the occupation forces. In this sense, one’s ability to cope with living under occupation may be strengthened by one’s ability to frame that coping as a form of resistance. ‘Dealing with’ the situation may not change the reality of the occupation, but it certainly changes the way occupation is experienced, reflecting the sentiment of the research participants in Nabi Saleh who stated that the occupation would ‘break’ them if they did not try to make life ‘normal’ (Interview 13, Nabi Saleh, January 2012; Interview 14, Nabi Saleh, January 2012). Palestinian resilience to the daily impacts of the occupation is relational to Palestinian resistance to occupation. The forms of Palestinian resilience interact with and shape the forms of resistance that are possible, and, in turn, Palestinian resistance and refusal to acquiesce makes resilience necessary because (overt)

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Palestinian resistance is almost invariably met with a Israeli response that makes daily life more difficult. This can be seen within the interactions between resilience and resistance in the weekly demonstrations against the annexation of village land and village springs in the village of Nabi Saleh and other Area C villages. Land annexation in the occupied territories is most common in Area C, particularly in places in Area C adjacent to Israeli settlements or near the separation barrier. Since the end of the Second Intifada, a common tactic of Palestinian resistance to land annexation has been weekly demonstrations organised by non-violent, non-partisan, village committees. Villages such as Budras, Nabi Saleh, Bil’in and Nil’in are particularly well known as sites of weekly demonstrations against the loss of village land and against the wider occupation as a whole (Richter-Devroe 2011). These demonstrations are organised within the village, but they also attract participants from other parts of the West Bank, and activists from Israel and around the world. As such, these weekly demonstrations clearly represent an example of Palestinian resistance to the occupation. However, these demonstrations also make resilience necessary. These demonstrations generate an Israeli response, both formal, from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and informal, from Israeli settlers. These responses require Palestinians to adapt to adverse conditions. Human rights organisations such as B’Tselem and Al Haq have documented violent reactions to the demonstrations by the IDF and by armed settlers. For example, the IDF uses tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammunition and ‘skunk water’4 to disperse demonstrators. Since 2008, the IDF has killed multiple demonstrators with projectiles, such as Mustafa Tamini, killed by a tear gas canister fired from close range in Nabi Saleh in December 2011 (Al Haq 2011). Residents of Nabi Saleh also report that the IDF frequently enters the village during Friday demonstrations and fires tear gas and skunk water directly into people’s houses (Al Haq 2011). These violent responses necessitate that residents in demonstrating villages adjust to and deal with unpredictable shocks. For example, women responsible for cleaning their homes have to find ways to clean up skunk water fired into their windows. Women with small children must find ways to carry on with the security risk posed to their children by weekly incursions of the IDF into the village. These, and other related, situations that necessitate resilience are the result of the village’s participation in overt resistance.

4A

petrochemical sprayed from a truck-mounted water cannon, ‘skunk water’ emits an extremely foul odour, which cannot be cleaned easily.

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Overall, the daily-lived experiences of this structural and physical violence require Palestinians to adapt to changes to their physical landscapes and daily routines. In turn, their ability to reflect upon and draw strength from their ability to adjust to these disturbances, and the continued necessity of doing so because of the occupation’s endurance, helps to reinforce their resolve to engage in national resistance. Resilience, as demonstrated in the context of the Palestinian national liberation movement, can provide a condition for resistance, and within daily-lived practice in the occupied territories, there is mutual assistance and intertwinement between resilience and resistance. As such, this demonstrates the importance and added value of thinking about resilience and resistance in relational terms instead of in substantialist terms. Rather than understanding resilience and resistance as fixed entities that exist prior to their relations, our case study underscores that the form each concept takes shapes and is shaped by the other concept. Not only are resilience and resistance not mutually exclusive, but each concept also acquires meaning and significance through its relations with the other concept.

5 Conclusion A relational approach to resilience allows us to account for the wide variety of forms that resilience can take—even within one context, such as Palestine, where there are multiple ways in which one can act with resilience. These different ways of acting with resilience in Palestine have changed over time depending on factors such as the strength of national-level leadership, the structure of Israeli control over the occupied territories or the viability of the peace process. Although we focused on the case of the Palestinian national liberation movement, we believe that our conclusions might apply to other instances of subjugation. Lived experiences of subjugation vary from person to person, as well as temporally, necessitating a variety of forms of resilience. Resilience itself is highly relational because one’s adjustment strategies are structured by the context, material conditions and existing relations of power—resilience is not static by nature because it relies on adaptation and flexibility. Since it is a response to shocks that are on some occasions unpredictable, it does not take one homogeneous form, but rather responds to the situation at hand. Its relationship to resistance is therefore also not static by nature or predetermined, but adaptive and heterogeneous. Resilience (as well as resistance) can be shaped by conditions of subjugation or hardship, by material need, or, as Scott (1990) points out, by the level of indignation.

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Furthermore, attempts to adjust to a shock by seeking to bounce back to an established way of life or to maintain a previous status quo can provide/sustain conditions for more overt resistance—the success of social and resistance movements over time depends on the adaptation strategies of the movements themselves, as well as of the populations who offer support for the resistance movements. According to Scott, in reference to the infrapolitics of resistance: One might argue perhaps that even such practical resistance, like the discourse it reflects and that sustains it, amounts to nothing more than trivial coping mechanisms that cannot materially affect the overall situation of domination. This is no more real resistance, the argument might go, than veiled symbolic opposition is real ideological dissent. At one level this is perfectly true, but irrelevant since our point is that these are the forms that political struggle takes when frontal assaults are precluded by the realities of power. (1990, p. 191 f.)

A relational understanding of resilience allows for a better understanding of how material conditions and relations of power may require populations or specific resistance movements to demonstrate resilience in order for resistance to continue. In order to withstand shocks, as well as pervasive repression, populations and resistance movements alike must be able to adapt strategies and tactics of resilience in order to maintain resistance over long periods of time. As demonstrated by Scott, there will be moments in the life of any resistance movement where overt resistance is impossible. During these times, resilience becomes essential to preserve resistance. A relational approach to the non- static nature of the interactions between resilience and resistance is productive insofar as it allows a broader view of resilience within the IR resilience literature.

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Joseph, J. (2013b). Resilience in UK and French security strategy: An Anglo-Saxon bias? Politics 33 (4), 253–264. Khalili, L. (2007). Heroes and martyrs of Palestine: The politics of national commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lentzos, F. & Rose, N. (2009). Governing insecurity: Contingency planning, protection, resilience. Economy and Society 38 (2), 230–254. Lepore, S. J. & Revenson, T. A. (2006). Resilience and posttraumatic growth: Recovery, resistance, and reconfiguration. In L. G. Calhoun & R. G. Tedeschi (eds.), Handbook of posttraumatic growth: Research & practice (pp. 24–46). Mahmaw, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Luthar, S. S. (ed.). (2003). Resilience and vulnerability: Adaptation in the context of childhood adversities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malkki, L. & Sinkkonen, T. (2015). Political resilience to terrorism in Europe: Introduction to the special issue. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 39 (4), 281–91. Masten, A. S. & Cicchetti, D. (2016). Resilience in development: Progress and transformation. In D. Cicchetti (ed.), Developmental pathopsychology. Volume 4. Risk, resilience and intervention (pp. 271–333). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Parsons, N. & Salter, M. (2008). Israeli biopolitics: Closure, territorialisation and governmentality in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Geopolitics 13 (4), 701–723. Pearlman, W. (2014). Violence, nonviolence and the Palestinian national movement. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Richter-Devroe, S. (2011). Palestinian women’s everyday resistance: Between normality and normalisation. Journal of International Women’s Studies 12 (3), 32–46. Ruggie, J. G. (1998). What makes the world hang together? Neo-utilitarianism and the social constructivist challenge (in constructivist approaches). International Organization 52 (4), 855–885. Rutter, M. (1987). Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 57, 316–331. Ryan, C. (2015). Everyday resilience as resistance: Palestinian women practicing sumud. International Political Sociology 9 (4), 299–315. Schmidt, J. (2015). Intuitively neoliberal? Towards a critical understanding of resilience governance. European Journal of International Relations 21 (2), 402–426. Schock, K. (2005). Unarmed insurrections: People power movements in nondemocracies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Schock, K. (2013). The practice and study of civil resistance. Journal of Peace Research 50 (3), 277–290. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasants resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sending, O. J., Pouliot, V. & Neumann, I. B. (2015). Diplomacy and the making of world politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, R. (2012). The discourse and practice of ‘heroic resistance’ in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: The case of Hamas. Politics, Religion & Ideology 13 (4), 529–545. Sleijpen, M., Ter Heide, F. J. J., Mooren, T. et al. (2013). Bouncing forward of young refugees: A perspective on resilience research directions. European Journal of Psychotraumatology 4, 201–224.

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United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Occupied Palestinian Territory (UNOCHAOPT). (2012). Humanitarian fact sheet on the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea. East Jerusalem. Van Teeffelen, T. (2011). Sumud: The Soul of the Palestinian People. Bethlehem: Arab Education Institute Open Windows. http://www.scribd.com/doc/101948051/SumudSoul-of-Palestinian-People. Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R. et al. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9 (2). http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/. Walker, J. & Cooper, M. (2011). Genealogies of resilience: From systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation. Security Dialogue 42 (2), 143–160. Walklate, S. (2011). Reframing criminal victimization: Finding a place for vulnerability and resilience. Theoretical Criminology 15 (2), 179–194. Walsh, F. (2002). Bouncing forward: Resilience in the aftermath of September 11. Family Process 41 (1), 34–36. Walsh, F. (2003). Family resilience: A framework for clinical practice. Family Process 42 (1), 1–18. Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. London: Verso.

Bourbeau, Philippe  (Prof. Dr.) is Associate Professor and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Immigration and Security in the Department of Political Science at the University Laval. Previously, he was a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College. He has expertise in the field of International Relations, Security Studies, Resilience and Comparative Immigration Policies. Relevant publications: Bourbeau, P. (2018). On resilience: Genealogy, logics and world politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Bourbeau, P. (ed.) (2017). Handbook on migration and security. Cheltenham/Northampton: Edward Elgar; Bourbeau, P. (ed.) (2015). Security: Dialogue across disciplines. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Ryan, Caitlin  (Dr. C.M.) is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations and International Organization at the University of Groningen. Her work focuses on Feminist and Postcolonial Security Studies, West Africa, the women peace and security agenda, and Palestine. She currently works on large-scale land deals in West Africa and how these deals impact women’s security. In this area she has carried out extensive field research. Her most recent project problematizes the division between Feminist Security Studies and Feminist Political Economy. Finally she researches the concept of resilience and in particular examines the relationship between resilience and resistance. She has published in the European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Third World Quarterly, Intervention and Statebuilding, amongst others, as well as having published a book with Routledge.

The Imaginary of Resilience: Trauma, Struggle, Life Julian Reid

1 Introduction As a culture we are saturated today by discourses around the need to develop the self. In fact discourses around selfhood can be seen to be driving wider social and political discourses around development on a more or less global scale. The discourse on ‘the resilient self’ is a case in point. Leading psychologists of resilience claim responsibility not just for developing the concept from out its psychological origins into the international political and social framework it has now become, but for the peace and reconciliation in former war torn countries where resilience is now said to exist. Within resilience, however, lurks another property and capacity of the self, that of imagination. Imagination is said by psychologists to play a crucial role in the recovery, for example, of human beings from traumatic experiences and their development of resilience. For abused children, especially, ­recovery and development is said to require the work of imagination, as hurt creates the images of a better future and the pleasure of such images becomes linked with painful realities, enabling them to withstand the present. It is even possible, some psychologists of resilience maintain, that the torment of the present heightens the need to imagine a future and thus increases the very powers and potentials of imagination itself. How, then, to theorize and understand the work which imagination performs socially and politically? An earlier version of this article was published in: Bohland, J., Davoudi, S. and Lawrence, J. L. (eds.), “The Resilience Machine” (2018), pp. 29–42, New York: Routledge.​ J. Reid ()  Univerity of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_10

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In this chapter I want to consider, critique and extend such psychological accounts of the function of imagination for the purpose of developing a better understanding of the politics of resilience. Images are, I argue, while untrue and in a certain sense inferior to the real, nevertheless things which human beings need in order to be able to act collectively upon the real, and to change the very nature of their political and social circumstances. But while resilience provides scope for the function of imagination in enabling human beings to survive, it is ­nevertheless, as a discourse, also based upon a highly circumscribed imaginary, the limits of which are defined by survivability as such. Imagination can either contribute to the survival strategies with which human beings attempt to care for themselves in the face of ordeals and traumas, or it can, more ambitiously, seek to create an image of the self-existing free from the possibility and necessity of a life of endless trauma and struggle. It is this latter task that I will argue deserves the greater exploration today.

2 The Image of the Resilient Self The image of the self as that which must struggle to survive, that which is in need of care, and always in danger, of dispossession and harm, is a fairly universal one today. One encounters it not just in the popular self-help manuals on resilience that clutter the shelves of bookstores but in fairly philosophical works on the self such as Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s recent book, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. As they argue in a manner that expresses the fundamental principle of the governing orthodoxy on the self; We cannot understand ourselves without in some ways giving up on the notion that the self is the ground and the cause of its own experience … dispossession establishes the self as social, as passionate, that is, as driven by passions it cannot fully consciously ground or know, as dependent on environments and others who sustain and even motivate the life of the self itself. (2013, p. 4)

Being dependent on others who may alternately sustain or deprive us means, ­Butler and Athanasiou argue, that others always “hold a certain power over our very survival” (2013, p. 4). The self is thus to be considered as vulnerable and only ever able to struggle to survive in its dependence on others. How it survives, how it manifests resilience, in the context of its vulnerability to and dependence on others that may either sustain or deprive it of life is a question of what Butler and Athanasiou call self-poietics; the arts deployed to make and produce the self by subjects in struggle with others who hold power over them (2013, pp. 64–74). At work in this theory of the self, then, is a highly particular image of the self. An

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image of the self as vulnerable, as a subject of constant and necessary struggle, one of which resilience is demanded, in the context of the claim that it must consistently remake itself to survive. One of the major criticisms to be made of resilience is that, while it provides scope for the function of imagination in conceiving how human beings survive, it also bases itself upon a highly circumscribed imaginary the limits of which are defined by survivability as such. The image of the human governing this imaginary is that of the survivor itself. Such that life cannot be imagined as anything other than a game of mere survival. The discourse of resilience, whether in its popular self-help form, or the philosophical form in which we encounter it, in the work of Judith Butler, credits human beings with imagination, but always and only in the interests of survival. Images are conceived as forms of technology, instruments for getting humans out of situations of struggle and servitude, but only so that they might live to fight another day. The function of imagination in this discourse is one that serves to embellish the image of the human as survivor. There is no better example of this than the work of the French psychologist Boris Cyrulnik, whose book Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set Your Free from the Past (2009) is sold on the claim that “his work has been credited with helping France heal the wounds left by the Second World War.” For ­Cyrulnik, imagination plays a crucial role in the recovery of human beings from traumatic experiences, and for the “knitting together” of a feeling of selfhood, which he argues is the major factor in determining aptitudes for resilience (2009, p. 19). Cyrulnik describes a demoralized child, who having suffered abuse, experiences confusion and hurt mingled with hope. “As soon as he is hurt, the child begins to dream of a better future … and because the pleasure of the dream becomes linked with the painful reality, he is able to withstand it” (Cyrulnik 2009, p. 4). It is even possible, Cyrulnik maintains, “that the torment heightens the need to imagine a future” (2009, p. 4). Resilience, he argues, is a word which can help us understand the mystery of survival; the way that is by which human beings, amid great suffering, are able to create an image of a future, where free from the pains and oppressions of the present, life will be lived differently, and of course, the function of that image in leading the way, providing a light, by which the human beings in question find their way to a future which enables them to survive the present (2009, p. 4). There is a further way in which the capacity for resilience is said by Cyrulnik to enlarge the imagination. For the subject who is capable of imagining the possibility of disasters on the horizon is also the subject more capable of imagining events that exceed the norm. As Cyrulnik argues, we live in a culture where we are taught to believe that the best of all possible worlds is one in which everything turns out best. Against what he argues to be a dominant cultural norm, Cyrulnik

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opposes, precisely, the figure of the survivor. He or she who knows, from experience, that things don’t always turn out well, and that preparedness for extreme suffering is necessary. “‘Don’t fall for it’, the survivor warns, ‘the next disaster is on its way.’” This unfounded optimism as to the image of the future, which supposedly defines our culture expresses the limits of the imaginations of those who have shaped it. It is to them that Cyrulnik’s survivor speaks; “‘you cannot imagine anything that is out of the ordinary. You see anything that deviates from the norm as an act of aggression’” (2009, p. 25 f.). Is it the case, as Cyrulnik maintains, that our culture is geared to ­preventing us from imagining that which is out of the ordinary, so beyond the norm, including potential disasters? The 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004, and prepared at the request of the then United States President, George W. Bush in response to the surprise attacks made upon the United States in 2001 by Al-Qaeda, berated the problem that “imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 2004, p. 344). The military history of the United States, it noted, is defined by recurrent failures of imagination, most notably the failure to have imagined the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour; an event that in spite of its calculable potential was also not reckoned upon (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 2004, p. 344). “It is therefore crucial,” the report concluded in wake of the apparent exposure of the lack in imagination of the United States military, given its failure to have anticipated the 9/11 attack, “to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination” (2004, p. 344). In confronting the threat of Terror, here in the twenty-first century, the United States security and strategic community considers itself faced with an enemy possessive of greater capacities of and for imagination than itself. Nobody epitomised the intensity of that threat, the 9/11 Commission Report reported, more than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself, the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks. Alongside his technical aptitudes and managerial skills, Khalid Sheikh “applied his imagination” to constructing an “extraordinary array of terrorist schemes” the report concluded (2004, p. 145). The image the report constructs is not that of a culture that condemns the subject who imagines too excessively, but one which, like Cyrulnik’s survivor, condemns it for not imagining enough. Likewise it constructs the image of a culture that fears another, more adept at applying imagination than itself, and on which account, it demands more imagination, greater imagination, in order to overhaul the threat posed by enemies possessive of such

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rampant imagination.1 This is precisely what the routinization and bureaucratization of imagination it calls for is about. The interest of power and government in accessing the imaginations of its subjects is, of course, not new. Back in the 17th century, the great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes lamented the ways in which crafty governments “abuse the simple people” by manipulating their faculties of imagination (1993, p. 93). For Hobbes, political problems stem from human beings possessing too much imagination, and being too willing to invest credibility in this or that absurd image, leading to belief in false prophesies and generating superstitious fears. Modern theories of state power have proceeded in his wake on the assumption that the imaginations of modern subjects are vulnerable to such manipulation. The dangers and threats which states construct do their work upon the imaginations of societies, building the fears on which the power of states rests and grows. Critical agency, it has long been presumed, depends on challenging these strategies of construction, releasing imagination from its manipulation by power, and exposing the imaginary nature of the threats and dangers which state power creates, by rationalizing the world better.2 What can and should critical theorists say, then, about this present juncture in which the image of danger by which the state constructs its threats is that of an enemy itself possessive of extraordinary imagination? What also can and ought critical theorists say about this present in which state powers lament the lack of imagination of their own citizens, bureaucracies, and cultures? For political theorist Mark Neocleous this concern of the United States security and strategic communities to secure imagination is a frightening development. For it indicates the will of the state to “police” and even “colonise” our political imaginations through the development of new state strategies of resilience.3 It is, he argues, a strategy that embodies the age-old Hobbesian premise of state power,

1Consider

also, in the current security climate, here in 2016, also the hysteria surrounding the threats posed by images created by Islamic State (ISIS) and disseminated on social media. A wide range of western security analysts have demanded more attention and greater responses to the functions of these images in the war against terror (see especially Harmanşah 2015; Giroux 2014). 2Much of the energy of critical theory in the discipline of International Relations has been devoted to shoring up this central premise of Hobbesian thinking concerning relations between imagination, fear, security and state power. For a now classic account, see Campbell (1992). 3“Resilience thereby comes to be a fundamental mechanism for policing the political imagination, nothing less than the attempted colonisation of the political imagination by the state” Neocleous (2013).

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f­ulfilling the need of the state to manipulate the imaginations and fears of its ­subjects (Neocleous 2016, p. 2). Indeed for Neocleous, as for many other critical theorists of the War on Terror, we are living through an era in which states possess remarkable powers of manipulation and construction when it comes to the question of danger and threat, and the societies of such states are powerless and docile in the face of state strategies. I do not follow Neocleous in his assumption that this expresses a crude will of ‘the state’ to capture our political imaginations. How then should we understand the wider discourses on resilience and the ways in which imagination is said to be a resource for resilience by psychologists and other forms of theorists and practitioners? Have they simply been brainwashed by ‘the state’? Are they its ideological proxies? Instead of resorting to such crude formulations we have to address the way in which the development of the concept of resilience, across and throughout not just the social sciences, but also the humanities and life sciences, as well as all manner of other forms of thinking about resilience entails this revalorization of imagination. The incorporation of a concern for promoting imagination in American security doctrine is just a part of this revalorization. Critical thinkers, not belonging to the US State department or working within the Pentagon, but of the political Left, concerned with the limits of the imaginaries through which the species is attempting to survive and proffer resilience in the face of potentially catastrophic climate change, for example, also insist on the fundamentality of imagination for our abilities to manifest resilience and adapt to the new realities. As Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys (2011) argue resilience “may not be best realized—or imagined—through depoliticized capsules for survival, but rather through more thorough-going encounters with the social and political connections that make survival and adaptation possible—and ethical. Such encounters inevitably raise questions about the scale at which we imagine adaptation to be viable.” The destructive nature of man-made climate change raises the question, they go on to argue, of “how we imagine and understand the collective human condition, the longevity and sustainability of Homo sapiens” (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). “The work of the imagination” challenges us to extend our conceptions of what the human is and “perhaps the greatest work of the imagination” is its power to “imagine how we might be otherwise” in context of destructions the species has wrought upon the planet it depends on to survive and, as a consequence, on other life forms (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). “Our ability to imagine other possibilities, to embrace decidedly different futures with creativity and resolve, to learn to let go of the sense of permanence we may have felt about certain landscapes that have seemed to be always so, and to embrace change, is paramount,”

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they ­conclude, “to building resilience and adaptive capacity” (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). “Requisite imagination,” as other prominent proponents of resilience have argued, the ability “to expect the unexpected, and to look for more than just the obvious … is a sine qua non of resilience” (Hollnagel et al. 2006, p. 349). This is just one example of how diffuse thinking about relations between resilience and imagination is today. There is a widely held belief, expressed from different positions spanning the political spectrum, articulated by use of a wildly different range of discourses, drawing on different forms of scientific knowledge, addressing different social and political problems, as to the need to galvanize imagination, in order to build resilience. Beneath the regime of resilience which I (and others) have analyzed the origins and directions of, there is a growing regime of imagination.4 The function of this regime of imagination is one of limiting the political imaginations of whoever is subject to it. In this sense it enjoys deep continuities with the strategy of state power which Hobbes identified, back in the 17th century, and which continues to be of importance for our understanding of how power works through the manipulation and mobilization of the human imagination. However this is not a strategy grounded simply in a capacity to conjure up fake or misleading images of threat. Nor does it emanate simplistically from ‘the state.’ It does not just exploit the overzealous attributes of imagination that can lead human beings to imagine danger where it is not. Instead it functions by circumscribing our imaginations, limiting its motions within the boundaries of the regime of resilience. The problem for critique, therefore, is not one of pointing out how and where imaginary threats masquerade as real. It is one of mapping the imaginary in and through which imagination is captured. How, consequently, might we liberate imagination from its subjugation within this dominating imaginary such that it can create images which do political work of another kind? Where, even, can we find and draw succor from other imaginaries of life? This is the problem and question motivating the inquiry of this chapter.

3 The Limits of Imagination The theorization of imagination, and its functions in human experience, has been absolutely central to western philosophy, from its inceptions, in the classical eras of Ancient Greece and Rome. In one dominant tradition, extending from Plato,

4For

the analysis of resilience, see especially Evans and Reid (2013); Chandler (2013).

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images, the products of imagination, have tended to be condemned as inferior to the real, and sources of deception; barriers to the discovery of truth. But in other more minor traditions they have been understood as things human beings need in order to be able to act collectively upon the real, and to change the very nature of their individual, political and social circumstances. But grappling with the politics of imagination, particularly the roles it plays today in these new discourses of resilience, requires us to delineate the differences and relationships between imagination, images and the imaginaries in which they function. For while resilience provides scope for the function of imagination in enabling human beings to survive, it is nevertheless, as a discourse, also based upon a highly circumscribed imaginary, the limits of which are defined by survivability as such. Imagination is limited if the images it produces only serve to contribute to the strengths of a dominant or governing imaginary. There is nothing radical or progressive or alternative in insisting on the power of imagination as such. Imagination is something everybody has. Nobody, we can suppose, lives without producing images. The critical question is what are its limits? What are the boundaries which determine the imaginary in which a given imagination functions? Selfhood, as contemporary regimes of resilience demonstrate aptly, requires the making of images of the self to work. Likewise challenging any given regime of the self requires an act of imagination that transcends the imaginary in which that self is captured. In this sense imagination can either contribute to the survival strategies with which human beings attempt to care for themselves in the face of ordeals and traumas, or it can, more ambitiously seek to create an image of the self existing free from the possibility and necessity of a life of endless trauma and struggle. It is this task of imagining in ways that will challenge the imaginary in which the resilient self is presently captured which I believe to be the critical task. Not only is the function of imagination in servicing the survival strategies of subjects, be they states, societies or individuals, circumscribed by an imaginary of survival as such. It is questionable whether such functions of imagination, in servicing survival, qualify imagination as fully human. Even animals utilize their imaginations to survive. The Canadian philosopher, Adam Morton, for example, argues that it is a capacity of mice; “a fearful mouse imagines the dangers facing her, and people can imagine in ways that need little refined human capacity” (2013, p. 3 f.). His argument runs that the exercise of imagination does not even require images, for “images and words are just one way in which we can grasp possibilities that might be important.” When we imagine, he argues, we simply “represent something to ourselves; a fact, a thing, or a possibility” (2013, p. 8). Imagination, thus conceived, is only “a process of searching for representations suitable for a specific purpose” (Morton 2013, p. 9). It is always ends-oriented as “all imagining has a purpose” (Morton 2013, p. 10).

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I don’t buy Morton’s argument in its entirety. Such a way of conceiving imagination leaves no room for discrimination between imagination and the making of representations as such. Indeed it begs multiple questions concerning the differences between imagination and representation, questions that go unaddressed in Morton’s work. Such a way of conceptualizing imagination effectively debases all that is specifically human to it. Imagination is nothing if it does not produce an image, and an image is never simply a representation. If it were simply the case that imagination was the faculty for the making of representations, and representations that are always end-specific, then we would have no need for the concept of imagination, or indeed of the image. We could speak simply of representation. A mouse no doubt does make “representations of possible situations” to itself when it “anticipates carnivores leaping from unexpected places” (Morton 2013, p. 13) and responds with a dash for shelter, but such representations are unlikely to ever exceed its mousiness. Were it to represent itself to itself, as a carnivore, of equivalent ferocity and guile, to that which it perceives lurking, possibly, around the corner, then it would be engaged in an exercise of imagination, and not simply representation. There is, in other words, an excess to the image which differentiates it from a mere representation. I am happy to concede the concept of representation to the games we humans also play out, throughout life, which help us in “setting in place a structure of responses to possible threats” (­Morton 2013, p. 13). Such embodied and mental practices are integral to the adaptive life of every living being, human and otherwise. But imagination, I believe, is quite different. An image, fully conceived, is more likely to interfere with and corrupt whatever means-ends calculations we are engaged with, as much as our imaginations are in conflict with our faculties for reasoned belief, perception and action. The imagination, “the ruling and divine power,” is as Francoise Delsarte (2011) declared, “never governed.” It is what makes human beings so interesting. Imagination is never a means by which we simply adapt and respond to our environments, in some strategic way, of accommodating ourselves to whatever we perceive to be threatening. Our images have a life that is their own. The question, then, is, what is in an image? What makes the difference between images that function to enable response and adaptation to take place and images that challenge and transform? In 2010 the American director, Jim ­Jarmusch, released a film, The Limits of Control to wide critical acclaim.5 The film depicts the journey through Spain of a Mysterious Loner set upon penetrating the

5For

a full account of the film, see the excellent Julian Rice (2012).

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heavily fortified headquarters of American Empire, the history of which the film narrates in its genealogical intertwinements with that of the Spanish and other European imperial formations. Journeying deep into the Spanish countryside, the Mysterious Loner breaks into the office of its president-like figure, the so-called Big Boss. Unlike most comparable thrillers the film contains no visual sequence in which the feat of the breaking into the imperial headquarters and office of its Big Boss is depicted. The viewer simply is not shown and does not know how that seemingly miraculous feat was achieved. Instead the film cuts to the scene of confrontation between the Big Boss (played by Bill Murray) and the Mysterious Loner (played by Isaach De Bankolé). The Boss is sitting behind his desk when he looks up and catches glance of the Loner. Boss “How the fuck did you get in here?” Loner  “I used my imagination” The scene culminates in the Mysterious Loner’s murder of the Big Boss, as he strangles him with the cord of his own telephone. The film has been interpreted largely as an anti-colonial and anti-American fantasy, combining as it does, the motifs of contemporary American imperialism with those of historical Spanish colonialism (Rice 2012). The overwrought power, racism and arrogance of the figure of the American are contrasted with the humility, cosmopolitanism and asceticism of the tai chi practicing Mysterious Loner. And the act of imagination by which Mysterious Loner penetrates the seemingly impenetrable fortress of the headquarters of the Empire and topples its sovereign contrasts with the dependence of the Big Boss on his crude access to information. One might say that Jarmusch’s film celebrates the irreducibility of imagination, its essentially ungovernable nature, and hostility as well as superiority to political power. Indeed this is how Jarmusch’s work, and not just The Limits of Control, has been interpreted—as homage, politically and culturally, to the power of the human imagination to transcend boundaries (Rice 2012). But does Limits of Control not presuppose an image of power itself, as lacking in imagination, and dependent on crude mechanisms of control, in ways that no longer describe the imaginal properties of regimes of power in a post-9/11 world? And can we be sure that Jarmusch’s character, Mysterious Loner, performs his imagination in ways that go beyond its theorization as a function in the search for representations suitable for specific purposes in the manner that Adam Morton reduces imagination to? Limits of Control is ultimately, perhaps, a revenge movie. As Morton himself notes, a lot of emotiondriven thinking, including the kind of thinking motivated by the desire for revenge, is imaginatively creative, and in line with what is believed to be the biological

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function of emotions—“to make us search for actions which will address problems of particular kinds” (2013, p. 22 f.). This involves the creation of images that enable us to act in and on the real. Contemporary neuroscience has claimed significant advances, through the development and application of new technologies for brain imaging, in the understanding of how imagination helps us to act in and on the real. Its major lesson is that images do indeed have a function for human beings in enabling them to act more proficiently in the real. We know, for example, that when someone imagines she is dancing the image she creates activates the same area of the brain as is activated when she actually dances in reality. The measurement of brain activity, enabled by the latest scanning devices, tells us so. Brain images of the effects of physical and imaginary movements on the brain reveal the precise areas of the brain where these two different forms of movement coincide (Frith 2007, p. 12f.). The image created by a purely imaginal movement is of use to the human only in so far as it enables him or her to approximate towards something that is real in the world. Tests show that human beings asked to train for real events entailing real movements by first imagining them over a period of time are better able to carry them out on account of the imaginary preparation. We learn how to do things by simply imagining the movement entailed (Frith 2007, p. 106). Thus do we learn the value of the imagined movement by transforming it into a real movement. Perhaps what neuroscience tells us, then, is that the act by which Mysterious Loner penetrated the headquarters of the American Empire and toppled Big Boss was not so miraculous at all. And perhaps, as it also indicates, the use of imagination as method for the performance of such a task, as claimed by Mysterious Loner, is not so farfetched either. Mysterious Loner, we might suppose learned how to perform that act by carrying out the necessary imaginary preparation. And he learned the value of the imaginary movement of the penetration of the Empire by transforming it into a real movement, rather than leaving it in the realm of fantasy. The neuroscience converges, in this sense, with the aesthetic representation of the power and indeed functional utility of imagination, in ways that make the homage to imagination at work in Jarmusch’s film less romantic and transcendent than it might otherwise seem. Indeed there are many ways in which one might compare Jarmusch’s aesthetic representation of Mysterious Loner, a character equipped with imagination and dedicated to destroying American Empire, with the United States representation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a man also said to have been abundant in imaginative schemes and dedicated to destroying American Empire. The aesthetic and neuroscientific arguments for and representations of the functional utility of imagination are also verified by a third source: capitalism.

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It is a fact that the power of imagination and human capacity to make mental images has become integrated within the machinery of capitalism and neoliberal economies in recent years. Shoshana Zuboff’s classic, In the Age of the Smart Machine, written and published in the 1980s, described how the introduction of computing and electronic data changed not just the kind of work which industrial laborers were required to do, but the “quality of mind” demanded by such work (1988, p. 85). Suddenly the ability to have “inner vision, constructed out of a combination of memory and imagination” became a key capacity demanded of the industrial laborer. The complexity and especially the abstract nature of electronic data meant that operators had to become adept at “mental imaging” in order to be able to respond efficiently to data (Zuboff 1988, p. 86). The image, we can conclude, then, from these three sources of verification (the neuroscientific, the aesthetic, the economic), is utile. Images and imagination help us to function more proficiently in the real world. In this sense they are subordinate to the real. Their value, however creative they may be, is logistical, in that they enable us to act more proficiently. Whether we are a dancer learning to dance, a mysterious loner looking to penetrate the headquarters of American Empire, or an industrial worker in a factory, they enable us to get things done. In each instance the self extracts from the image forms and forces that serve to render it utile for a specific problem-solving purpose. It is not the image but the real, in each of these contexts, that is conceptualized and represented as the truly creative force, continually outstripping our abilities to control it, know it, and see it, even. Images are simply the tools with which we manage our survival in subordination to the creative forces of reality. Brain imaging studies indicate that there is a “face area” of the brain where neural activity occurs regardless of whether the face in question is real and encountered or imagined (Frith 2007, p. 137). The face area in the brain becomes active whenever we see a face or imagine a face. In both instances, the brain creates a face. What, then, is the difference? For neuroscientists such as Chris Frith the difference is that in encounters with real faces, the face imaged by the brain never perfectly conforms with that which is seen and received by our senses, and thus we must continually revise its image on account of the ways in which the face seen escapes its imaginary model. The imagined face on the other hand does not err. It appears to us, but requires no revision. It is perfect in itself. For Frith this indicates the “utterly uncreative” nature of imagination. For it has “no errors to resolve” (2007, p. 137). As philosopher Jan Slaby has described, neuroscience has sold itself on the claim to be able to unveil the fundamental functioning principles of the brain and the central nervous system. The brain is the zone of intersection where ­matter

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s­upposedly meets mind, and in its unveiling of these principles, neuroscience supposedly unveils the fundaments of subjectivity, consciousness, agency— the very core of the human (Slaby 2015). Slaby identifies neuroscience and the social ­sciences which are influenced by it with what he calls “a bio-perfection ­imperative,” which consists of a reframing of both life and the mind as a resource, potential and source of risk in the “drive towards technological perfection of the human condition” (2015, p. 17). As such it is as discursive every bit as much as humanist scholarship is technically sophisticated and materially grounded (Slaby 2015, p. 17). Neither the natural sciences nor the social sciences or the humanities can claim any greater or deeper grip on the real (Slaby 2015, p. 17). The lesson Slaby extracts from this is the need, firstly, for a thorough repoliticization of neuroscientific truths—one which will highlight the struggles for discursive, institutional and economic dominance within neuroscience itself, and secondly, for political interventions within these fields. It is on this basis, building on Slaby’s critique and call that I argue we need to challenge and reverse neuroscientific formulations of the relation of the imagined to the real; this notion of the functionality of imagination, of the reduction of the image to resource in a life of endless survival, and ultimately of the subordination of the image to the real. And I believe there are good humanistic grounds on which to do so. Images are of many kinds. In effect there is no such thing as ‘the image’ or ‘the imagination’ in the ways that neuroscience and its ideologues, so powerful today in the social sciences and in the framing of governmental policies, suppose. Instead we need a typology of the many different kinds of images that exist, and the many different types of movement of which imagination is capable. To begin with it is necessary at a minimum to state the fact that images produced by the brain in response to real faces are always copy-images, reflecting an encounter and response to the real, while imagined faces are pure creations, less diluted by a relation to some other thing they have learned from in order to correct their errors. Likewise the image produced by an imaginal movement within the brain has characteristics of its own which will be lost in the translation to real movement which occurs when real movement is the task at hand. In both instances the real functions to extract from the image forms and forces that serve to limit its range of expressions. Why should this be so? Instead we must consider the ability to reverse this conceptualization of the image to the real, and of the profoundly human power to subordinate the real to the image, such that it is made to conform to what we imagine. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze created a typology of images within his work that involved discerning the specificities of many different kinds of image, including what he described as the sensory-motor image and the optical-sound

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image (1989, pp. 44–47). A sensory-motor image is one which gives rise to movement. In service of the operation of a motorized movement it extracts from reality only that which is useful for that purpose. An optical-sound image, in contrast, affects us in ways that do no lead to motorized movement. In making an opticalsound image we extract from the real features more likely to disable our motorized capacities for action, slowing us down, sending us in directions we had not perceived possible, making us less efficient, but more attuned to layers of the real which a sensory-motor image would screen out. Deleuze detailed the relative richness versus poverty, depth versus superficiality, of sensory-motor and optical-sound images, in ways that inverted the neuroscientific formulation of the value of images. From a strictly superficial point of view, the sensory-motor image would seem richer, in so far as it gives us access to the thing itself of which the image derives; access at least to “the thing as it extends into the movements by which we make use of it” (Deleuze 1989, p. 44). In contrast the optical-sound image would seem poorer and lacking depth in so far as it involves only a selection of features of the thing itself, a ‘description,’ which does not help us to make use of it. But the richness of the sensory-motor image is itself superficial in so far as it gives us access only to what that thing has in common with every other thing of which we make like use. It is not this particular grass that interests the herbivore, but grass in general, when it creates for itself a sensory-motor image of grass, in the event of grazing. In contrast it is the optical-sound image which is really rich when, in the thinness of its description, it gives us no means of making use of the thing from which it derives, instead bringing the thing ‘to an essential singularity,’ one that casts us into a state wherein we no longer know how to react or what to do. It is not just a matter, therefore, Deleuze maintained, of images that are different in kind, but the richness of the optical-sound image in contrast with the poverty of the sensory-motor image. How can an image which is of no use, which does not engender movement, be called rich? Well, because it is not entirely true that it is of no use. Instead it is a question of type of use. It is true that the optical-sound image does not extend into movement, but that is not to say that it does not go anywhere. Instead it enters into relation with a ‘recollection-image.’ Indeed it ‘calls up’ the recollectionimage from the depths of memory. Not only does it have depth, it extends into the depths. It makes itself deep, such that the difference between what is recalled and what is seen and heard in the optical-sound image becomes itself indiscernible (Deleuze 1989, p. 46). Here, in the world of the optical-sound image, “there are no longer sensory-motor images with their extensions, but much more complex circular links between pure optical and sound images on the one hand, and on the

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other hand images from time and thought, on planes which all coexist by right” (Deleuze 1989, p. 47). It is in this sense that the optical-sound image is ‘useful’ for us. It deepens us, taking us down, from the surfaces of movement on which we are otherwise positioned, in our sensory-motored lives. In doing so it makes us a subject in the true sense of the term. For subjectivity itself emerges, not in movement as such, but in the gap between a received and an executed movement (Deleuze 1989, p. 47). It is not, as Deleuze argues, “motor or material, but ­temporal and spiritual” (1989, p. 47). Everything which neuroscience assumes about the image, everything which the psychologists of resilience assume about the function of imagination, as well as everything which the social scientists fraught with worry about climate change assume about the image, in enabling the movements through time by which human beings are able to survive the ordeals of the present in order to achieve new and qualitatively more secure conditions of being can be seen to fall within the descriptions of the sensory-motor image. These are images that perform the function and maintain the value of the utility that the bio-perfection imperative of our time demands. In contrast, and against this imperative, what our time demands is another quite different image of imagination, one that Deleuze comes close to in his descriptions of the richness and functions of the optical-sound image. For these are images that dislocate us from those spaces wherein the bioperfection imperative may be heard. These are images that may not enable us to survive better but which in their dislocating of us provide us with another image of our self; a self existing free from the necessity of a life of endless struggle and survival, given over to a temporal and spiritual movement which enriches our existence as free human beings; subjects in the true sense of the term.

References Butler, J. & Athanasiou, A. (2013). Dispossession: The performative in the political. Oxford: Polity. Campbell, D. (1992). Writing security. Minneapolis: University of Minneosta Press. Chandler, D. (2013). Resilience: The governance of complexity. London and New York: Routledge. Cyrulnik, B. (2009). Resilience: How your inner strength can set you free from the past. London: Penguin. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image. London: Athlone Press. Delsarte, F. (2011). Delsarte system of expression. Milton Keynes: Lightning Source. Evans, B. & Reid, J. (2013). Resilient life: The art of living dangerously. Oxford: Polity. Frith, C. (2007). Making up the mind: How the brain creates our mental world. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Giroux, H. A. (2014). ISIS and the spectacle of terrorism: Resisting mainstream workstations of fear. https://philosophersforchange.org/2014/10/07/isis-and-the-spectacle-ofterrorism-resisting-mainstream-workstations-of-fear/. Harmanşah, Ö. (2015). ISIS, heritage, and the spectacles of destruction in the global media, Near Eastern Archaeology 78 (3), 170–177. Hobbes, T. (1993). Leviathan. London: Penguin. Hollnagel, E., Woods, D. D., Leveson, N. (eds.). (2006). Resilience engineering: Concepts and precepts. Aldershot: Ashgate. Morton, A. (2013). Emotion and imagination. Oxford: Polity. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United State. (2004). The 9/11 commission report: The full final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Neocleous, M. (2013). Resisting Resilience. Radical Philosophy 178 (March/April), 1–7 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279570324_Resisting_resilience (accessed on 19 March 2014). Neocleous, M. (2016). The universal adversary. London: Routledge. Rice, J. (2012). The Jarmusch way: Spirituality and imagination in Dead Man, Ghost Dog and Limits of Control. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Slaby, J. (2015). Critical neuroscience meets medical humanities. Journal of Medical Humanities 41, 16–22. Yusoff, K. & Gabrys, J. (2011). Climate change and the imagination. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews 2, 516–534. Zuboff, S. Z. (1988). In the age of the smart machine. New York: Basic Books.

Reid, Julian  (Prof. Dr.) is Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland. Relevant publications: Chandler, D. & Reid, J. (2016). The neoliberal subject: Resilience, adaptation and vulnerability. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; Reid, J. & Evans, B. (2014). Resilient life: The art of living dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Part III Case Studies

Building Community Resilience in the Anthropocene: A Study of International Policy Experiments with Digital Technology in Jakarta David Chandler

1 Introduction This chapter explores hacking as a mode of resilience, which calls into being a new approach to international policy practice, where awareness of embedded relationships enables the empowerment of communities, not merely to respond to disasters but to creatively engage with emerging problems or threats. This approach is often methodologically contraposed to a failed or failing modernist discourse of security, which assumed that security threats could be ‘solved,’ ‘prevented’ or ‘removed’ through technological or engineering approaches. Hacking as a methodology thus becomes less dependent on its etymological roots in computing technology and becomes a transformative process of building engaged communities through experimentation and grasping momentary and fluid connections and inter-relations. Resilience policy interventions, on this basis, thus no longer seek to ‘solve’ problems but neither do they ignore or disengage from them (see Duffield 2013). Instead the problems themselves are reinterpreted as enabling and creative opportunities. It is important to emphasise that ‘digital policy hacktivism’ and, likewise, the conception of hacking as a mode of resilience are developed and outlined as a result of the research undertaken by the author. The international policy activists interviewed in different projects in Jakarta do not necessarily see their work in these terms and have differing understandings of how new policy approaches can D. Chandler ()  University of Westminster, London, England E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_11

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be developed and the political and philosophical stakes involved in their deployment. It is the process of policy experimentation itself that this chapter wishes to focus upon. Of particular interest, in the field work undertaken in Jakarta, was the attempt to see how new digital technologies have been deployed in ways which enact or performatively stage this broader shift in understandings of resilience, towards the presentation of threats or problems as enabling or revealing new forms of agency and community capacity, previously unrecognized. The interview material that forms the bulk of the following sections is taken from fieldwork undertaken in Jakarta in February 2016. This fieldwork was hosted by a flood awareness NGO, PetaJakarta, and included extended interviews with representatives from PetaJakarta, the Jakarta Open Street Map Project and the United Nations Global Pulse, Jakarta Pulse Lab.1 The interview material is deployed as a backdrop to how new digital technologies are appropriated to enable new forms of resilience thinking to emerge through the Anthropocene problematic. Jakarta seemed to be one of the best places to undertake this research as these concerns motivate the work of many international agencies in the city and it is not unusual to come across references to Jakarta as ‘the city of the Anthropocene’ in both policy and academic research (see, for example, Turpin et al. 2013). Indonesia has been a leading actor in mainstreaming disaster risk reduction approaches since the 2004 Aceh tsunami (see, for example, BNPB 2014; GFDRR 2015). However, it is its capital city, Jakarta, which has been at the centre of climate change and disaster risk concerns: on one hand, it is symbolic of an ever-expanding megacity, on the other hand, it is rapidly approaching ecological catastrophe (Rukmana 2014; Holderness and Turpin 2016b). The problem of securing the city against rising water levels (the threat from rainfall, river turbulence and rising sea-levels) throws into relief the limits of structural engineering projects and has increasingly called forth new approaches that no longer assume modernist, or linear, accounts of progress (Sukardjo 2013; Geros 2015). This is the context in which digital policy activists have sought to re-envision ways of living with security threats and of using new technologies to engage with and transform citizen awareness. The rest of the chapter draws out this argument step-by-step, bearing in mind that a number of concepts brought into the analysis have received relatively l­ittle

1Further information about the work of PetaJakarta can be found here: https://petajakarta. org/banjir/en/; the Jakarta Open Street Map Project here: http://www.gfdrr.org/sites/gfdrr/ files/publication/Pillar_1_Using_Participatory_Mapping_for_Disaster_Preparedness_in_ Jakarta_OSM.pdf; and the United Nations Global Pulse, Jakarta Pulse Lab, here: http:// www.unglobalpulse.org/jakarta.

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attention in studies of resilience approaches. The following section provides an introduction to the concept of the Anthropocene and the problematisation of modernist approaches to resilience based on causal linear understandings and the rise of correlational or relational approaches seeking to re-envision problems and solutions. The following sections then focus on the empirical research findings regarding digital policy activism in Jakarta. The chapter concludes by suggesting potential limits to the displacement of modernist discourses of resilience by a process of securing through hacking as a mode of policy engagement.

2 Resilience and the Anthropocene The Anthropocene is a concept coined by Paul Crutzen in 2000 (Crutzen and ­Stoermer 2000), and is a disputed term which refers both to a new geological era, in which human activity is seen to have profound and irreparable effects on the environment (Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene,’ 2016) and to a recognition that the nature/culture divide, central to modernist constructions of Enlightenment progress no longer exists or was always problematic (Latour 2014; Clark 2011; Haraway 2015; Proctor 2013; Swyngedouw 2011; Macfarlane 2016; ­Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). In this respect, the Anthropocene appears to confirm that we are living in an age of ‘manufactured uncertainty’ or ‘manufactured risk;’ in which security threats can no longer be seen as external but rather are immanent to societal processes (Giddens 1994, p. 4; Beck 2009) undermining the modernist separation between security referent and security threat (Baldwin 1997; Chandler 2010). It is held that modernity comes up against its own limits with the end of the culture/nature divide: the end of a ‘nature’ of laws and regularities somehow external to human interaction. In this more complex, contingent and inter-related world, the ‘reductionist’ causal connections, generalisations, and ‘lessons learned,’ which shaped the security projects of modernity, are no longer seen to be tenable (for example, ­Mitchell 2009, p. ix–xiii; Prigogine and Stengers 1985; Cilliers 1998). Without the ‘outside’ of ‘nature,’ counter positioned to the ‘inside’ of ‘culture,’ new forms of security governance necessarily need to be ‘reflexive’ and ‘adaptive’ (Voss and Bornemann 2011; Berkes et al. 2003). Thus, the lexicon of international security is beginning to carry with it an asserted recognition of the Anthropocene as a fundamental challenge to previous epistemological and ontological assumptions about how we know and how we govern/secure in a world that is no longer perceived as open to linear temporalities of cause-and-effect (see Fagan 2016). In response to this closure, new possibilities are held to be inherent in existing communal forms of living and socio-technological forms of interconnectivity and

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networked community, building on new ways of making connections and seeing relationships (for example, Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010). It is this need for a fluid awareness of relations in their specific and momentary context that has enabled hacking as an approach to become an important form of engagement to build resilience. For Anthropocene epistemologies and ontologies, the actual existing reality contains much more possibility and potential than has been traditionally recognised by policy makers and academics (see, for example, Sharp 2011; Grosz 2011, pp. 77, 183). Thus the task is that of engaging more imaginatively with the constantly emerging present, alert to the fact that these relationships need to become a matter of care, attention and opportunity.2 The question of how to engage with the present with more creative and imaginative insight is key to discourses of resilience in the Anthropocene. In other words, the methodological concern is for real time contextual meaningfulness rather than for the extraction of causal laws or theories of causation, which can be taken and applied elsewhere. This ‘new empiricism’ (Clough 2009; see also Latour et al. 2012; Venturini and Latour 2010) seeks a less abstract, representational or conceptually mediated access to the world3 and is more concerned with relations in their immediate context, rather than attempting to extract knowledge of the inner essences of discrete entities by abstracting from their context. The focus on empirical immediacy, essential for effective policy responses, is often highlighted in the contradistinction between analogue views of sensing, affect, relations and correlations,4 as opposed to modernist homogenising or ‘digital’ forms of representation and ideas of causation which reduce reality to homogenous units based on binary distinctions (see Galloway 2014).5 A world 2In this regard, the implications of the Anthropocene accord closely with perspectives forwarded by a wide range of critical theorists associated with posthuman, new materialist and speculative realist approaches among others (for example, Braidotti 2013; DeLanda 2006; Coole and Frost 2010; Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Connolly 2013; Harman 2010). 3This non-representational reality is engaged with by a number of theorists, using a variety of conceptual terms to capture this shift (see, for example, Thrift 2008; Massumi 2002; Protevi 2009). 4Several authors locate the historical emergence of this policy approach in the discussions around cybernetics in the post World War 2 period (see for example, Halpern 2014; Invisible Committee 2014, p. 35–44; Pickering 2010; Hayles 1999). 5In the ‘non-philosophical’ method of Laruelle, information or data that is relevant bears no necessary relation to the essence of the problem or threat but is a direct form, trace or sign of its appearance. This ‘clone’ world does not provide representational knowledge of the problem or threat in-itself but enables us to orientate ourselves towards it: to pay attention to it.

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u­ nderstood as a fluid set of inter-relations is not amenable to statistical regulation or to causal lines of prediction and implementation. Knowledge has to be finegrained and real time rather than abstract or universal.6 The attraction of what are called ‘Big Data’ approaches stems from the promise that new computer technologies, high-speed algorithms and machine-learning can provide relational insights through pattern recognition, without the need for causal theory (Anderson 2008). The forms of knowledge essential for the policy hacktivism of resilience, could, following Latour (2013, p. 26), be seen as postepistemological, focused on seeing and awareness of the world in its complex empirical emergence. For Big Data aficionados, the term for seeing concrete relations through new human-technological assemblages is ‘datafication’ (MayerSchönberger and Cukier 2013; Kitchin 2014). Datafication, driven by new forms of sensing and interconnection through the development of the Internet of Things, relies on correlations (between text message words and societal changes, between intensities of the sun and human functioning etc.) to enable the extension of security governance to processes in their emergence, rather than the focus on things or entities. This is why metadata (relational data) is increasingly more important than content data for security agencies (see further, Aradau and Blanke 2015). The question of resilience in the Anthropocene is thus one of understanding and manipulating relations and feedback processes while relying less on our reductionist thinking. This is why radical theorists are drawn, often, to approaches that start with the external world, by ‘following the actors’ (for example Law and Hassard 1999; Latour 2005) or ‘following the data,’ rather than with human-centred questions and theoretical constructions and models (Chandler 2015). It is held that this openness to the world, this new empiricism or pragmatism, needs to be vectored via social and technological means of mediation, which provide access to a relational reality obscured or hidden by the modern episteme. McKenzie Wark (2004), at the New School, has long highlighted the links between hacking and the sensibilities of the Anthropocene, and his Hacker Manifesto gestures to the work of hacking in developing new approaches from

6These

sensibilities also shape a lot of the conceptual arts, as avant-garde ‘uncreative writer’ Kenneth Goldsmith puts it “context is the new content” (see Wilkinson 2015).

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what already exists, through information enabling new relations to be seen and actualised (see also Chardronnett 2015). Wark argues, in the Manifesto, that: The hack produces a production of a new kind, which has as its result a singular and unique product, and a singular and unique producer … Production takes place on the basis of a prior hack which gives to production its formal, social, repeatable and reproducible form. Every production is a hack formalised and repeated on the basis of its representation. To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate. (Sections 8 and 9)

Hacking is the iterative, gradual approach to policy interventions, where each hack uses and reveals new inter-relationships creating new possibilities for thinking and acting. However, as soon as a hack is reproduced (turned into ‘production’ on the basis of representation) it loses its creative capabilities. A hack is a form of intervention, which seeks to reveal new relations and interconnections: it does not seek to construct new forms (structured or technological solutions addressing causes and solutions) but neither does it passively accept the world as it is. “Instead, adaptation is the act of polities making-worlds by repurposing and reengineering infrastructure not as a heroic or redemptive activity, but as a strategic force of selection, affirmation, and affinity” (Turpin 2015). As the Invisible Committee states: The figure of the hacker contrasts point by point with the figure of the engineer, whatever the artistic, police-directed, or entrepreneurial efforts to neutralize him may be. Whereas the engineer would capture everything that functions, in such a way that everything functions better in service to the system, the hacker asks himself “How does that work?” in order to find its flaws, but also to invent other uses, to experiment. Experimenting then means exploring what such and such a technique implies ethically. The hacker pulls techniques out of the technological system in order to free them. (2014, p. 43)

“Pulling techniques out of the technological system in order to free them” from the grand designs of social engineers and technocratic planners captures well the aspirations of digital policy activists in Jakarta. The following sections illustrate how hacking approaches have been pursued in practice and the discourses and understandings associated with policy hacktivism as a both an ontological and epistemological performativity: the next section on ‘Citizen Sensors’ focuses on the critique of ‘Big Data’ approaches and argument for community engagement; ‘Seeing the Unseen’ analyses how working on correlations, rather than causal, relationships enables the reworking of problems; and the ‘Conclusion’ raises some potential limits to this approach.

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3 Building Community Resilience One thing that international digital activists are clear about is that they are hostile to approaches they term as ‘Big Data.’ In their understanding, Big Data merely replicates current thinking, providing mundane reflections on the world (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarata, 17 February 2016). For example, Big Data analysts might do a study on fear of volcanoes and work out that people are anxious or do datamining to discover that people prefer to lie-in on a Sunday morning. The best that Big Data can come up with is the mundane reality, but often it fails to even achieve this as it is not easy to train a computer to read and understand Tweets, or a drone to recognise the difference between a barracks and a hospital or between a terrorist suspect and a civilian (see Grothoff and Porup 2016; ­Robbins 2016; MSF 2015). At worst, Big Data is seen as problematically reproducing dominant understandings of the world and as serving the needs of commercial companies and producing problematic linear and securitised forms of knowledge.7 As well as providing less access to ‘reality,’ activists argue that passively data-mined information does little to change the circumstances of people, bypassing communities and privatising data to aid governments and corporations. Even the active generation of data can be problematic when the information is never the responsibility of the community itself. An organiser of the Jakarta Open Street Map project sees an entirely different relation between mapping and the citizen. Rather than mapping being the province of ‘armchair’ mappers with drone cameras, mapping was necessarily a local project as the information mapped was only ‘real’ while it was in the context in which it was generated. This was firstly because local people could identify objects and sites in fine-grained ways, which would be impossible for ‘armchair’ outsiders; secondly, because the categories used to describe or to classify sites and objects were not readily transferable (the use of road or street classification in Western Europe would be of little use to a street mapper in many parts of Africa, for example);8 and, thirdly, because mapping could not be a one-off project, but was necessarily an on-going process: Even a global fine-grained map would not be adequate. Things keep changing and changing: a sub-village could disappear and become a shopping mall, a hospital

7This framing is dominant in the critical academic literature. As Read et al. note (2016: 13): “Ultimately we conclude that the new aspiration towards hubristic big data processing is just another step in the same modernist process of the production of statistical truth.” 8On problems of classification, see, for example, Bowker 2000.

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might close down. The map has to be continually updated, even in a matter of days. Really, really updated. The main challenge is to ingrain that kind of motivation/attitude in people responsible for updating the area. (Jakarta Open Street Map coordinator, Jakarta, 19 February 2016)

The challenge was, in effect, to engage enough people to construct living maps as a better, crowdsourced, representation of the world. Other approaches to real time mapping, however, take a more mixed9 or less modern ontology to heart in the design of digital policy projects. A leading example of this new empiricist methodology is that being developed by the academics and practitioners of the PetaJakarta project, based on facilitating geo-social forms of collective intelligence.10 As one of the PetaJakarta project coordinators stated, “[d]ata can not be ‘mined’ it is not a resource to be used by others. It is not about taking something out of one place and giving it to someone else, it is about feedbacks, not ‘mining’” (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarata, 19 February 2016). It is about using data in a system of ‘intimate sensing’ to enable contextual seeing and understanding (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarata, 19 February 2016). From PetaJakarta’s perspective, the population of the major city are a resource still in need of mobilisation: they are already extensively networked through social media and could make great citizen sensors, especially once information offered can be verified through geo-spatial tagging of the precise time and location of the information (this enables others to check and compare the information from multiple sources and makes verification much easier). Social media can be reconfigured with humanitarian apps to activate these civic citizenship elements. Different problems then can be used to construct engaged and active communities able to play a role in addressing them as a form of ‘civic co-management’ (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). Rather than passively reproducing a pale imitation of reality, the development of civic communication

9For

a good history of cybernetic or relational approaches that exceed the subjective desires of the scientific researchers that initiated them, see Pickering 2010. Mixed ontologies therefore are not uncommon in the more ‘hands on’ world of scientific and policy experimentation, which is one of the reasons this article seeks to draw on real world engagements rather than sticking to the purely conceptual realm. 10PetaJakarta is a research project focused on the use of social media for the real time mapping of flooding in Jakarta (led by the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong in collaboration with the Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta) and Twitter Inc.), see Holderness and Turpin 2015 for an assessment of the Joint Pilot Study for the project, operationally active from December 2014 to March 2015.

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t­echnologies could enable a more dynamic reality to unfold, amplifying the collective networked social intelligence of the city. At present, new civic technologies are being bankrolled and tested in relation to disasters and emergencies, but the hope is that this could be the beginning of new forms of geo-social networked systems enabling much more distributed and democratic forms of real time ­governance. Radical and tech-savvy academics and activists are keen to see the possibilities for human citizen-sensor-led initiatives, in which citizen knowledge and ownership is seen as vital for the development of civic apps. Where Big Data approaches of data-mining are seen to be passive, and led by the desire to monetise civil networked capacities, citizen-led approaches are seen to be active and transformative (see also McQuillan 2014; Read et al. 2016; Kitchin 2014). More importantly, they are seen to be self-transformative initiatives, not just generating information to be used by others but a different politics: “Recognising a problem is not the same as resolving a problem. The momentum of ‘intimate sensing’ is to enable people to think differently and thus to feel differently” (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarta, 19 February 2016). For these radical policy hacktivists, it is clear that “Big Data and Twitter won’t save you, won’t stop the floods. To be successful the key point is to be able to see what’s beyond the interface … the relationships of care” (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarta, 19 February 2016). Seeing the unseen relationships was also the objective of representatives of the UN Global Pulse Jakarta Pulse Lab project, who very much bought into the policy methodologies of hacking, being developed elsewhere, by PetaJakarta and others. Again they were not in favour of ‘Big Data’ approaches, which relied on the passive data-mining of social media and other sources, instead emphasising the importance of ‘thick data’: the use of Big Data but also of fine-grained ethnographic research. The Pulse Lab is involved with a large number of projects but one emphasised in particular was a study of the impact of El Niño, in conjunction with the World Food Programme. This project relied on recruited (paid) volunteers, i.e., on active rather than passive data collection, who used a humanitarian app to record a range of market prices, taking a photo of the particular item and entering its quality and price. This information was then geo-located and time-stamped to build up a finegrained and real-time picture of market fluctuations. Like PetaJakarta, the Pulse Lab found that passive data-mining of social media was not fine-grained enough to provide reliable information. This actively generated market price data was then matched against other data streams, such as household resilience surveys and local weather data to map the

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effects of changes in community sustainability. Importantly, for the points made here, the project was based on locating outlier communities: those that seemed to do either better or worse than the average. Thus, the purpose was not so much to provide a complete picture but to see the as yet unseen: to find the communities that were in trouble (reaching their tipping points or threshold levels) and requiring intervention by the World Food Programme but also, crucially, to initiate research projects to learn from the resilience capacities of communities which did better than average. This provides a useful performative demonstration of this approach to resilience, in that the UN Global Pulse and World Food Programme wanted to use new data technologies not to generate universal forms of knowledge and comparative measurements or to predict what might happen in the future or develop large scale interventions but rather to locate the exceptions. The intimation being that certain communities have ‘tricks up their sleeve,’ the ability to ‘hack’: i.e., ways of thinking or organising that enable them to engage differently with certain contingencies. The reality that is being looked for is not something that can be neatly fitted into categories and charts but the reality of the sign that provides the possibility for analogic reasoning to reveal relations and connections whose importance may have been ignored. Long gone is the idea that international development organisations already possessed ways of knowing or technological solutions that could be generalised and exported through training or project grants (see, for example, Haldrup and Rosén 2013). If there are solutions to problems of climate change and poverty then these are held to be context specific and generated through communities themselves, but the ways in which these creative solutions emerge can be learnt from and provide possible opportunities for others in the region.

4 Resilience as an Immanent Process of CapacityBuilding Citizen-sensors are not just more attuned to reality, in mobilising or inculcating the power of the geo-socially networked citizen. The immanent capacities of geosocial networks are used to enhance awareness of problems and issues in new ways. At present, many social, economic and ecological questions are not posed or are ignored. A good example, in Jakarta, is the city’s relationship to the river system, which often floods in the monsoon season. The city is currently undertaking a massive project of ‘normalisation’ tearing down informal settlements on the river banks and concreting the walls of the river; in some areas the river itself is

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being concreted over. For many middle-class citizens, this ‘beautification’ of the river is a good thing and they support the river being pushed underground and out of sight. For Western policy activists, “[t]hey are turning their backs on the reality of the city. The river is an ugly monster that no one wants around” (International visiting researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). Thus, the attitude of covering over the problem is the problem, preventing ways of rethinking the city’s relationship to the river system and, even more importantly, this approach is seen to be counterproductive: increasing the rigidity of a river system which is constantly in flux, and therefore storing up more problems for the future. Despite the constant and worsening flooding, it seems that the message is not getting through to either the city or its inhabitants: When you get sick, it’s the body’s way of saying that something is wrong. Flooding is a sign that something is wrong with the city. PetaJakarta is like a thermometer. It enables us to see, it alerts us to the facts. You can’t see a fever. PetaJakarta is a quantification of the problem. (International visiting researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016)

In my own understanding, this is not really a ‘quantification’ of the problem; this would intimate that it was building up a representative store of knowledge. It is, in fact, a ‘datafication’ of the problem, bringing to light a set of relationships and interdependencies rather than just measuring something on an universalisable basis. This process of datafication as enabling the seeing of the unseen is crucial to new approaches of resilience in the time of the Anthropocene. The data generated by PetaJakarta is not a passive representation: it is neither quantitative nor qualitative in the usual meaning of these terms. The project uses machinic or technological enhancement to construct a more dynamic, relational, version of reality. It is this digitally-enabled vision that enables a community to be able to see the unseen and thereby responsively care for its now enhanced and extended relational self.11 At PetaJakarta there is an understanding that a new methodology is emerging with the work being undertaken and that its full outline is still in process. Key is the desire to visualise relational infrastructures, networks and interdependencies, and new technologies are seen as central to this process: What are data? Data are signs that can be assembled as a relational structure but can only be read mathematically. Signs produced can be read/organised by mathematics

11As

Bruno Latour might state, the community has enlarged its ‘common world’ by recognising its interdependency with previously ignored agencies, “bringing nonhumans and the demos into the expanded collective” (2004, p. 215).

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not by language. For example ‘Banjir’ [flood] is not linguistic, it is a code that is machine readable. (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarta, 19 February 2016)

A PetaJakarta coordinator continued later: We want to develop a post-intentionality platform. The role of CogniCity [the open source software programme]12 is not to generate greater intentionality but machine solidarities. Big Data is problematic [with its predictive assumptions] it identifies volition/will in systems without them … Big Data traces, it only provides the evidence of the Anthropocene’s existence rather than augmenting its unfolding. (PetaJakarta coordinator, Jakarta, 19 February 2016)

While the articulation may not be immediately clear, the aspiration is to use technology to see ‘posthumanly,’ which means not to impose linear cause-andeffect assumptions (intentionality, will or volition) but to see things for how they really are, open to contingent connections and relations. This is why it is argued that relational structures can only be seen ‘mathematically,’ through datafication and machine recognition. The assumption is that, through seeing contingent and fleeting interconnections and relations, the unfolding of the Anthropocene can be ‘enhanced,’ i.e., real time responsive adaptation can take place through iterative processes rather than through attempts to generalise and take information or data out of their context in order to instantiate major projects of social or technological engineering (which would hold back the development of ‘Anthropocene’ approaches). As one member of the PetaJakarta team told me: “Understanding the river as a line is the first problem. It doesn’t move in one constant direction or with a constant thickness” (International visiting researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). Paradoxically, the application of modernist approaches to solve the problem of the river system is seen to create the unintended consequence of making the problem worse: sporadic concretisation of the river is held to make the river even more turbulent. This is not just an ontological problem; it also highlights the paradox of the modernist episteme itself. “The denial of the river as the enabler of life in the city stems from the Dutch linear view of the river, which is still prevalent since the 17th Century. This means that planners are not addressing the reality: the river cannot be forced into a box” (International visiting researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016).

12CogniCity

information is available here: http://cognicity.info/cognicity/.

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The more we apply modernist approaches and inherited understandings of scientific approaches to hydrological engineering (working on equations which have not changed in a hundred years), the less we are able to know and to understand the problem and to understand the river itself: The ‘normalisation’ of the river has made it much more turbulent and less predictable. Before, local people knew the behaviour of the river when the gates were lifted upstream. People living informally on the banks of the river had a syncopated rhythm of daily life, living with the river. They would be prepared for flooding and move their stuff upstairs and they would know when the river was receding and quickly move out the (toxic) mud before it dries. Now they can’t predict how long it will take for the water to flow. All the ways through which the city learned to live and adapt to the river have become irrelevant. (International visiting researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016)

The more responses to the problem of resilience in the Anthropocene take a modernist form the worse the problems become, at the level both of ontological reality and of epistemic possibilities of thinking about approaches to these p­ roblems.13 This negative approach is summed up by the Great Garuda sea wall initiative (Koch 2015). A huge planned extension of the city into the sea. The image of the Great Garuda—a warrior bird, facing out to the ocean, as if it is defending Jakarta against climate change—is seen as particularly unfortunate (Mezzi 2016). “Promoting the idea that climate change is something out there and we can just stop it; not let it in” (International visiting researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). The PetaJakarta project activists are against the city’s ‘normalisation’ approach but that does not mean that they want to just let the flooding take its course. As several of the international researchers argue, “resilience can only be built through community not form” (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). The general understanding of the Great Garuda and normalisation initiatives, which seek to formalise the river, to control it, is that: “We will be more resilient because we will be in control” (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). For PetaJakarta, this is the wrong approach to take

13The

building of flood walls and levees is quite possibly the least viable option in the epoch of the Anthropocene. Kathleen Tierney, for example, quotes Gerald Galloway, chair of the presidential committee report on the 1993 Mississippi River floods as stating “there are only two kinds of levees: those that have failed and those that will fail” (2014, p. 59). It is a classic example of what the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2014) terms ‘coercive resilience,’ tackling symptoms rather than the problem and therefore storing up greater problems for the future.

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to the problem. The PetaJakarta project is therefore very different: “It’s not trying to solve flooding, it’s trying to give a voice to the flooding: to give a voice to the river” (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). The alternative to resilience through ‘form’ is resilience through ‘community’: “Communicating smarter about the environment and helping people to get through flood events” (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). ‘Community’ resilience thus starts from a very different set of ontological and epistemological assumptions. Rethinking the city from a relational perspective in which the city and river are fundamentally interconnected. “We need to put the river at the centre of the city, the river comes first and secondly there is the human development on top. By blocking off the river we are making the main character less visible” (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). The Twitter feedback from the project participants helps in the process of remapping the city, making it more dynamic, or lively, than the reality of the river on the map. “This enables thinking differently. The river is not a line but a body ever present across the city” (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016). ‘Community’ resilience is not the geo-social networked intelligence of the citizens alone but the use of the geo-social networked technology to re-envision what the city is and what it means to be a citizen of it. For PetaJakarta researchers: We need to visualise the city as a set of relations that can not be pinned down. We need to move beyond binaries. Information is the commodity of change … Architects and engineers need to take this on board. There are no technical solutions. Planners, architects and engineers need a whole new level of thinking about the medium we are working with. (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016)

This view that for resilience in the Anthropocene there can be ‘no technical solutions,’ highlights the fundamental shift involved in the emergence of hacking as a policy methodology for resilience under conditions of uncertainty. It also poses the fundamental question of what role planners, architects and engineers are to play in this new resilience framework: What are we trying to design? A better functioning image of today? Shouldn’t we be designing for the system to live better, to live smarter? Maybe it doesn’t have to look different. It’s hard to say. When you talk about resilience through form it’s difficult to take it away from capitalist investors. It’s difficult to take it away from who it’s meant to work for. (PetaJakarta international researcher, Jakarta, 17 February 2016)

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The PetaJakarta project very much works on the basis that things do not have to look differently for a radical shift in resilience capacities to take place. There is already a socially networked citizenship through social media and the technology is already available for geo-spatial mapping of communication (the project sends out automated responses with a video telling people how to enable the Global Positioning System (GPS) location). The project seeks to ‘hack’ this already existing geo-social technological infrastructure to reconfigure it and to activate elements not at the fore. Thus, taking the existing capacities and transforming them to remap problems and issues, through taking apps developed as open source software and making them capable of mobilising and re-envisioning community relations in open-ended and experimental directions. What could perhaps be seen as the extension of emergency or disaster risk reduction to the politics of everyday life is here reread as a hack to enable community resilience, understood as an empowering network able to amplify the power of self-organising community intelligence.

5 Conclusion: Temporality and Resilience The PetaJakarta approach promises both an epistemological and ontological transformation in how cities and citizens and the problems of the Anthropocene are imagined. However, underneath this radical gloss is a sense of making do with what we have, not by doing nothing but by re-envisioning the problem and then being able to ‘hack’ into existing resources and capabilities to make the most of opportunities and interconnections. This ethos of building resilience in the Anthropocene through attention to repurposing and re-envisioning, attempting to enable existing potential interconnections is, I think, highlighted in the idea of Public Service Jams or Civic Hackathons where Smart City Labs, the UN Development Programme or other donors invite ideas and proposals to deconstruct problems and try out prototype solutions with volunteer hackers, technologists and designers immersing themselves in the problem. These ad hoc forums are lauded as mechanisms for reaching out to citizens to develop new ideas, exposing governing authorities and international institutions to new tools and skill sets and for re-envisioning problems, seeing issues in a different light (see, for example, Anggakara et al. 2016). When it comes to securing the Anthropocene, it seems that traditional forms of social research and policy analysis are barriers to this form of creative engagement, condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past and reproduce problems and forms of social and economic exclusion. What this misses though is the temporary and short-term nature of these new community approaches. This is exactly the idea of a ‘Life-Hack’ as a short-term

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solution for a ‘problem hair day,’ for example.14 When the World Food Programme organises with the UN Global Pulse to develop a dashboard of information on drought, food prices and household resilience this is not because they have an ambitious programme of transformative initiatives for development but precisely because they have no such programme and in its absence they are seeking to design a system in which communities can develop their own resources to cope at the edge of poverty. The same can be said of the other short-term projectbased initiatives enabled by data-based re-envisioning, community engagement and empowerment. The world of digitally-enhanced geo-social intelligence and real time empirics seems more dynamic and lively than the world of traditional security discourses. But, I would suggest that its dynamic appearance does not come so much from the power of open source data gathering and of geo-spatial mapping. But rather from the breaking up of reality into short-term and momentary quick fixes. This approach is neither the interventionism of liberal social and technical engineering nor the non-intervention of community self-responsibility but its engaging and transformative ethos remains perpetually stuck in the ‘Life-Hack’ mode for fear of doing either too little or too much. Building resilience in the Anthropocene, it seems cannot be done by attempts to socially or technologically engineer the world but it can be done by applying technological applications to citizens recast as a geo-socially networked community of sensors, attuned to the ‘unfolding’ of the Anthropocene as a humannon-human assemblage of open-ended inter-relations. This is what gives the correlated or datafied world its hyper-reality.15 The lack of temporality of the emergent assemblages of the Anthropocene mean the ‘what-is-ness’ of the world is enhanced by seeing it only as a momentary event, liable to momentary interventions, rather than in terms of long-term problems that need longterm solutions. Building resilience in the Anthropocene, through its ontology of interdependency, implies open-ended forms of governing and intervening which seem, at first sight, to be radical, creative and empowering. This chapter suggests that underneath this radical gloss is a much more humble approach to the world, which in fact enshrines the status quo as ontological necessity.

14See,

for example, LifeHack.org: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/100-life-hacksthat-make-life-easier.html. 15Jean Baudrillard (1994) argues the ‘hyperreal’ exists independently when signs and signals no longer need to be related to (a modernist representation of) reality.

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Chandler, David (Prof. Dr.) is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster and editor of the journal “Resilience: International Policies, Practices and ­Discourses”. Relevant publications: Chandler, D. (2018). Ontopolitics in the ­Anthropocene: An introduction to mapping, sensing and hacking. Abingdon & New York: R ­ outledge; ­Chandler, D. (2017). Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997–2017. London: P ­ algrave Macmillan; Chandler, D. & Reid, J. (2016). The neoliberal subject: Resilience, adaptation and vulnerability. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; Chandler, D. (2014). Resilience: The ­governance of complexity. Abingdon/New York: Routledge.

Resilience as a Security Programme: The Janus Faced Guiding Principle Stefan Kaufmann

1 Political Context and Current Significance Resilience has become a central paradigm of security policy. At the end of the 1990s, resilience was brought into play by the UN as a key guiding principle for the reduction of natural disasters. In Great Britain, the entire natural disaster planning was restructured with the stipulation of resilience, and comprehensive security programmes for cities were being developed under a ‘resilient ­cities’ guideline. Under Obama, resilience has risen to a standard approach for the Department of Homeland Security, particularly in the areas of infrastructure security and disaster management. And ultimately, resilience is succeeding as a central point of reference for security research programmes in the EU and the security research programme of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Education and Research. The rise of resilience is bound to a transformation of security understanding that has prevailed since the 1990s. This transformation can be fixed to three movements of dedifferentiation. The definitions of threat and danger for national security penetrate the classic distinction between foreign and domestic. There is no longer a clearly defined (military) opponent; instead terrorists, organised crime, illegal migrants, cyber-attacks, pandemics, contamination and natural disasters

An earlier version of this article was published in German language as: “Resilienz als Sicherheitsprogramm—Zum Janusgesicht eines Leitkonzepts,” in Endress, M. and Maurer, A. (eds.), “Resilienz im Sozialen”(2015), pp. 295–312, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. S. Kaufmann (*)  Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_12

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determine the scenarios; that is to say, phenomena that cannot be categorised according to the domestic-foreign distinction. The second type of dedifferentiation is comprised of institutional arrangements like the Department of Homeland Security or concepts such as civil security. With that, new fields of intervention emerge in which the classic departmental boundaries and operational divisions of security agencies tend to be overridden. Instead, ‘networking’ is becoming the imperative for security forces and the programmatic demand is for security to be thought of as holistic or ‘comprehensive.’ A third element of dedifferentiation is the fact that security is no longer viewed in relation to specific risks or dangers, but in the context of general risks, emergencies and crises, and even more so, in the sense of a universal vulnerability of society at large. The classic distinction between safety and security is becoming obsolete. The compression, the (infra) structural complexity and networking, or in other words: the complexity of modern life is in itself a source of increased vulnerability. Accordingly, the measures tend not to be directed in a specific way against one particular threat or another, and instead of addressing the cause, focus is placed on the possible consequences of harmful incidents. The central questions now are how to reduce vulnerability, how to reduce dangers, how the damaging effects of harmful occurrences can be decreased, how they can be dealt with and how to again achieve a state of normality. Resilience—the strengthening of defensive forces (Bröckling 2012, p. 102)— is becoming an aim of security policy in areas that need to become immune to negative consequences from attacks, damage and breakdowns. In the context of our time, resilience can be understood as a new method of governing uncertainty. The editor of an international handbook on risk analysis and management, gathering expertise from various fields from the military and civil protection to insurance, opens with a reference to Anthony Giddens’ “Runaway World” and Ulrich Beck’s “Risk Society” (Habegger 2008, p. 13). The future is more uncertain than ever in the face of massively accelerated social change, in view of globalisation dynamics and increased systematic and infrastructural interdependence. “Three interlinked elements are constitutive of today’s risks: interdependency, complexity, and uncertainty” (Habegger 2008, p. 16). In light of the above, systemic risks come into focus, the occurrence of which is as uncertain as their potential to be accompanied by extraordinary and possibly irreversible damage. For the theory of reflexive modernization, uncertainty, a key term for the current state of affairs, marks the difference between ‘old’ risks determined by probability, and ‘new’ risks that tend to have no limitations in terms of their time, substance and social dimension (see Beck 1993, p. 40–45; Bonss 2011).

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From this perspective, the question arises as to whether resilience points to a “paradigm change in dealing with uncertainty, that can be characterised as a transition from a factor orientated elimination of potential uncertainty beyond the prevention and identification of risk factors” (Bonss 2014, p. 16). An analysis of government based on the Foucault school of thought also reveals a rediscovery of the “concept of uncertainty” (Ewald 1998, p. 5) and determines that “we are living in a time characterised by a return of catastrophes, a persistence of individual and collective damage of unknown proportions, at least in times of peace” (Ewald 1998, p. 12). The focus lies on damages that cannot be assessed by risk calculations, where it is even uncertain whether damage can occur, but at the same time, an enormous level of damage as well as irreplaceable and irreversible consequences must be anticipated. Rather than calculations based on knowledge, considerations of the imaginable ‘worst case scenario’ become the foundation of anticipatory action. In general, a distinction is made between three methods of preventative action (see Diprose et al. 2008; Anderson 2010). The new principle of governing that Ewald sees looming is that of “precaution.” Prevention in this sense means avoiding the worst, ensuring security by circumvention. If irreversible damage cannot be definitively ruled out, avoidance is necessary. The most significant expression of this is as an “ecological morality of preservation” (Bröckling 2012, p. 100), which establishes bans in cases of doubt. This type of precaution—to avoid a disastrous future—finds its most active counterpart in the principle of ‘pre-emption,’ involving a pre-emptive attack that aims to pre-empt that of an enemy, not knowing that an attack is imminent, but because of the notion that a disastrous attack could be possible. Pre-emption, as outlined by Brian Massumi (2007), presumes a threat in the form of “unknown unknowns” as much as it reproduces it. Prevention motivated by “unknown unknowns” requires permanent invention of preventative risks. Since it is unknown in what shape or form the danger will manifest, when and where it will hit, it is necessary to generate that which you want to fight; thus pathogens which can be used for terrorist purposes are created to prevent bio-terrorism. The result is a permanent state of emergency, a state of undeclared war: “When the worst is to be prevented, everything seems to be justified, even terror in the name of fighting terror” (Bröckling 2012, p. 101). Resilience is more closely tied to analytics of government in a third way of dealing with uncertainty: that of preparedness. Preparedness does not focus on the prevention of disruptive events—as precaution and pre-emption do—but on how to cope with them. It is not the event but its negative effects that need to be prevented or minimized. The anticipated element—the what if?—is not the cause of disruptive incidents but their possible consequences. The aim is to secure

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the functioning of “vital systems” (Collier and Lakoff 2014), and to increase the ability to withstand or react to disruptive events. The classic subjects are emergency plans and the protection of infrastructure, though also this type of prevention has its own dynamics: the imperative to be prepared extends across more and more areas: “The language of preparedness has spread from disaster preparedness, through preparedness for epidemic diseases, to preparedness for individual survival in an emergency” (Lentzos and Rose 2009, p. 235). In contrast to preemption, this form of handling emergencies, crises and disruptive events does not operate in a mode of exception. It does not rely on extraordinary mobilisation and measures, but instead on a societal distribution of strength and responsibilities. Its core principle is not protection in the sense of governmental patronage, but in a widely and finely distributed net of resistance forces. Resilience, according to Lentzos & Rose, exceeds a state of preparedness: “Resilience implies a systematic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective and material arrangements so as to be better able to anticipate and tolerate disturbances in complex worlds without collapse, to withstand shocks, and to rebuild as necessary” (2009, p. 243). Both in the context of reflexive modernity and the theory of governmentality, resilience can be understood as a liberal mode of prevention. In contrast to precaution—security through prohibition—, and preemption—security through limitless preventative action—, resilience would mean a technology and a telos of governance that does not aim to eliminate insecurity, but to deal with it. In one way or another, diagnoses are often also political operations. Similar to the sustainability concept, resilience originated in alternative policy drafts and ultimately entered into ruling politics. What is true for sustainability is also true for resilience: the ‘if’ is less disputed than the issue of programmatic content. After all, resilience represents ambitious political goals. In terms of democratic theory, “while the increased implementation of security laws quickly conflicts with the idea of liberal and democratic ways of life and thus often generates tremendous criticism, the idea of resilience seems to be able to reconcile the areas of freedom and security” (Riescher 2013, p. 1067). Within an analysis of political power based on Foucault, it has been said: “Perhaps the opposite of a Big Brother State, a logic of resilience would aspire to create a subjective and systematic state to enable each and all to live freely and with confidence in a world of potential risks” (Lentzos and Rose 2009, p. 243). This codification is even more surprising in light of common diagnoses since 9/11 marked by a general increase in control and surveillance (Groenemeyer 2010; Singelnstein and Stolle 2008), that illiberal practices in the name of security are escalating (Opitz 2008), while others postulate the reign of the state of emergency

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(Massumi 2007; Dillon 2007). The argumentation will show that hidden beneath the aforementioned codification is a second face, a face connected to a diverse range of programmatic goals to implement resilience as a guiding principle.

2 Formation of a Discourse: The Genealogy of Vulnerability What are the prerequisites for the possibility of a rather peripheral scientific concept such as resilience to be promoted to a central guiding principle of current security management? A fundamental requirement is to understand resilience as the answer to its antonym: vulnerability. Resilience owes its plausibility to a way of thinking which is governed by the idea of an intrinsic societal vulnerability, that is, the thought that the very same things that represent the productivity of modern societies—high mobility, dense networks and infrastructural integration—are what also represent their weakness, their vulnerability. This ­ thought pattern has its basic roots in the military sector. It is established in the context of specific problematisations of national security, beginning with aerial warfare theories of the 1920s and 1930s. Broadly speaking, the following lines can be drawn (see Collier and Lakoff 2008; Dombrowsky 2010; Kaufmann 2011, pp. 104–112, 2012, pp. 115–124). The doctrine of total war, which emerged in the interwar period, concluded from World War I that the actual centre of power of military violence was not on the battlefield but in war production and manufacturing. The doctrine not only implied a concept of broad national mobilization but also opened the door for a kind of strategic thinking that expanded the notion of enemy from the opposing forces to an entire nation. Aerial warfare became the focus of theories on the vulnerability of infrastructure, first formulated in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s, and further advanced for the offensive in World War II. Suddenly the homeland, when viewed in light of these theories, became a conglomeration of worthwhile targets. Several layers of correlation were being discovered and analysed: the interdependence of individual branches of production and their dependence on resources, the relevance of transport routes and, ultimately, the dependence of all these layers on the information and communication networks for ‘command and control’ of the front and home. The central question and, as such, the central problem, was the location of shortages and bottlenecks, intersections and specific points of vulnerabilities, the destruction of which would have far-reaching consequences. Addressing this problem went hand in hand with the development of new technologies, procedures and media helping to create knowledge in the area of (un)

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certainty. The progression from the rather empirical-descriptive ‘industrial web theory’ of the 1930s to the current concept of system vulnerability is based on mathematical and non-mathematical methods, such as operation research and system analysis. Since the late 1960s, computer-based methods were available to quantitatively determine degrees of interconnectedness, dependences and vulnerabilities. Linear models were enhanced through complexity theory, which means they no longer only encompass certain events but are laid out generically, so that general system vulnerabilities can be examined. Soon these models diffused into civilian sectors as well. Another medium for risk assessment was topographic mapping. A bomb impact raises the question of spatial dispersion and distribution of dangers, such as those from heat, chemicals or radiation. This form of analysis was in particular upswing in context of the nuclear threat after World War II, which highlighted not only the logistic and operative relationships in their spatial configuration, but especially the immediate effects on the population. While specific maps for the preparation for an atomic war marked the beginning of risk topography mapping, it soon spread to other areas of concern: from flooding risks to ‘crime mapping.’ Besides the specific maps, ‘multi-hazard risk maps’ were developed, containing diverse threats and their local dispersion, risk calculations, emergency resources, evacuation plans, and more. A third technology is also tied to atomic war: scenario-based knowledge creation and management. It deals with the question of how to provide civil defence in the face of risks of the ‘low probability/high consequences’ type, events for which there is no empirical data. Compared to statistical or experience-based war strategies, this knowledge technology is developed based on narratives of events and the combinatorial analysis of possible event patterns and appropriate alternatives. The scenario design has many methods, such as thought experiments, role plays, and drills. The most important aspect is the generation of knowledge via re-enactment, with the goal of accumulating ‘enactment-based knowledge’ (see Ellebrecht et al. 2013). Such knowledge technologies have manifold effects: they create specific thought patterns, make them vividly real, stabilize them, allow for their dispersion, and—central to strategic thinking—they make knowledge operable, allowing it to translate to concrete security practices, techniques and tactics. After total war and atomic war, the third form of threat that fuels the concept of vulnerability is the double figure of the hacker and the terrorist. Similar to the aerial warfare theories, speculation in the 1990s about using offensives such as ‘information warfare’ and ‘cyberwar’ was reversed and the question of vulnerability was raised. It often revolved around hackers, who were always also thought of as terrorists, a symbol of asymmetric warfare par excellence (see Pias 2002;

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Cavelty 2008). The discussion about the hacker-terrorist, the sudden realization drawn from Oklahoma that an attack can paralyze governmental and administrative operations nation-wide and for an extended period of time, and a commission founded by Bill Clinton in 1997, which coined the term “critical infrastructure” all ensured well before 9/11 that infrastructure security was no longer solely a military issue. Firstly, the cyber threat knocks down the division between external and internal, between military and other forms of threats. Secondly, information infrastructure is viewed as the infrastructure of many other infrastructures, meaning the nexus of virtual and physical infrastructure, a fact which is associated with an enormously increased hazardous potential, became a focus. Thirdly, at the centre of concerns over the security of infrastructures expressed in the commission was always a deliberate attack, rarely ever an accident or damage from natural disasters. Thus infrastructures became a particular topic in security issues, different from other concerns such as nuclear energy: the discussion expanded beyond the question of how to improve the safety of all regular operations to the question of how to shield it against extraordinary incidents, specifically, against attacks. Besides the problem of safety, security became a central issue. A fourth element is the decreased meaning of a distinction between private and public safety. National defence was no longer the sole responsibility of the government and, at the same time, the security of infrastructure was no longer viewed as an operational concern for enterprises.

3 Formation of a Discourse: Resilience in Current Security Programmatics The genealogy of vulnerability illustrates the knowledge basis of the security discourse which seemed impossible to challenge after 9/11. The ‘war on terror’ and ‘pre-emption’ were answers to 9/11, but ‘preparedness’ and ‘resilience’ emerge as a second strategy that is unclearly demarcated. The EU security research programme is one area in which resilience is becoming a central topic to conceptualize and develop strategies. 1.4 billion € were invested in the programm in a first phase, from 2007 to 2013. Initiated as an industrial-political programme to support the European economy in an emerging market, the development of marketable security solutions is the main focus (see Hayes 2009; Dombrowsky 2014). Research programmes such as this can definitely be understood as a “crucial form of proactive security policy” (Kolliarakis 2013, p. 108) because they create networks between the relevant players, identify problems and develop technologies to help shape security policy in the

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medium term. The four goals of the program are the security of citizens, the security of infrastructure and supply, intelligent surveillance and border security, as well as crisis and emergency handling. Along with the reinforcement of material structures, technology should be developed for fire-fighting, public transportation, emergency planning, crisis communications, and other such services. Georgios Kolliarakis (2013) examined these issues as presented within the EU project for a resilience discourse. He found that resilience is commonly associated with four concepts: First, resilience is used congruently in relation to security—more resilience means more security and more security means more resilience. In that sense, resilience is the means and the goal, but not a strategy, to cope with insecurity. Second, resilience is most often used in a context of guarding against threats. ‘Preparedness’ specifically refers to increased (technical) safety measures for buildings or infrastructure: hazardous materials of a nuclear, biological or chemical nature are to be detected; suspicious persons, suspicious behaviour, suspicious deviations are to be identified; access points, facilities, compounds, public places, and buildings are to be equipped with a safety design—everything from locks and concrete bollards to resistant materials; and new technologies for visual and data surveillance are to be implemented on a large scale. Based on Crawford Holling’s (1996) differentiation between “engineering” and “ecological resilience,” the term is clearly associated with “engineering resilience” within the EU program. Systems are to be strengthened by reinforcing their structures, as opposed to the meaning of “ecological resilience,” where the goal is the preservation of functionality and the creation of more redundant, adaptable and flexible structures. Third, there is an—considering the design of the programme—unsurprising focus on high-tech solutions. Particularly the development of detection, identification and control technologies, partly aiming for a broad surveillance—which has, for example, caused a scandal related to the INDECT project—associates resilience with illiberal governmentality (Opitz 2008). Fourth, there is a distinct “resilience of everything fashion trend” (Kolliarakis 2013, p. 109). Resilient design is supposed to be developed for everything: for technical and social systems, for organisations and institutions, companies, buildings, production sites, entire cities and infrastructures. Numerous projects claim—each solely for itself—a holistic approach, insinuating: “When resilience at one level is enhanced, then resilience at the next level will be automatically improved” (Kolliarakis 2013, p. 111). More and more security projects are working under the heading of resilience: whether they are developing scanners, detection technologies, pattern recognition, surveillance cameras, drones, sensors or similar items. The expected effect of all these security projects and technologies is a paradox: “suddenly there emerge new conditions, the facets of which are being praised as an increase in security by both the developers and the users. In reality, no one knows what conditions arise

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as a whole and how to handle them. […] What is certain in an empirical sense is only that every component generates data which is, in one way or another, in itself relevant to security” (Dombrowsky 2014, p. 300 f.). Many political consulting publications are marked by ‘resilience of everything’ and the postulation, that synergy effects—behind which conflicts over goals, paradoxes and ambivalences disappear—will lead straight from the resilient citizen to the resilient society: this characterises a number of publications on policy advice. A framework drafted by the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute views resilience as a superior objective in confronting two types of danger: terrorism and large-scale disasters. Diagram 1. (Kahan et al. 2009, p. 7)

As is typical for these types of concepts, ‘prevention,’ ‘protection,’ ‘response’ and ‘recovery’—complemented with ‘prepare’ as a separate point (Schwarte et al. 2014, p. 17)—are included alongside neighbourhood watch and infrastructure management. These are all governmental duties in the field of civil protection and disaster control. However, the trend is for an appeal to individual citizens to understand their responsibility in ensuring security. In that way, resilience differs from all other dominant forms of security policy thus far. The concrete realization of these goals is yet to be determined: the Guantánamo Bay detention camp is a possible example, just as the renovation of the flood protection around New Orleans is. None of the models clarify whether or not the ‘mentality of planning’ asked of citizens refers to the participation in ‘suspicious activity reporting,’ part

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of the now prohibited “Terrorism Information and Prevention System” (TIPS), or to the call for Norwegian citizens to ostentatiously adhere to the liberal-democratic principles after the terrorist attack of 2011 (or whether to believe that both are possible at the same time). The reason is not only that a diagram cannot exhibit more complex relations. The entire 50 pages of the framework, at best, mention a conflict of goals between security and economy because the private sector’s orientation towards “business continuity” is not the same as common welfare security (see Assaf 2008; Wiater 2013). Such concepts remain beyond space and time and cannot be demarcated, for example, by subsidiarity in disaster control in the event that public measures fail (Gusy 2013). Nor is this possible without broaching the issue of conflicts of goals—when does resilience of the one become the vulnerability of the other, or the resilience of one area to the vulnerability of another?—or without raising the question of power constellations in the context of resilience ­projects. Without it all, they cannot take hold in a society, politics, law, and culture, and they remain meaningless as a guiding principle. Without at least answering the question “Resilience of what to what?” (Carpenter et al. 2001), it is not possible to obtain from such a holistic resilience concept an analytical category that measures resilience. Thus the commonly praised holism of these concepts turns out to be pure technocracy, which amounts to a comprehensive securitisation of society (Buzan et al. 1998). “In the security field, the danger is that the cry for resilience is simply another attempt to foster the perception of living in a permanent state of conflict. This heightens popular fear, and supports the allocation of limited resources to a technology-oriented security industry” (Wooton and Davey 2013). Resilience would thus be seen as a mobilisation strategy which would incorporate “pre-emption” and “preparedness” as complementary, not contrary, programmes. Janus, the guardian of doors, gates, passageways and bridges, would mutate to a sort of big data processor, whose knowledge of the future is focused on potential catastrophic events and attacks. It would not be clear whether the doors to his temple should be opened because it is war, or if they should be closed because the warriors are at home.

4 Alternative Interpretations It is not possible to reject vulnerability as a mere ideology because the concept is too deeply rooted epistemically. Moreover, the genealogical line leading to the term ‘critical infrastructure,’ as laid out above, converges with other perspectives of sociological criticism and thus its diagnostic plausibility is supported—the key

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term being “risk society.” Can resilience be used against a programme of comprehensive securitisation? Viewed in detail, resilience has, in many references that are now considered classics, been brought into play not as a comprehensive programme but as a specific method or a specific criticism in situations of uncertainty or crisis. Each time, socio-scientific innovation, technology, organisation and disaster research associated a different strategic-conceptional approach with the concept. Aaron Wildavsky’s (1988) study, “Searching for Safety,” ties the question of security to questions of general social development, thereby focusing on (technological) innovation strategies. Wildavsky is one theorist among those from different fields who, at the end of the 1980s, as Wolfgang Bonss (2011, pp. 54–60) explains, questioned “modernity’s ‘standard position’ on the context of insecurity” (2011, p. 54). While insecurity and uncertainty had generally been considered nuisances, “deeply rooted negative anthropological experiences,” as Bonss (2011, p. 55) formulated it in reference to Talcott Parsons, they were now being viewed in a positive light. The classic position on insecurity had equated societal progress in science and technology with an increased control of nature and a safe, secure life. After 1988, when the ecological debate flared up over Harrisburg and Chernobyl, this position could no longer be held without contradiction. Wildavsky dissects the “precautionary principle,” which demands that high-risk technologies should not be approved as long as their harmlessness has not been proven (see Wildavsky 1988, p. 17 ff.). Wildavsky argues for a positive emphasis on uncertainty: that we have to embrace uncertainty, otherwise innovation and social progress are impossible. He is making his point that modern societies have reached such a high level of safety precisely because of willingness for innovation and an acceptance of risks. He boils it down to the short but often repeated formula “[w]ealth adds to health”: “Increasing the pool of general resources, such as wealth and knowledge, secures safety for more people than using up resources in a vain effort to protect against unperceivable, hypothetical dangers” (1988, pp. 2, 65 ff.). Following this line of argument, he places two strategies against each other: “anticipation” and “resilience” (1988, p. 77 ff.). Those who favour safety, meaning anticipation, impede technological innovation; those who favour risks, advance progress, which in turn increases safety. Wildavsky’s central argument is that it is not possible to know which technologies are potentially dangerous and which technologies may turn out to be a blessing. He also cites that it is too expensive to secure against all eventualities, arguing against classic forms of prevention. Resilience, on the other hand, would be a strategy pushed on by decentralised decisions and characterised by “trial and error,” resulting in a high potential for learning and experience with the handling

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of risks. In the long run, he claims, risk avoidance based on political intervention would lead to greater insecurity because it blocks learning and progress, while the risk willingness of the market is the safer strategy (1988, p. 225 ff.). Wildavsky’s theses are disputed (see the symposium discussion, 1989). He particularly ignores the possibility that large-scale technologies could create irreversibilities in entirely new proportions and that learning in the “trial and error” mode would scarcely work under such circumstances. On the other hand, it opens the door to a differentiated debate on “reality experiments” (see Gross et al. 2005). Another issue of contention is whether or not the logic of financial markets and resilience go hand in hand. Holling, for example, had introduced resilience in the area of ecology, as a counter-concept against (short-term) economic efficiency thinking. However, it can be said that Wildavsky’s resilience distinguishes itself as an alternative against a comprehensive securitisation. Instead of avoiding risks in the sense of prevention or precaution, he supports the thought of dealing with uncertainty and insecurity in a productive manner. After 9/11, a study originally written by Armory and Hunter Lovins in 1982 and commissioned by the Pentagon, was reissued. The new edition had a sound basis: Lovins and Lovins (1982) had determined the same basic concepts in relation to energy infrastructure, which ruled the post 9/11 discussion about the criticality of infrastructure (see Kaufmann 2012, pp. 115–124). Particularly important was the diagnosis, that infrastructure is enormously vulnerable: “brittle power” was the ambiguous title, referencing both energy and the political power of the U.S. The reason for this vulnerability, for which the energy supply network was a paradigmatic symbol, was to be found in the complexity of large-scale technologies and supply systems. Apollo spacecraft, nuclear power plants or electricity systems, it was argued, could not be understood in terms of a mechanistic tradition according to Newton, “in which most systems are linear (responding smoothly in proportion to the stimulus), reversible, and predictable” (Lovins and Lovins 1982, p. 190). On the contrary, the analysis of incidents, accidents and breakdowns showed that unexpected and unintended events and effects occurred in a similar manner to the ecological consequences of DDT and CFC use, or some of the unwanted social effects of urban planning. A long-standing crux of weak point analysis is the fact that, similar to ecological or social systems, there are countless “interactions, combinations, feedback loops, higher order consequences, and links across the system boundaries” (Lovins and Lovins 1982, p. 19). Referring to Holling, Lovins and Lovins bring resilience into play as a security strategy. In their study, resilience is explicitly understood as an alternative to police or military prevention and protection from, for example, terrorism or energy shortages. The concept aims for structural preparedness, security in the

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level of long-term resources, capacity and distribution, safety obtained via decentralized structures, the localization of networks and, in the area of energy, renewability. Thus resilience is placed on a fundamental level of industry and politics, different to that of dominant security policy programmes. A strengthening of infrastructure in the sense of “engineering resilience” not only sets different priorities. Studies—especially that of Charles Perrow (1987)— that more precisely detail which system components determine how accident prone large-scale technologies are, and carved out of the technical-theoretical argument that complex systems have, in principal, limits on technical safety. The attempt to ensure safety by adding technical system components increases the complexity of the systems and thereby actually enhances susceptibility to unexpected effects (Perrow 1987, p. 108 ff.). It is implicit that not only do other ­priorities have to be set for infrastructure safety, but that “engineering resilience” can be contrary to resilience as proposed by Lovins and Lovins. Perrow does not make a plea for classic forms of prevention but he argues to use precaution in specific cases, suggesting the abandonment technologies that are structurally too risky (1987, pp. 399–411). As such, resilience of infrastructure is now more closely connected to general industrial-political development, or even economic and political power conflicts, rather than incremental engineering solutions (see Pommerening 2007; Perelman 2007; Perrow 2007). Following Perrow, there is evidence of a second line of discussion about resilience. For Perrow, catastrophes are normal because system errors caused by unexpected interactions of diverse, small errors would be harmless in themselves. While Perrow focuses on the danger of systemic error, other studies under the heading of “High Reliability Organizations” work to find ways to deal with the question of how to ensure high-degree reliability for organisations that cannot learn through trial and error because they operate in high-risk environments or run high-risk systems (see Weick and Sutcliffe 2001; Schulman et al. 2004; de Bruijne and van Eeten 2004; Potthast 2007). Thus a discussion about inter- and intra-organisational hierarchies, responsibilities, coordination and communication, about forms of control, management and command measures and modes of operation enters the security debate. It revolves around the analysis of allocations of resources, redundancies, qualifications, roles, and others; in short: the question of resilience or preparedness becomes a question of work management. Based on this “alternative interpretation,” resilience would tend to be a counter-programme against prevention and pre-emption, as well as a counterprogramme against understanding security in a context of threats and the mobilisation of a homogeneous ‘we.’ To come back to a quote by Lentos & Rose, as a “widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective

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and material arrangements,” the creation and implementation of resilience would have always been part of social conflicts about such issues as industrial politics, progress, and work management. When this concept is expanded to include the question about social resilience in emergency and crisis situations, as raised in disaster research, the vocabulary used in social inequality research emerges: social, cultural and economic capital (see Cutter et al. 2003; Voss 2008, 2010). Resilience is being tied back to problems and themes of socio-cultural perspectives of development. Using engineering resilience and high-technology for security reasons could then be understood as specific tactics to broach the issue of its validity, its cost, and its conflict potential. The divine guardian of doors and gates who can see the future would be superfluous: dealing with uncertainty and insecurity would include countless practices that would keep raising the questions about the benefit and cost of security. At least though, a decision could be made to close the doors to the Janus temple.

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Kaufmann, Stefan  (Prof. Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Freiburg and Scientific Coordinator at the universities Centre for Security and Society. He was a Research Fellow at the ETH Zürich (2003–2006), Temporary Professor for Cultural Sociology at the University of Freiburg (2006–2007) and for Media Theory at the University of Siegen (2008–2010). His research focuses on security, warfare, violence, technology and organisation. He has led many national and international projects financed by third-party funds, especially in security research and is co-editor of the European Journal for Security Research. Relevant publications: Kaufmann, S. (2016). Security through technology? Logic, ambivalence and paradoxes of technologised security. European Journal for Security Research 1 (1), 77–95; Kaufmann, S. & Wichum, R. (2016). Risk and security: Diagnosis of the present in the context of (post-)modern insecurities. Historical Social Research 41 (1), 48–69.

Chances of ‘Resilience’ as a Concept for Sociological Poverty Research Markus Promberger, Lars Meier, Frank Sowa and Marie Boost

This article was developed in the framework of of the project “RESCuE – Patterns of Resilience during Socioeconomic Crises among Households in Europe” (see Promberger et al. 2014; Promberger 2017). The project has received funding under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research since March 1, 2014. The empirical data in sections 4 and 5 are based on secondary analysis of of earlier research projects (see footnote 2), and are to be understood as preliminary studies for the RESCuE project. We are grateful to Martin Endreß and Martin Kronauer for their discerning comments.

M. Promberger (*)  Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA), Nürnberg, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] L. Meier  Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaft und Kunst (HAWK), Holzminden, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] F. Sowa  Technische Hochschule, Nürnberg, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] M. Boost  Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) der Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA), Nurnberg, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_13

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1 The Multiple Crisis of Anti-Poverty Politics and Poverty Research If we take a look at the development of poverty in Germany over the last few decades, we have to notice several million people living in poverty since at least as early as the 1970s, irrespective of changes in economic situation, transformations in business structures, shifts in political paradigms, methods of fighting poverty or changes in the procedures for measuring poverty. Thus, although compensatory benefits have cushioned poverty successfully for the most part in Germany and other welfare states in the west, attempts to reduce poverty significantly have failed despite activation policies launched and implemented with promises of great success. If we share the European political goal of reducing poverty as extensively as possible—a component of the implicit sociopolitical consensus in Europe –, we have to admit that we are dealing with a fundamental and permanent crisis in the politics to fight poverty. This applies all the more so because poverty phenomena in Europe have increased in number and severity in the course of the economic and financial c­ risis— even if only slightly so in Germany. In the European Mediterranean countries especially, externally coinduced austerity politics, cuts in public budgets, particularly in the social sector, and the instability of business and labour markets form an unholy alliance. This results in significant dangers for the social cohesion of the affected countries and the solidarity of the European Union. In the current crisis, anti-poverty politics faces doubly tough conditions: on the one hand, it has to deal with a greater number of more serious poverty phenomena, and on the other, it is under increased pressure with regard to financing and legitimation due to the crisis. Poverty research has made some remarkable progress in the last few decades. First of all, the dynamic perspective has shown that exchange also occurs in poor populations in Germany, even if not everyone shares the same likelihood of rising from poverty, and even if someone does, this seldom lasts (Leisering 2008) and the rise from poverty is very rarely successful (Destatis and WZB 2013). A further finding resulting from these analyses is that poverty phenomena are also increasingly affecting the middle classes (Burkhardt et al. 2012)—which is clearly being confirmed by the Mediterranean countries at the moment (Eurostat 2013). Second, the correlation between gainful employment and poverty, which was already characteristic of early industrialised society, but had been outruled by the wage and social security developments in modern welfare capitalism is re-­emerging more clearly. The dismantling of the social security systems in the western welfare states and the triad of flexible business organisation, employment, the shift in macroeconomic distribution patterns, and the erosion of standard

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employment contract play a significant role in this. Despite all the dynamics of the decline into poverty and the rise out of it, and the spread of the threat of poverty to the middle classes, various studies show that it is particularly the more long-term poverty which is primarily a phenomenon among the lower social classes (income groups, education groups and occupational prestige groups), no matter whether it is a question of ‘perforated’ employment biographies containing frequent changes, a combination of bad jobs and the drawing of state benefits, or long-term unemployment and lack of resources and claiming of benefits (see, for example, Groh-Samberg 2009. Recent research results have also shown the very close proximity of many of those drawing basic social support benefits to employment, and their acceptance of the values of a work-orientated society in principle (Hirseland and Ramos Lobato 2010). However, so far poverty research has hardly been able to clarify the mechanisms to biographically get out of poverty and benefit recipiency after long periods of unemployment and neediness. Nor has it been able to explain why some—albeit few—households have managed to get by with very few state benefits or none at all, despite their relatively poor socioeconomic situation. Against the background of the growing, unresolved problem of poverty in Europe, there is a certain helplessness apparent in poverty sociology with regard to these open questions. What could contribute to the solution of these questions concerning poverty sociology and anti-poverty politics to fight poverty? In principle, socioeconomic, political and cultural factors could conceivably play a part in solving the problem of poverty—such as changes in distributional patterns relations, sociopolitical paradigms or putting economic and state actions into an ethical framework. If very little is known about which patterns of action and social mechanisms contribute to ending or avoiding poverty or reduce vulnerability on the micro level, however, the first priority for the time being is to continue to clarify the problem from a scientific standpoint. What should interest us in this article is a new type of analysis strategy that should produce new insights with regard to poverty and enable new practices for fighting and avoiding poverty. Ultimately it is a question of identifying and reconstructing how the unlikely can become reality in the light of the poverty research to date: how and under what conditions do some poor households, which are few in number, manage not only to survive with very few or no state benefits but to avoid or clearly attenuate the processes of loss of social status, declining health and skills, and loss of opportunity for inclusion which are normally connected to persistent poverty for the majority of the people sharing the same fate? If these issues are pursued, social policy research and poverty sociology will have to expand the scope of their questions. It is no longer only about representing

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the forms and extent of poverty and determining the factors involved in its occurrence and persistence. It is about how these poor preconditions can be surmounted in individual cases and what type of supportive sociopolitical measures could be contributed that go beyond mere maintenance. This involves the relatively new research principle of intra-group comparison (Solga et al. 2013) and the search for group members (such as the long-term unemployed) who experience events under certain circumstances which are unlikely for the group as a whole. Research like this should initially begin with the extension of the conceptual starting point. Here it would seem appropriate to test the term ‘resilience’ for its applicability for sociology and sociological poverty research, which we will deal with in the following section, as the term has only very partially been used in sociology to date.

2 History, Development and Demarcation of the Term ‘Resilience’ Resilience is a complex term which has been adopted by various scientific disciplines and cannot help its growing popularity. With regard to its history, three sources of the concept can be identified in technology, psychology and ecosystem research. Resilience has been used to describe a special feature of material in the fields of technology and materials since the 1960s. The characteristic of resilient material is that after strain or interference it returns or springs back to its original condition due to its flexibility, pliability and durability. However, it seems as if concepts like elasticity and flexibility have replaced the concept of resilience in technology, or have at least added to it. In the humanities and social sciences, resilience was used for the first time in psychology, following Viktor Frankl’s studies of prisoners from concentration camps. This was later followed by research into child poverty and child abuse, where the concept is still applied today (­Eitinger 1964; Frankl 1959; McMurray et al. 2008; Rutter 1999; Werner 1977). Here, resilience is always a rare, exceptional phenomenon in events and circumstances which normally create trauma and grave suffering among the affected. The concept of resilience has not only been taken up by neuropsychology (Greenberg 2006) and medical anthropology (Eeuwiji and Obrist 2006), but has also diffused into other fields which address the adaptive capacity of individuals (Bonanno 2004; Butler et al. 2007) or communities from a psychological perspective (Luthar and Zelazo 2003; Norris et al. 2008). Developmental psychology denotes as resilience the exceptional phenomenon that “people develop into psychologically sound individuals despite stress and strain in childhood which is often extreme, or recover quickly from severe trauma without any signs of permanent damage” (Nuber 1995, p. 76). This refers

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to the capacity that enables some children “to overcome strong emotional distress, unusual risks to development and to live through trauma ‘more intact’ than would have been expected” (Zander 2011a, p. 9). These protective factors are installed as individual personality traits (Schumacher et al. 2005) and are also the result of the child’s interaction with its social environment. In this respect they represent social resources to successfully overcome great risks (Nettles et al. 2000). Therefore, researchers in the field of psychology and also in the adjacent disciplines of educational science and social pedagogy are searching for factors that promote resilience (protective factors), and those that increase the occurrence of mental health problems (risk factors) (Lösel et al. 1992; Sturzbecher and Dietrich 2012; Werner 1999; Zander 2011b). Analysing the resilience of children and teenagers draws the focus away from the deficits and troubles which occur in their development and directs it towards the observation of their positive powers of resistance and their strengths. These studies on resilience have practical relevance for aiding children, teenagers and families (Alicke 2012; Hildenbrand 2010; Messer 2012; Theis-Scholz 2012; Uslucan 2010). In this connection, resilience research can be seen as a turning away from a deficit-based approach. In ecosystem research, resilience has been used to analyse the stability of socio-ecological systems since the 1970s. Here it is defined as a characteristic which enables a system to return to its prior state or to preserve a specific state after suffering a shock (Brand et al. 2011; Folke et al. 2002; Holling 1973, 1996). Thus, resilience describes a system’s capacity “to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2004). The dynamics of the ecosystem are emphasised here: “But resilience is not only about being persistent or robust to disturbance. It is also about the opportunities that disturbance opens up in terms of recombination of evolved structures and processes, renewal of the system and emergence of new trajectories” (Folke 2006). In many approaches of human ecology and cultural anthropology, ecological resilience is tied to human actions, and therefore the development of an analytical relationship between social and ecological resilience is also strived for (Adger 2000; Nuttall 2009). Here, social resilience describes the “ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental change” (Adger 2000, p. 347). Thus, social resilience is the result of social, political and environmental change processes. Disaster research shares a similar understanding of the term (Lorenz 2013; Voss 2010). Here, to a certain extent as a spillover of ecosystem research, resilience appears as a phenomenon that describes a type of specific human reaction to the occurrence of natural disasters like earthquakes, droughts, floods, storms or

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climate change (Bara 2011; Bürkner 2010; de Bremond and Engle 2014; ­Kassam et al. 2011; McCarthy and Martello 2005). Furthermore, in the field of civil safety, resilience signifies disaster precautions. In terms of safety management, systems, processes and organisations should be prepared for disaster in a way that allows them to be less vulnerable and able to deal with unpredictable events, critical situations and insecurity (Kaufmann 2012; Kaufmann and Blum 2012, 2013). The idea that state intervention alone can establish complete protection from disaster is now seen as outdated. In fact citizens are now given responsibility regarding the development of resilience strategies and are involved in setting up safety precautions (Kaufmann 2012). The disciplines of geography and political geography have also discovered the term ‘resilience,’ for instance when analysing the resilience of towns and cities in the face of disasters (Manyena 2006) or terrorism (Coaffee et al. 2009), the economic resilience of regions (Lukesch et al. 2010; Simmie and Martin 2010), or concerning town planning studies (Bürkner 2010; Raco and Street 2012; Xiao and Zandt 2012). What these approaches have in common is that they take a socio-spatial perspective, where it is assumed that “the manner in which acting subjects perceive, anticipate and raise public consciousness about hazards varies in its social and spatial distinction” (Christmann et al. 2011, p. 1). However, there is only sporadic investigation into the origin of social resilience as the result of collective, community or social developments. In this regard, there is one particular binational study that examines the effects of welfare support on the development of the health of people living in poverty, and which also mentions resilience in passing (Jones et al. 2006). The reactions of communities to change are also analysed, under the label of “community resilience” (Amundsen 2012; Batty and Cole 2010). In cultural anthropology, the concept of resilience also arises when research is conducted into the collective types of behaviour of threatened indigenous peoples (Borrini-Feyerabend et al. 2004; Posey 1999). In all of these contexts, resilience is understood as people’s capacity to recover from negative influences faster than expected, or to survive or cope with growing adversity of their context with more stability, quality of life and well-being or less damage than would be expected in the circumstances. Resilience is therefore a special, unlikely development that clearly and positively deviates from a development which would generally be expected; resilience is the exception rather than the rule. According to the humanities and social science literature, resilience develops and has an effect in a complex interaction of general conditions, resources, factors and capacities within and between people and environments.

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3 The Term ‘Resilience’ and Problems with its Application in Sociology In sociology, the application of the term ‘resilience’ is still comparatively underdeveloped. The term frequently appears to be vague and difficult to operationalise (Luthar et al. 2000; Mohaupt 2008). In the context of his investigations into handling transformational processes, Bruno Hildenbrand (2008) attempted to describe resilience as a relational and process-related term: relational, because resilience cannot arise or develop without strain and failure; process-related, because it is built up interactively. In the end, however, the perspective selected remained a clinical sociological one with more of a psychotherapeutic focus (see Welter-Enderlin and Hildenbrand 2006). Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont made the attempt to determine social resilience more precisely (Hall and Lamont 2013b). They define social resilience “in dynamic terms, not as the capacity to return to a prior state but as the achievement of well-being even when that entails significant modifications to behavior. At issue is the capacity of individuals or groups to secure favorable outcomes (material, symbolic, emotional) under new circumstances and, if need be, by new means” (2013a, p. 13). In this definition it becomes clear that for individuals and communities resilience cannot mean “springing back” to the original state after a crisis. In fact, challenges are overcome and well-being is restored through the practice of modified behaviour. In other words, as human action is that of adapting and coping, and is always accompanied by processes of analysis and reflection, the people involved will have changed after going through a crisis, if only due to their experiences and other prerequisites for decision-making. In this respect, a return to the original state is impossible1 ; at least if one includes the inner state of the people involved—which is necessary from an action theory standpoint. A sociological approach to resilience focuses accordingly on social action, social practices and knowledge, collective patterns of analysis, action and orientation, and on resources, whether social, cultural, economic or institutional, which can be mobilised to ensure or restore well-being. This orientation towards resources instead of deficits was inspired by the model of auto-salutogenesis or health maintenance (Antonovsky 1987). While it used to be usual to focus on risks, bad health and illness, it was now a person’s resources and skills which

1However,

research into technology and materials or psychology has also established that there is not a complete return to the original state (see Steinheuser 2009).

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were to be observed. Hence it is no longer the emergence of illness but the emergence of health which is now of interest for research (Lindström and Eriksson 2005). Resilience is frequently understood as the positive counterpart to vulnerability (Bender and Lösel 1998; Gabriel 2005). However, this does not refer to the robustness of a system or of social units. Robustness implies that crises have no effect on individuals or communities and that the social units are immune to the disruption, so that a shock situation cannot even occur. However, resilience is always relational and requires a crisis as a reference. The terms “inertness” or “lethargy,” on the other hand, assume inactive social units that are passively and just reacting on external influences in a slow or delayed way. Instead, resilient social units experience and overcome the crisis as active entities. They reflect on and redefine their practice, and reassess experiences, patterns of interpretation and resources. Resilience is dependent on processes which are experienced by individuals or communities and which lead to a change in patterns of interpretation, action and orientation. Therefore, resilience must also always be regarded as a chronological process: resilience develops in a process of crisis management by the social units. To some extent, it is also always necessary for social systems to have the capacity to adapt to the environment in crisis. Adaptability refers to the “capacity of any human system, from the individual to humankind, to increase (or at least maintain) the quality of life of its individual members in a given environment or range of environments” (Gallopín 2006, p. 300). Hence, a process of experiencing crises, reflection, realigning actions, and coping takes place. It is a process which happens in stages but is interlinked. One decisive question with regard to resilience focuses on the specific resources which contribute to its development. Experiencing and reflecting on crises may lead to the mobilisation of resources which have so far been latent or inactive, and which make it possible to find ways out of the crisis. Resources like this can be economic, social and cultural, they can be produced or acquired (personalised) in individuals and families due to their family history and socialisation, or they can exist externally, in structures and institutions. The mobilisation and use of resources leads to the development of resilient practices—social, cultural and economic practices which, in the best cases, can lead to crises being overcome or well-being being safeguarded or restored. In the literature, these ­circumstances are discussed as a central theme under the term “coping”: In general, psychological and social coping seem to relate to two types of etiological agents: Loss events which deprive the individual of a loved object or role seem to call for the reconstitution of the person’s perception that the world is meaningful, i.e. ‘grief work’ is required as an adequate form of dealing with the loss. The second

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provoking agent – long-term difficulties – seems to call for a different type of coping. Manipulation of and appeal for help to outside sources such as friends, welfare agencies, employing organizations, etc., are required, i.e. attempts at changing one’s social rather than psychological world. These are here referred to as social coping. (Gerhardt 1979, p. 208)

Hence, social coping is possible when the perception of social units or their social world changes due to the usage of external resources. Successful forms of coping behaviour or coping patterns are therefore resilient practices per se. The term ‘resilience’ therefore not only overlaps with resistance and adaptability, but also with the term “coping.” Resilience as a sociological term is based on an active, relational, processrelated, reflexive and praxeological understanding that breaks away from the exclusive observation of psychosocial factors originating from the person (individual personal characteristics) and regards the resilient individual as embedded in a specific social, temporal and spatial context (Keck und Sakdapolrak 2013). It therefore assumes a social individual and explains the social with the social (Émile Durkheim). To put this into practice, we suggest expanding the term ‘resilience.’ Debates on path dependencies as well as on the structure-agency nexus need to be included into the concept of resilience (Dagdeviren et al. 2016). To do so, we use the dimensions of sociality and temporality here as examples.

3.1 The Sociality of Resilience Human beings are fundamentally different from ecosystems or materials: they think, reflect and experience things and events in a way that influences their future actions. Moreover, they can never be considered independently of human communities, groups or any form of social relationship—this was already shown by Viktor Frankl’s studies of concentration camp prisoners. This creates a further argument to support the idea that resilience cannot be considered independently of external, social and socially conveyed influential factors. In psychology in particular, on the other hand, resilience is mostly understood as a personal trait whose characteristic resources are primarily acquired in the process of socialisation and familially conveyed—as the research into resilient children in connection with violence has shown, for example. Furthermore, forming a sociological term must not exclude the social genesis and conveyance of those resources which occur outside the people and families affected, but must include them empirically. This is true for language, knowledge and education, for example, but also for the use of

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generally accessible economic resources. The acquisition and mobilisation of such resources occurs as part of the family history and individual socialisation. On the other hand, the term ‘resilience’ would lose its specific power of explanation if it were exclusively defined by external factors, as it is generally always a question of a system—environment relationship in which the system or subject exhibits an agency based on certain opportunities for action, even if these opportunities for action were learned or acquired by the person or family at an earlier juncture. If resilience as described above is produced socially, is shown in individuals and households and, in the best case, can contribute to coping with or overcoming a crisis situation, a sociological examination leads straight to the question of the social consequences of resilience (Revilla et al. 2018). There are several positive examples in the literature—such as those from disaster research or the studies of the resilience of communities. These are studies where it is particularly the positive relevance of the social which becomes clear and where resilience appears as a community practice, as the social fabric of the community and its resilience are more than the sum of its individuals and their resilient practices (Norris et al. 2008). On the other hand, negative consequences of resilience are certainly conceivable for the resilient social units—for instance, if the increased, short-term use of a resource involves the impairment of its long-term availability in the course of time. This can range from banal things like selling a family’s only laying hen to going without education in favour of taking a job straightaway. Furthermore, resilient practices of one group can have a detrimental effect on another group’s opportunities for action, for instance with regard to the overuse of natural resources. However, to what extent to exogenous and endogenous factors contribute to a person’s resilience? From the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge, these two factors cannot just be seen separately, but are included as a kind of coalition in the prevailing discussion or knowledge system. On the other hand, this coalition is fragile, as it contains inconsistencies between internal and external structures and practices. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain resilient practices which stand in close proximity or even in opposition to institutional structures, such as moonlighting, bartering or the unauthorised use of public goods. Therefore, to comprehend resilience from a sociological standpoint, it is necessary to take a look at both aspects. Thus, resilience describes individual practices or practices specific to small groups which are related to institutional practices and structures and can only be understood in this context, but which can simultaneously also include both non-intended practices and those standing in opposition to the external structures within one system of reference.

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3.2 The Temporal Context of Resilience Resilience is a process-related phenomenon. It has a history, and does not h­ appen suddenly or randomly. Two dimensions can be distinguished concerning the relevance of time. First, practices of resilience occur in a certain historical context with specific structures, knowledge systems and institutions, as described above, for instance as part of a specific regulation regime. Accordingly, practices of resilience have time-related specifics and are only to be understood in this context. Second, individual practices of resilience have a history. They can be based on biographical knowledge and experience which is related to the knowledge of our ancestors (or a collective, identity-related store of knowledge) and their economic, cultural and social capital. This can be reflected in today’s practices in the sense of the historical perspective in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1987, 1982). From a sociological point of view, the practices of resilience by individual people are therefore to be seen as not only biographically based but also as part of the specific historical tradition of a social group or a (real or imagined) community. As we understand it, resilience thus describes the phenomenon of microsocial units adapting to change and critical conditions—a phenomenon which was unlikely, exceptional, comparatively successful and was not to be expected, and which caused relatively little damage in the sense of coping or resistance by mobilisation of the person’s or group’s own resources or external resources of different kinds. Internal (learned during the person’s life) and external (historically developed) resources and skills are significant here, and can be economic, social and cultural in nature. Under given and changeable basic conditions, and with their own interpretations and attitudes, which also develop and are distinct from resources and skills, resilient social units develop their own strategies, practices and habits which may lead to changes in the social unit itself or in its environment. In any case, they give rise to a better, or maybe even stable or sustainable situation under critical or adverse conditions where, precisely because of these conditions, the opposite would have been expected and, empirically speaking, would have been the rule.

4 Case Examples: Poverty and Resilience from a Sociological Perspective In the following, we test how far the term ‘resilience’ is actually suitable for expanding the sociological language used to describe poverty. The aim is to explain improbable cases where latent or previously unused resources can be tapped to enable those affected to develop practices to maintain their emotional

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stability and their capacity to act despite the adverse environment, and to make adjustments to overcome the biographical poverty crisis or cushion its effects.2 To analyse these, we first selected two cases that represented contrasting types of poverty: one case of hardened poverty, where little resilience is in evidence, and one case where a person copes with poverty and rises out of it successfully due to patterns of resilient action.

4.1 Case 1: Descent and Setting in of Poverty Entering and remaining in unemployment, poverty and the drawing of income from basic social support systems brings with it the likelihood that health will deteriorate, social integration will decline, material deprivation and further

2The first three case examples in this section (Mr Forstmann, Mr Meggle and Ms Albert) come from the “Poverty dynamics and labour market” project, a qualitative panel of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) financed by the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs as research according to Section 55 SGB (Social Code Book) II and conducted in cooperation with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS) and the Munich Institute for Sociological Research (Promberger et al. 2007; Hirseland and Ramos Lobato 2010). As part of this study, 150 participants drawing basic security benefits (at times) were questioned in narrative interviews up to four times at yearly intervals. For the first two case examples, we analysed the interviews, participants’ observations and intermediate evaluations (case profiles, longitudinal profiles) of waves one to four (2007–2011). We have restricted quotes then given as examples to the interviews from the first wave due to reasons of economy. The interviews from the first wave include biographical narratives from the past, which generally go back to the year 2000, and often further back than that. The cases of Forstmann and Meggle were selected against the background of an intragroup comparison of males in poverty who had been drawing basic security benefits for a long time, whose lives had developed differently and whose prospects differed within these parameters. Gender, marital status and family of origin are comparatively similar in order not to increase the complexity of the representation unnecessarily. However, in the sense of grounded theory, they would of course have to be introduced as contrast dimensions in the further course of the analysis. The other cases arose out of the fieldwork for a student’s research seminar at the Institute for Sociology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen in the winter semester of 2006/2007 (taught by A. Bosch, A. Hirseland, U. Wenzel and M. Promberger). In order to remain within the scope of this article, we completely omitted all representations of primary materials in favour of condensed extracts from case profiles—with the exception of Meggle’s case. The case profiles, on the other hand, are condensed, reflexive and cross validated interpretations of the cases and extracts from the observation reports. All the names of the interviewees have been changed and all personal data and data regarding times and places have been anonymized, defamiliarised or simplified.

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social exclusion will increase, and earning-related qualifications and the chances of being given paid employment will decline over the course of time (see Groh-Samberg 2009; Leibfried and Voges 1992; Leisering and Buhr 2012). At the time of the final interview (2010), Mr Forstmann is 30 years old. After his parents’ divorce early on—the mother was addicted to medication—he grew up with his father. At the age of 19, he married his girlfriend, a care assistant, when they were expecting their first child, which was quickly followed by two other children. After receiving his school-leaving certificate from the Hauptschule, he never managed to enter the job market for any length of time, despite various measures—most of which he did not complete –, training courses and employment relationships on a trial basis. His low level of school education, his lack of vocational training and the poor labour market opportunities for the very low qualified play a role here. Forstmann and his wife were repeatedly unemployed, in poor health, in debt and hard-pressed for money, so that they occasionally went begging to buy food for their children. After they had moved several times and due to tensions between them and their families of origin, the family was socially isolated and hardly left the flat which the landlord had let them have for a reasonably small sum. The family broke apart after about six years, the couple separated, and the sickly children, some of whom were undernourished, were sent to different foster homes. In the interviews there are clear signs of the strain of parenthood, poverty and debt. After the separation, Forstmann lived for a time in an unheated, half-renovated flat in an old building. At the time of the last interview in 2010, Forstmann had a new partner and was living with her. He was suffering from heart trouble, was still very much in debt and lived on basic income support benefits and earnings from occasional jobs. His positive vision of the future consists of regaining his health, a better, “reliable” reputation at the job centre and getting a paid job. In Forstmann’s history, his attempts to cope with the bad situation are repeatedly interrupted by drastic breaks during the observation period of 2000 to 2010 (serious illnesses, terms of imprisonment, homelessness). For instance, he worked for an electrical retailer, took over the business when the retailer gave it up, but had to give it up himself due to a term in prison. Moonlighting, unsuccessful petty crime and short-term jobs as a warehouse assistant or delivering leaflets alternate with long periods of illness and repeated terms in prison. After the break-up of his family, his resources are limited to a slowly growing network of helpful friends in similar situations, the friendly relationship to his former wife, his technical IT skills, his will to improve his situation, and ultimately his new relationship as well. His growing network of friends contributes to compensating for extreme states of emergency (isolation, homelessness and hunger), but so far it has not been able to help him cope with his other problems

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(debt, unemployment). With regard to the current literature, one could refer to the sociostructural homogeneity and social homophily of his friendship network. Forstmann’s continuous economic activities do not represent adequate resources either. Although he could scarcely be described as idle or inactive in line with the prevailing prejudice with regard to poverty, his activities as an electrical retailer, casual worker and petty swindler hardly lead to relieving his situation in the longterm. Nevertheless, his recent psychosocial situation is a little more stable than at the time his family broke apart, which marks the lowest point of his life so far. The first case illustrated here is an example of a constellation where the cumulative social problems of ongoing dependency on welfare benefits, a ­problematic situation of repeated crises, poor health, the erosion of temporal structures in day-to-day life, isolation and lack of perspective set in and become a stagnating or downward-spiralling “career of poverty” (see Ludwig 1996, for example, concerning the term “career of poverty” and similar case examples). This case represents the counterpart to the following empirical representation of resilience in situations of poverty.

4.2 Case 2: Recovering from and Overcoming Poverty Independently Mr Meggle was born in South Germany in 1958. After receiving his Realschule school-leaving certificate, he successfully completed an apprenticeship in the food trade and subsequently became a master craftsman. As he was soon not able to continue on this path due to an occupational disease, however, he switched to the construction industry, where he began an apprenticeship which he likewise completed as a master craftsman. He subsequently started up his own construction firm with a relative. Parallel to this self-employed activity he returned to education to get his Abitur [A-Levels], and then rapidly completed a degree in civil engineering. After his studies, he worked as a self-employed construction manager for many years. He also worked in Eastern Europe for some years, which is where he met his wife. In 1995 he returned to Germany with his wife and their first child and continued his self-employed activities in an East German city. His second child was born during this period. In around the year 2000, the business situation deteriorated significantly. Meggle therefore moved his self-employed activities to a medium-sized town in the south of Germany and moved his family there as well. At the same time, however, he became seriously ill due to strains on his health which were typical of his trade, and could not work at all for almost an entire year. In the course of this year he lost his self-employed livelihood and had

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to apply for basic income support after a short time. He and his family were still supported by his parents. Although his health was still suffering, he took a job as a construction manager with a landscape gardener’s business in 2001. However, after three years he lost his job at the end of 2004 due to the lack of business, and after claiming ALG I [unemployment benefit] for a year, he then drew ALG II (basic income support). At that time he first worked as a voluntary lecturer at a university and eventually took a mini-job as a cleaner for a property management firm. In this firm he was offered a job as regional manager in December 2006. When the first interview took place, in 2007, he was working there parttime (50%) as a regional manager. His wife was unemployed and the family drew ALG II benefits to top up their income. By the second interview, in February 2008, Meggle’s job was three-quarters of a full-time job and he was now a regional manager for the whole of South Germany and the closer neighbouring countries. However, as his income was relatively small, he and his family still had to rely on basic income support to top it up to the minimum of subsistence. By the third interview, in September 2009, he was no longer claiming any state support benefits, as he had been working full-time for his company since as far back as July 2008, and had meanwhile moved up to become Acting Managing Director. Furthermore, his wife had also been working part-time for the company since May 2008. Barely a year after taking on his full-time job, the interviewee had an accident which forced him to undergo a major surgical operation. After that he was on sick leave for a long period, but still continued to work—albeit mostly from home. As Meggle then reported in the last interview, in January 2011, the firm went bankrupt at the beginning of 2010 and was taken over by another firm. However, both he and his wife remained in employment there. In this course of this he was promoted to branch manager, so that in the meantime he has a permanent contract and is responsible for around 400 employees. Meggle is work-­ orientated and success-orientated, although not in the material and instrumental sense, but by his personal interest in challenging and interesting tasks—as is shown by his lecturing and by other part-time work in the construction industry (some of which was unpaid), whose revenue he sees in the gaining of experience, in making contacts and in avoiding stigma. In his dealings with social welfare services Meggle is exceptionally self-confident and discerning. With regard to jobs and measures he rapidly takes on an unusual amount of responsibility—­ filling in for the sick lecturer at the application training at the job centre, and working his way quickly up from a precariously employed winter service driver to department manager and even to branch manager at the property management firm. He processes setbacks and losses in professional status quickly and pragmatically. When he starts work for the property management company after being a

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self-employed construction manager and then falling ill, and quickly moves up the ladder to a senior post, even though his income is still low, he summarises this as follows: Of course, it’s not my absolute dream job, but in principle it makes no difference whether I’m a construction manager now and jump around after the lads or whether I do the job [in the property management firm; authors’ note] and jump around after the lads. The business is the same, only in terms of thinking, it’s much easier of course, because I’m used to something completely different, aren’t I? But I just say,’OK, things aren’t going to stay like this, I can still look for something else while I’m at it,’ can’t I? For me it’s easy to just say, right, that’s my future.

What causes and enables the unlikely to become reality for Meggle—adapting, coping and finally leaving poverty behind despite serious and repeated illnesses, unemployment and advanced age? Meggle’s resources are unusual: in comparison with what would be to be expected statistically speaking, he differs with regard to his surplus of education, his surplus of motivation, his attitude concerning activity, his orientation towards opportunity and his willingness to accept things. He also differs regarding his self-reliance or Eigensinn, his capacity to transform situations and use social relationships, and his stable family. In the context of the previous considerations of the term ‘resilience,’ Meggle, his family and his patterns of action can justifiably be described as resilient.

4.3 An ‘Entrepreneurial’ Type of Resilience in Poverty With several training qualifications, including an academic qualification, Meggle not only has good education resources at his disposal, but also acts in line with his active attitude to life and his active identity. He is able to use his management and organisational experience whether he is taking part in measures or taking on new jobs. Meggle actively grasps market and social opportunities which offer themselves and weighs up their short-term and long-term use. His high degree of flexibility when changing occupations is not least fed by a great learning capacity, a willingness to educate himself, and curiosity: while he was in employment, Meggle returned to education to do his Abitur and he is still continuing his education by reading or researching on the Internet. In addition to this he occasionally works as a construction consultant (with or without payment) to keep his old experience fresh, to be able to pass it on and to experience new things. When changing occupations he also accepts temporary losses of professional status—in his current firm he started out as a winter service driver, for example—and sees

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what connects different tasks rather than what separates them. When he was getting through the crises concerning his health and then his financial situation, the (“one hundred percent”) support of his parents and his own family helped him— something that he himself describes as not common (“one man I knew, studied mechanical engineering, separated from his wife, children stayed away, hanged himself after one year”). Meggle, according to his account, protected himself from the dangers of social stigmatisation in his local environment that go hand in hand with poverty and unemployment by mentioning his extra activities as a freelance civil engineer, which he had always done from home. Meggle’s resources consist of education, professional skills and knowledge that are transferable beyond the limits of the profession, professional experience, management experience and corresponding social competences, loose networks of former customers and employers from different professions and industries, and not least the stable support of his family. His markedly clear and positive fundamental attitude despite illnesses and crises, his high degree of local and professional flexibility, his entrepreneurial, opportunity-orientated identity, and a hefty dose of pragmatism allow him to mobilise and implement these resources again and again in changing and sometimes extremely adverse crisis situations. It is obvious that Meggle can be described as resilient with regard to poverty, unemployment and crises in his employment history. So what does Meggle’s case reveal with respect to a sociological observation of resilience? Contrary to statistical expectations, Meggle copes with several concurrences of negative health developments and crises in his employment history, such as poverty and losing his job. He manages to use and mobilise his wide range of knowledge and educational resources which he has gained during his life, and different professional backgrounds and experience. This is made easier or even made possible by his social and entrepreneurial skills, flexibility and pragmatism, a discerning, reflective and opportunity-orientated fundamental attitude, a non-instrumental work ethic and the support of his nuclear family and family of origin. Meggle is therefore not the only one of his kind in the IAB Panel ‘poverty dynamics’ sample, but represents a type. The combination of educational and relationship resources—cultural and social capital, to use the Bourdieu terminology, with a markedly active business attitude is typical of this type. It is a question of socially produced and socially relevant characteristics here and not of purely individual psychological ones: for a long time greater educational resources have generally been seen as highly preventative with regard to poverty and unemployment (pars pro toto, Allmendinger and Leibfried 2002). Social resources, particularly stable families and farther-reaching weak ties which extend beyond homogeneous social environments have a positive effect:

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the former with respect to psychosocial stability, and the latter with respect to the chances of finding a new job, being promoted or earning a higher income.3 His active, opportunity-orientated fundamental attitude deserves special attention. In the literature there are terms to be found to describe this, such as the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Bröckling 2007) or the ‘worker entrepreneur’ (Voss and Pongratz 1998). In the more specific poverty literature, the term ‘active creator’ was coined (Ludwig 1996, p. 241 ff.). Both Bröckling and Voss and Pongratz strongly associate the finding of an entrepreneurial attitude with modern images of professions (IT, advertising), with flexible organisations that accentuate flexibility and self-responsibility as a management principle, and a post-industrial economic structure and subjectifying working culture. On the other hand, similar professional business orientations have been found among worker entrepreneurs since the early modernity, and also among artists and tradespeople (see Promberger 2012, p. 35 ff. for details). The same applies to Meggle, who tends to change from the classic self-employed person to a manager, then to a simple, flexible and precarious worker, rather than fitting in with the image of the subjectified worker in a large, flexible organisation. In contrast to Richard Sennett’s flexible people, whose unstable social situation contributes to an unstable identity and way of life and thus to the corrosion of their character (“The Corrosion of Character” was the original title of Sennett’s book 1998), or their shift towards entrepreneurial identities postulated by Pongratz and Voss (1998), Meggle retains his self-employed tradesman identity as a worker-entrepreneur throughout the poverty crisis in his life and uses it to climb the career ladder in a property services firm, which should actually be a prime example of an atypical, even precarious work context.

4.4 Further Examples and First Outlines of a Typology of Resilience in Poverty However, the scope of resilience in poverty is not limited to this active, entrepreneurial type, which, despite all self-willedness, still fits into the normative image of the “active working citizen” (Promberger 2009, p. 610) which has been engraved in the social reforms since 2001. The first outline of an ‘ascetic’ type of resilience in poverty can likewise be identified. The consumer behaviour of this type

3Avery

(2006) and Seidel et al. (2000) provide a selective overview of this comprehensive research, which goes back to Granovetter (1973).

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corresponds to a critical, anti-consumerism, ecologically and social movementsoriented subculture (Sinus 2013), but without being able to have recourse to the economic means of this environment. In similar cases outlined briefly below, an ascetic way of life is combined with critical attitudes towards consumerism and society, based on alternative religious or political value systems: Ms Albert is in her mid-40 s, has been unemployed for 10 years and lives in a small, sparsely furnished apartment which she takes care to keep tidy in an area of council housing in the north of [name of a city in southern Germany]. What first catches the eye is a PC covered with a cloth and a carefully laid coffee table, where the interview will take place. In the corner of the room there is a figure of a Buddha with joss sticks and a flower in a vase in front of it. There is no television or stereo system. In the interview, Albert proves to be a person who thinks before she acts or replies. She lives alone and, according to the information she provides, copes well with her basic social support benefits. One of the key issues she addresses in the interview is her calmly delivered criticism of the egocentric and destructive nature of modern social and economic relations. Ms Albert meditates every day, is a vegetarian, fasts regularly, goes for walks and reads a great deal. Mr Baumann, who is in his late 40 s, shows the interview team his favourite personal things: a very worn pair of jeans and a pair of trainers which are not in much better condition. He received industrial-technical vocational training in the printing sector, is a union member and, according to his own information, is a not particularly committed member of an unemployment initiative. He lost his job several years ago when his firm closed down. Baumann lives in a sparsely furnished council flat and sees himself as a radical oppositionist and consumer critic. He generally eats frugally and vegetarian. He only eats meat once every couple of weeks, but “when it’s meat, then it’s from the organic shop.” Baumann goes jogging every day for several hours, in all weathers. He regards people who “go to work in a suit” every day as contemptible or pitiable (“poor guys”), because they cannot buy health or clarity of political thinking despite their money, and he is definitely much more athletic than they are. They are kinds of slaves to consumerism and ownership, while he is “free,” according to his own words. The characteristic resources of this ‘ascetic’ type are not so much knowledge or education, but more the capacity to reinterpret one’s own situation according to one’s own ideas or find alternative interpretations for it, create social contexts as a framework and mobilise cultural frames of reference or value orientations other than that of the ‘successful working citizen’—in our cases religiousness, criticism of consumerism, ecology, vegetarianism and criticism of capitalism. The question is whether this reinterpretation according to one’s own ideas can fittingly be described as a resource, or whether it is not more a skill attributable to the person

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or small group to redefine and make use of situations, deal with resources in a different way or mobilise other resources. At the same time—and this would have to be tested in further analysis—the form of ascetism we observed is a reversal of social positions to a certain extent: in view of the practice of ascetism and abstinence which also has sacral connotations, those who are not willing or able to practise ascetism and maintain their profane practice of consumerism now have to come up with moral justification for their actions, while in a working and market society, on the other hand, there is a huge pressure for the poor and the unemployed to justify themselves (see Geremek 1991; Zoll 1984). Another type of resilience in poverty situations which has revealed itself is characterised by a strong community orientation. In these communities—neighbourhoods, parishes or the environment of charity-, church- or union based support centres and initiatives for the unemployed, mutual aid and practical solidarity are mixed with a gift and barter economy and the resources of welfare state institutions and charities. Ms Brunner is in her mid-50 s and is a long-term unemployed, divorced cook with four children—two grown up and two of school age. The two oldest children, who meanwhile have their own households, also visit her frequently. Brunner cooks four days a week in a café for the unemployed, close to a council estate, partly as a ‘one-euro job’ and partly without payment. When she cooks there, her younger children come by for lunch and stay in the café afterwards to do their homework. The café premises were provided by the city, the furnishings were donated, and lunch costs one euro and is supported by donations from a charity organisation. Many people go to the café for the unemployed, particularly at lunchtime. They talk to each other, exchange information, give or receive advice and can read one of the newspapers provided. Ms Brunner plays a key role in what goes on in the café. She emphasises that her family and being together are the most important thing for her personally and make her happy. Her principle is that you help each other, whether in the family or the neighbourhood, “in their quarter.” If there is something you no longer need, you give it away. If someone needs something, you help them, whether it is with needle and thread, hammer and pliers or practical knowledge concerning the household, health or bringing up children. Mr Zwickl is in his early 60 s. He is a former truck driver who was dismissed after a road accident, and comes from a poor Catholic farming family. He lives free of charge over the workshop of a friend, for whom he works as a caretaker on the business premises—likewise for free. Zwickl is a member of a local parochial social initiative, where he is the “general dogsbody”—he is sometimes in charge of the cash, takes care of the club room, gives advice to new people seeking help, and supports them “as a friend.” The parochial social initiative connects those affected—particularly the long-term unemployed and those drawing basic social support benefits—with community members who are better situated and who not

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only give donations but also, together with experienced unemployed people, provide practical support in the search for a job or a flat, or at the job centre. Zwickl is a sportsman and a motorbike fan and feels strongly committed to the values of the Christian workers’ movement. As he says himself, friendship, solidarity and helping each other are his purpose in life, which he shares with a network of likeminded friends and acquaintances. Knowledge, which does not necessarily have to be currently relevant to the labour market but which serves to improve the quality of life, goods and s­ ervices— also not primarily marketable—are the resources of this type of resilience in the face of poverty. Added to this are the networks of extended family, friends, acquaintances and neighbours in which these resources are produced, ­ shared, exchanged as gifts and also occasionally consumed together. Values and convictions like solidarity, sharing and friendship, which have nothing to do with the market economy or the working society and which it is very difficult to turn into commodities, are the cultural frame of interpretation. Talents concerning communication and relationships are the skills which help people to tap these resources. In this first analysis, it is not only education, willingness to adapt and an entrepreneurial personality which emerge as possible resources, attitudes and practices of resilience which make the unlikely become reality—coping with poverty in a stable and satisfactory life without the usually associated social and psychological damage. It is also abstinence and ascetism, alternative ideals, exchanging gifts, community orientation, voluntary work and alternative economic activities. Here, too, typical resources—social networks and an economy of gift exchange and sharing, partially subsidised by the welfare state and charity institutions, and technical and domestic knowledge—can be distinguished from the capacity to mobilise, cultivate and build up these resources. As unlikely as resilience is in poverty situations: although they must certainly be differentiated and extended in the course of further analysis, the first outlines of a typology of resilience in the face of poverty are emerging: an entrepreneurial, an ascetic and a communityorientated type are taking shape.

5 Recourse to the Term ‘Resilience,’ and Outlook Different aspects of resilience in the face of poverty, which were outlined in the first sections have already been made clear by these case examples. First of all, resilience is not a return to the original state before the poverty situation arose, but is a path to a new state which builds on what was previously experienced and in some cases can even use past experiences as a resource. Not every resilient individual facing poverty leaves the state of needing help, because just as

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r­esilience can develop in life processes, it can also become eroded or be lost in the course of general social and economic crises. Many resilient cases cannot manage without at least some form of minimal social support benefits, and draw support benefits or are close to for a long period. However, this requires further analysis which would also have to include cases involving life or employment crises or low income, but where no social support benefits were claimed at all. In addition to this, in the case of further analysis, age, gender, education, ethnicity, cultural practices and ways of life would have to be introduced as further comparative and contrasting dimensions, and specific research strategies with regard to biography and family history would have to be implemented to be able to trace conditions and development processes of resilience more closely. As we understand it, resilience describes an exceptional phenomenon of a successful adaptation of microsocial units to socioeconomic change and critical conditions which defies expectation. In a crisis this occurs by means of people coping—which can also include resistance—by mobilising different kinds of their own resources or external resources comparatively quickly. What is decisive here, however, is whether the strategies, practices and habits developed by the social units concerning the use of resources can actually lead to the development of a stable or sound situation under critical or adverse conditions. Forstmann, for example, could have had gradual and long-term success with his electrical shop and stayed away from criminal activities—which may have led to him and his family being in a more stable situation and have helped him to gain confidence and a sense of responsibility for his own life. If that had been the case, his method of coping could have been classified as a pattern of resilience. Hence, whether or not a practice can be described as resilient would ultimately be a question of its degree of success. Therefore, resilience is a gradual phenomenon. Furthermore, families, family stability and friendship networks can be a significant factor of resilience in the face of poverty and crisis. This can be described according to Bourdieu’s term of social capital as a social resource which is mobilised and used by resilient individuals. However, there is also a great deal to be said for regarding families and households as microsocial units of actors in developing resilience, while single individuals living alone only represent an exception with regard to a household or family constellation. Corresponding approaches have been an aspect of poverty research since the very beginning, while the perspective of the household is only finding its way tentatively into labour market research. However, from the research into the effects of unemployment on families, we know about their increased vulnerability in conditions of unemployment and poverty (Hess et al. 1991). The difference between skills and resources should also be determined. Resources are means—Bourdieu would speak of economic, cultural and social

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capital—to improve one’s situation, and skills allow the resources to be updated, mobilised and used. With the exception of knowledge, the means tend to exist outside the person affected, while the skills exist within the person or group— notwithstanding the fact that they may have been acquired and appropriated in historical and socialising processes. However, when observing resilience, the consequences of resilient practices for other members of the social unit or their social, economic or natural environment must also be taken into account,4 such as the overuse of natural, cultural, social or economic resources, the appropriation of third-party or common property, or the restriction of the future availability of resources due to current practices—from collecting firewood to grazing in drought areas to wasting water to the continued amounting of debts to criminal activity. Although a purely normative decision is out of the question here for methodological reasons, as regards the question of resilience in the face of poverty, the issue of whether a coping pattern, or a practice of resilience can be maintained in the long term to a certain extent or of whether it is vulnerable or threatened by serious sanctions should be tested empirically. A further important conclusion can already be drawn. It ties in with the idea of the sociality of resilience which was formulated at the beginning and adds to it the question of the welfare state framing of resilience. As the first case examples show, a number of resilient patterns of action require welfare state or charitable solidarity by means of corresponding income transfer benefits or support structures so that economic, social and cultural resources (such as knowledge, skills and experience, values and actions) for resilience which may be available can actually be mobilised and used at all. However, these resources—which presented themselves in the form of education, knowledge, social networks, alternative value systems, entrepreneurial personality in the case examples—are distributed very selectively across the poor population and are not at all omnipresent or easy to increase with social programmes. Resilience is therefore on no account a cure-all for fighting poverty or even a communitarian substitute for a functioning welfare state.5 Rather, specifically promoting it via social and welfare state activities could enrich the politics to fight poverty, the further sociological research into resilience, the sociology of poverty and sociopolitical research.

4Luís

Capucha kindly pointed this issue out to us. He is currently preparing his own publication on this topic. Capucha advocates going over to a ‘resilience’ term that is extended by the observation of intended and unintended consequences instead of maintaining the mainly ‘heroic’ association of the term so far. 5Georgia Petraki and Yuri Borgmann-Prebil kindly pointed this issue out to us.

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Promberger, M., Huws, U., Dagdeviren, H. et al. (2014). Patterns of resilience during socioeconomic crises among households in Europe (RESCuE). Concept, objectives and work packages of an EU FP 7 project. IAB-Forschungsbericht 05/2014. Nuremberg. Raco, M. & Street, E. (2012). Resilience planning, economic change and the politics of post-recession development in London and Hong Kong. Urban Studies 49, 1065–1087. Revilla, J. C., Martín, P., & de Castro, C. (2018). The reconstruction of resilience as a social and collective phenomenon. Poverty and coping capacity during the economic crisis. European Societies 20 (1), 89–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2017.1346195. Rutter, M. (1999). Resilience concepts and findings. Implications for family therapy. Journal of Family Therapy 21, 119–144. Schumacher, J., Leppert, K., Gunzelmann, T., Strauss, B. & Brähler, E. (2005). Die Resilienz-skala – Ein Fragebogen zur Erfassung der psychischen Widerstandsfähigkeit als Personmerkmal. Zeitschrift für Klinische Psychologie, Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie 53, 16–39. Seidel, M. L., Polzer, J. T. & Stewart, K. J. (2000). Friends in high places: The effects of social networks on discrimination in salary negotiations. Administrative Science Quarterly 45, 1–24. Sennett, R. (1998). Der flexible Mensch. Berlin: Berlin-Verlag. Simmie, J. & Martin, R. (2010). The economic resilience of regions: towards an evolutionary approach. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3, 27–43. Sinus (2013). Sozial-ökologisches Milieu. http://www.sinus-institut.de/uploads/pics/WebSOEK-2013.jpg (accessed on 19 May 2014). Solga, H., Brzinsky-Fay, C., Graf, L., Gresch, C. & Protsch, P. (2013). Vergleiche innerhalb von Gruppen und institutionelle Gelingensbedingungen: Vielversprechende Perspektiven für die Ungleichheitsforschung. Discussion Paper, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) SP 1, 2013-501. Berlin: WZB. Steinheuser, D. (2009). Werkstoffwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Verschleiß von Hybridankern. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Hohen Medizinischen Fakultät der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Bonn: Hektogr. Ms. Sturzbecher, D. & Dietrich, P. S. (2012). Risiko- und Schutzfaktoren in der Entwicklung von Kindern und Jugendlichen. Jugendhilfe 50 (6), 317–323. Theis-Scholz, M. (2012). Resilienzförderung in der Schule. Jugendhilfe 50 (6), 343–346. Uslucan, H.-H. (2010). Resilienz oder was macht Jugendliche mit Zuwanderungsgeschichtestark? Unsere Jugend 62 (4), 151–159. Voss, G.-G. & Pongratz, H. (1998). Der Arbeitskraftunternehmer. Eine neue Grundform der Ware Arbeitskraft? Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 50, 131–158. Voss, M. (2010). Resilienz, Vulnerabilität und transdisziplinäre Katastrophenforschung. In A. Siedschlag (ed.), Jahrbuch für europäische Sicherheitspolitik 2009/2010 (pp. 67–84). Baden-Baden: Nomos. Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R. & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9 (2), Art 5. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/ (accessed on 14 May 2014). Welter-Enderlin, R. & Hildenbrand, B. (eds.). (2006). Resilienz – Gedeihen trotz widriger Umstände. Heidelberg: Carl Auer. Werner, E. E. (1977). The children of Kauai. A longitudinal study from the prenatal period to age of ten. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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Promberger, Markus  (Prof. Dr. phil.) is Professor of Sociology at University of ErlangenNuremberg and head of the research department “Joblessness and Social Inclusion” at the Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung) in Nuremberg, Germany. His research fields are labour, poverty, social policy and social theory. Promberger currently is a Research Fellow of the Berlin Science Centre (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin), co-editor of the Journal “Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation” and repeatedly counsellor to the German Federal Ministry of Labour, the German Bundestag and the German Trade Union Council. From 2014 to 2017 he was coordinator of the international project “RESCuE – Patterns of Resilience during Socioeconomic Crises among Households in Europe” which was funded by the European Commission in the 7th Framework Programme. Relevant publications: Dagdeviren, H., Donoghue, M. & Promberger, M. (2015). Resilience, hardship and social conditions. Journal of Social Policy 45 (1), 1–20. Meier, Lars  (PD Dr. phil.) is a visiting professor for Sociology and Social Inequality at the Institute for Sociology at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and a Lecturer at the Institute for Sociology at the Technische Universität Berlin. His research focuses on social inequality and diversity, Cultural Studies, work, migration, Urban Studies and Qualitative Methods. Relevant publications: Meier, L. (eds.) (2017). Limits of resistance. Space and Culture 20 (2), Special Issue; Frank, S. & Meier, L. (2016). (Im)mobilities of dwelling: Places and practices. Cultural Studies 30 (3), Special Issue; Meier, L. (ed.) (2015). Migrant professionals in the city: Local encounters, identities, and inequalities. London/New York: Routledge. Sowa, Frank  (Prof. Dr. phil.) is a Professor of Sociology at Nuremberg Tech Georg Simon Ohm, Germany. He received his doctorate from the University Erlangen-Nuremberg and worked as Senior Researcher at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). He is specialized in qualitative and ethnographic methods. His past experiences include organizational ethnography of public employment services, trends of globalisation of social policy, New Public Management, social problems and homelessness as well as identity politics of the Greenlandic Inuit. Relevant publications: Sowa, F., Staples, R. & Zapfel, S. (eds.) (2018). The transformation of work in welfare state organizations: New public management and the institutional diffusion of Ideas. London/New York: Routledge; Gottwald, M., Sowa, F. & Staples, R. (2018). “Walking the line”: An at-home ethnography of bureaucracy. Journal of Organizational Ethnography 7 (1), 87–102.

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Boost, Marie  (Dipl. Soc.) is Research Associate at the Institute for Employment Research of the Federal Employment Agency (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung) in Nuremberg, Germany. Graduated from Dresden Technical University in 2013, she worked on employment biographies and coping strategies of unemployed women in Germany and patterns of resilience in a European research project. She is specialised in qualitative methods, poverty, labour & unemployment and welfare state research. Relevant publications: Boost, M., Gray, J., Dagg, J. & Promberger, M. (eds.) (forthcoming). Poverty, crises and resilience. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; Boost, M., Schlenker, K. & Meier, L. (2018). Mehrwerte einer kombinierten qualitativen Bild- und Textanalyse zur Bedeutung sozialräumlicher Strukturen für resiliente Haushaltspraktiken. Europa Regional 25 (1), 27–37; Boost, M. & Meier, L. (2017). Resilient practices of consumption in times of crisis – Biographical interviews with members of vulnerable households in Germany. International Journal of Consumer Studies 41 (4), 371–378.

Utilization of Resilience in German Development Policy—An ObjectiveHermeneutical Analysis Exemplified by the Case of Welthungerhilfe Marie Naumann 1 Introduction As already stated in various work, during the past decades ‘resilience’ ­experiences an ongoing growing reception in several scientific disciplines as well as in diverse practical-professional and political contexts (see, for example, Blum et al. 2016 and Weiss et al. 2018). In the light of this observation, several researches already undertook examinations of the specific ways in which resilience is being utilized in selected material contexts; however, a systemic-comparative empirical analysis of the utilization of resilience still appears to be necessary—especially with a view to German discourses as an object of research on the one hand and in regard to developing and advancing a profound sociological understanding of resilience on the other hand, which current sociological research on resilience is still lacking (Blum et al. 2016, p. 162; Endress and Rampp 2015, p. 33). As Blum et al. argue, this gap could be approached by a systematic investigation which—guided by the perspective of a sociology of knowledge—comparatively examines the utilization of resilience in different material contexts with regard to underlying basic perspectives as well as analytical and conceptual outlines; worth mentioning here in particular are psychological respectively therapeutical, (socio)ecological and developmental interrelations as these are application-orientated contexts in which the ­utilization of resilience is particularly pronounced (Blum et al. 2016, p. 152 f.). Taking this proposal into account, this article provides an objective-hermeneutical investigation of the utilization of resilience in the context of German development M. Naumann ()  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_14

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policy, thus taking a first step in the direction of a comprehensive ‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’. In the sense of an explorative analysis it focuses on the international operating non-governmental organisation Welthungerhilfe which is considered as one of the central operational practicing actors in German development policy. This appears appropriate, in so far as this organisation is one out of three stakeholders which intensively discusses the relevance and potential of the term respectively concept of resilience as potentially fruitful to its operational practice; besides Welthungerhilfe these are the non-governmental organisation medico international which is structurally quite similar to the former and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development as a central governmental actor of German development policy. For example, a similar investigation can be found in Katrina Brown’s monograph ‘Resilience, Development and Global Change’ in which the author, inter alia, analyses the utilization of resilience in current Anglo-Saxon development policy (2016, p. 36 ff.) as well as especially with view to an article published by Birgit Kemmerling and Amra Bobar (2018) who use the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as a critical conceptual lens to analyse the utilization of resilience in developmental programs exemplified by the case of the EU and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and, therefore, have a quite similar material interest.1 In doing so, the methodical approach in both of the aforementioned publications is rather a content-analytical one, whereas the investigation in this article a) focuses specifically on the context of German development policy and b) its underlying methodical approach is—guided by Objective Hermeneutics as a methodological approach of qualitative social research and having the research goal of a comprehensive ‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’ in mind—a sequential analytical one since “it allows for a grounded, cumulative, and intersubjectively testable development of hypotheses on social structures” (Maiwald 2005, p. 7). Following Blum et al., the analysis is guided by the assumption that—in the light of a quite simultaneously beginning change of communicative practice across different contexts—‘resilience’ has to be understood as a new mode of societal selfobservation, especially in application orientated contexts, and which comes into effect as specific constellations of disruptive phenomena (which are empirically perceived as threating, dangerous, hazardous or at least as challenging to a certain unit) are, generally speaking, identified as more complex and, therefore, as ‘new’ or

1In

terms of a further in-depth insight into the topic of resilience in political spheres see, furthermore, Joseph 2018 and Bourbeau 2018 who both address it from a rather meta-­ analytical point of view.

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‘altered.’ Hence, with a view to the focused material example the empirical analysis will discuss the following research questions: How is resilience utilized by the non-governmental organisation Welthungerhilfe? Which basic conceptual perspectives and analytical outlines can be identified? Which specific constellation of problems underlies this specific utilization of resilience and what are the consequences of this perception for the organisation’s utilization of resilience? And last but not least: having the approach of systematic-comparative ‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’ in mind, which similarities—or if applicable: particularities—can be identified with view to the utilization of resilience in scientific contexts as they are characterized by rather conceptually founded understandings of resilience and, therefore, feature a suitable horizon of comparison? To address these questions, this article will be divided as follows: The following second section provides a rough framing of the object of research. In section three, the empirical analysis’ methodological-methodical approach will shortly be summarized. The fourth section represents the core of this contribution, insofar as the research results of the empirical analysis will be presented and discussed in the light of the aforementioned questions. The article closes with a resume of central research results and a few final words on the relevance and potential of the approach of a ‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’ for resilience research.

2 First Field Observations on the German Development Policy Discourse The German development policy discourse on resilience started only about six years ago and is carried out by just three stakeholders. In October 2012, a first start was made by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development: In a paper concerning the relation of disaster preparedness and adaption to climate change (2012, p. 3), the strengthening of resilience is considered as a central task of the ministry in the context of the aforementioned remits. Thereby, resilience is understood as the ability of countries, communities and households to cope with extreme events triggered by shocks or stresses without compromising their long-term prospects (2012, p. 4).2 In the following years, the term ‘resilience’

2This

definition explicitly refers to a definition of resilience introduced by the British Department for International Development that is to say “the ability of countries, communities and households to manage change, by maintaining or transforming living standards in the face of shocks or stresses—such as earthquakes, drought or violent conflict—without compromising their long-term prospects” (2011, p. 6).

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is consistently utilized in different papers of the ministry whilst always referring to resilience as the ability or capacity of different social units to handle various constellations of disruptive phenomena (see, for example, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development 2014, 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017). Thereby, a transition regarding the fundamental understanding of resilience is observable: Whereas the primary definition indeed explicitly focuses a long-term perspective, however, only the potential of coping with disruptive phenomena is considered. This changes in the following years since not only the capacity to cope with but also to adapt to disruptive phenoma is adressed with increased regularity (see, for example, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development 2013, p. 6). In 2012, the non-governmental organisation Welthungerhilfe adapts this revised understanding of resilience, insofar as resilience is considered as a dynamic as well as structural feature of societal systems to cope with and adapt to various disruptive phenomena (Grassman 2012, p. 1 f.). Simultaneously to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the organisation refers to resilience as a central guiding principle to its operational practice in the following years (see, for example, Maass 2015). Not at least due to resilience as a comparatively new topic, a distinct enmity between the aforementioned two stakeholders and the non-governmental organisation medico international is observable: Whereas the former two negotiate resilience as a fruitful concept to their operational practice, medico international— whilst intensively discussing the potential of the term respectively concept to the general as well as its own operational practice since 2015—interprets resilience as a neoliberal idea of self-responsibility, thus, directly referring to critical approaches on resilience in political science and International Relations discourses (see, for example, Joseph 2013 and 2016 as well as Chandler 2014a and 2014b). In the following years, this rather critical perspective on resilience is constitutive for the organisation’s understanding of resilience, whereby it manly emphasises a policy of depolitization and a missing normative conceptualization of the term as points of criticism (see, for example, Gebauer 2015).

3 Data, Methodical Approach and Methodological Foundation The data on which the here presented empirical analysis is based on was surveyed within the scope of an online-research on the website of Welthungerhilfe (state: 11th of September 2018). In total, the keyword-search for ‘Resilienz’ disclosed

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fourteen documents—thirteen of them consisting of blog entries, one of them being listed under the tab ‘Material und Publikationen’.3 Due to the fact that the latter is the only document in which the relevance and potential of resilience as a concept of developmental practice in general and of the operational practice of the organisation itself in particular is firmly discussed (title: ‘Resilienz—Konzept und Praxis der Welthungerhilfe’), this in 2012 published concept paper was chosen as central to the empirical analysis. The remaining documents were used to reinforce the hypotheses of the case structure which were built during the detailed sequential analysis of the aforementioned paper. As already mentioned in the beginning, the empirical analysis is guided by Objective Hermeneutics as a reconstructive methodological approach of qualitative social research developed by Ulrich Oevermann et al. (see, for example, Oevermann et al. 1987 and Oevermann 2013) which is rooted in the tradition of Interpretative Sociology (Endress 2014) and committed to the interpretative method of sequential analysis (Maiwald 2005). Taking this methodical approach into account, the overall research goal of an empirical analysis guided by Objective Hermeneutics is the sequential reconstruction of a specific case structure and thereby focuses on the decoding of latent objective structures of meaning which have to be analytically distinguished from subjective structures of meaning in the sense of two different levels of reality. Speaking more generally, it is not of foremost interest what an actor actually intended to express with a specific interaction text, but what is unintentionally documented in an interaction text about a specific social practice (Oevermann et al. 1987, p. 438 f.).4 Or how Maiwald puts it more precisely: An objective-hermeneutical analysis is “­trying to reconstruct general patterns of social practice, conceived as ways of coping with general action problems. … The case-reconstructions are conceived as ‘­exemplary’ in this respect” (2005, p. 24). With view to the empirical analysis presented here this means that the utilization of resilience as a new mode of societal self-observation in German development

3The

presented empirical investigation as well as the analysed material originate from a German speaking context which is why the words in quotation marks are German terms. 4‘Interaction text’ refers to a broader term of ‘text’ as it includes expressive shapes of all products of social interaction; might that be written documents, videos, items, buildings etc. (Oevermann 2001, p. 40f.). Thereby, especially not standardized, natural or literal interaction texts are suitable for an objective-hermeneutical analysis (Oevermann 1981, p. 46)—such as the chosen paper of Welthungerhilfe.

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policy has to be understood as such a general pattern of social practice. Hence, the question of its underlying basic perspectives and conceptual as well as analytical outlines is the ‘case’ and the analysis of the material example of Welthungerhilfe has to be conceived as an exemplary case-reconstruction. Thereby, the reconstruction of the latent objective structures of meaning respectively the interpretative patterns which underlie the organisation’s utilization of resilience as “interpretations of problems of actions” (Endress 2014, p. 40) is the central task of the analysis. By consequently following the five central methodological principles of Objective Hermeneutics (for a brief summary of these principles see, for e­ xample, Wernet 2014) as well as in regard to the ideal-typical steps of an objective-hermeneutical investigation (see Maiwald 2005, p. 25 ff. as well as Przyborski and WohlrabSahr 2014, p. 266 ff.), the empirical analysis is not only going hand in hand with research pragmatic challenges such as a time intensive process of research itself, but within this article it is additionally accompanied by a specific pragmatic challenge in regard to its presentation: Whilst the interpretation process itself took place in a strict sequential manner, the format of this contribution with its comparatively limited space does not allow a, so to speak, strictly sequential presentation of the results of the empirical analysis; within this article they can only be presented with view to exemplifying sequences respectively segments which are perceived as the most-striking ones in terms of the aforementioned research question.

4 Developmental Utilization of Resilience Exemplified by the Case of Welthungerhilfe5 As outlined in the second section, a distinct enmity between two ‘resilience advocates’ on the one hand (Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development; Welthungerhilfe) and a ‘resilience opponent’ on the other hand (medico international) is observable with view to the previous discourse on resilience in German development policy. In the light of this field observation, this

5As

already mentioned in the prior section, the empirical material and the analysis originate from a German-speaking context. For the purpose of this contribution, the sequences and segments quoted from the research material (hereafter, direct quotations originating from the research material are written in italics) and the results of the sequential interpretation will be translated in English. In terms of making this process of translation more transparent, a tabular comparison of the original as well as translated version of the sequences and segments quoted from Grassmann 2012 is attached (see appendix).

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article attempts to supply a first step into the direction of a comprehensive investigation of this ‘battle of interpretations’ by exploratively analysing the material example of Welthungerhilfe and its specific utilization of resilience, whereby the organisation is considered as a representative of ‘resilience advocates’ in the material context of German development policy. In this section, the central research results of this investigation will be presented and discussed in the light of the research questions which were formulated at the beginning of this contribution. For this purpose, the following subsection provides a systematic summary of the interpretative patterns which were worked out as central to the utilization of resilience by the non-governmental organisation Welthungerhilfe during the detailed sequential-analytical interpretation. In the second subsection, these research results will be discussed in terms of similarities and particularities which can be observed with view to previous, already conceptually founded understandings of resilience in different scientific contexts. Hence, the discussion is particularly based on publications which are giving an overview over the previous state of current resilience research as a multidisciplinary discourse.

4.1 Sequential Analysis—A Systematic Presentation of Central Interpretative Patterns As already mentioned, the concept paper ‘Resilienz—Konzept und Praxis der Welthungerhilfe’ (Grassmann 2012) was chosen as central to empirical analysis. Speaking more precisely, six segments out of this document were consulted and analysed in course of the detailed sequential analysis as the core step of an objective-hermeneutical interpretation. Each of these segments emphasise specific and in terms of the guiding research questions central thematic priorities, namely concerning 1) a general framing of the task profile of the organisation, 2) the general relevance of the terms ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability’ in developmental interrelations, 3) a terminological definition of resilience which is directly linked to 4) a guiding conceptual differentiation of ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability’, 5) an explanation of the requirements for the ‘strengthening of resilience’ as a general developmental guiding principle and last but not least 6) a renewed framing of the task profile of the organisation in light of this guiding principle. The interpretative patterns which manifested during the detailed sequential analysis of these segments were proved by references to other sequences and segments originating from this

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particular document and—as already mentioned—from the other thirteen documents of the corpus of investigation.6 With view to the results of the exemplary case-reconstruction it can be initially seen that, on a fundamental terminological level, resilience is consequently understood a structural as well as dynamic feature of societal systems respectively communities (Grassmann 2012, p. 1 f.) which are essentially perceived as affected units in so-called developing countries (first reference point). As such a feature, resilience is highlighted as observable in regard to the relations and interdependencies between individual elements of these units (Grassmann 2012, p. 2) (second reference point), whereby the structures within these units as well as the aforementioned relations and interdependencies are emphasised as influenceable by social actors within aforementioned societal systems/communities (Grassmann 2012, p. 2) (third reference point). In accordance with these three levels of emergence it can be noted that the fundamental terminological understanding of resilience in this exemplary case is adjusted in two different perspectives: In a structural-theoretical perspective it emphasises a complex interwoven logic of structure (first and second reference point), in an action-theoretical perspective it stresses a dynamic process which is generally open to development (third point of reference). The worked out interpretative patterns which underlie the utilization of resilience by Welthungerhilfe especially come into effect with view to its conceptual extension which emphasises the ‘strengthening of resilience’ as a superior guiding principle for general and particularly the organisation’s own developmental practice.7 Systematically, these interpretative patterns point at three different dimensions which build on one another and, hence, have to be understood as strongly interwoven: 1) The organisation’s fundamental perception of disruptive phenomena, 2) a specific framework of action which is derived from this perception as well as 3) the potentials of actions which are identified with view to all actors perceived as involved in light of the aforementioned first and second dimension. DISRUPTIVE PHENOMENA—A twofold complex-interwoven constellation of disruptive phenomena which is strongly connected to the aforementioned

6For

the sake of preserving a clear overview, proving references which originate from these thirteen documents are exemplary quoted in footmarks in this subsection. 7Accordingly, the organisation refers to this principle as the glasses of resilience-strengthening (Welthungerhilfe 2018b).

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second reference point of the organisation’s terminological understanding of resilience has to be emphasised as constitutive for its conceptual understanding of resilience: On the one hand, societal systems are identified as potentially affected in terms of larger collapses which might occur due to the impacts of disturbances caused by political conflicts, extreme natural phenomena and climate change (respectively socio-political, natural-space and climatic dangers/hazards). On the other hand, these potential collapses of societal systems are ultimately perceived as disruptive phenomena to food security (Grassmann 2012, p. 1 f.). At this point it is becoming apparent that a temporally differentiated perspective comes into effect as a characteristic interpretive pattern, insofar as potential disruptive phenomena are comparatively identified in short-term perspective (disturbances caused by political conflicts) as well as medium- respectively long-term perspective (extreme natural phenomena and climate change). Elsewhere, reference is explicitly made to repetitive disturbances and long-term burdens in the light of which communities in so-called developing countries are perceived as threatened (Grassmann 2012, p. 1)—an abstract differentiation which pointedly highlights this temporarily differentiated perspective. FRAMEWORK OF ACTION—Another interpretative pattern which is also focused on a temporal scale is observable with view to the framework of action which is derived from the above mentioned perception of disruptive phenomena, insofar as a long-term planning perspective—respectively a long-term engagement (Grassmann 2012, p. 2) or a long-term approach (Grassmann 2012, p. 4)—which connects different developmental task fields in light of this specific constellation of disruptive phenomena is emphasised as necessary in terms of the organisation’s conceptual understanding of resilience. This long-term planning perspective is consolidated not at least with view to the organisation’s target setting, insofar as in context of the above outlined constellation of disruptive phenomena a sustainable food security (Grassmann 2012, p. 1) is perceived as the overall goal of Welthungerhilfe. During the sequential interpretation it has become clear that, thereby, reference is made to a sustainable process8 which is not only directed to ecological respectively social compatibility and, therefore, spatial imagined but especially to a permanent viable handling of food

8In

the original document, the German term ‘nachhaltige Ernährungssicherung’ is used which—on the level of latent objective structures of sense—inherently points out to a processual mode, whereas the morphologically related term ‘nachhaltige Ernährungssicherheit’, by comparison, would rather emphasis a more static understanding. A linguistically equivalent differentiation does not exist in the English language use.

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and, hence, temporally perceived. More specifically, the analysis has shown that with this particularly on temporality focused processual perspective reference is inherently made to the past as well as to the future: Welthungerhilfe, for example, states that it works towards cushioning the impacts of disturbances caused by political conflicts, extreme natural phenomena and climate change and, therefore, emphasises the idea of alleviating vulnerability which was experienced in the past. By way of contrast and besides the explicit reference to future generations whose development opportunities have to be ensured and whose options of development have to be kept open (Grassmann 2012, p. 1), an inherent reference to the future is made with the term ‘food security’ itself as it points out to a preventive handling of food. To put it pointedly: With view to the dimension of the perceived action of framework it can be said that an interpretative pattern which emphasise an interrelation between disruptive pasts and futures is constitutive. Thereby, the action of all actors who are perceived as involved in the outlined perception of disruptive phenomena is implicitly labelled as bound to already experienced vulnerability in the sense of a basis for a long-term planning perspective as well as aimed at vulnerability which might be experienced in the future. Thereafter, the question of how the organisation perceives potentials of action within the frame of these two dimensions leads to the third and last dimension. POTENITALS OF ACTION—First and foremost, the principle of subsidiarity (‘help for self-help’) has to be highlighted as a constitutive interpretative pattern in the context of this dimension since it is decisively structuring the organisation’s conception of resilience with view to the concrete potentials of action which are attributed to the actors who are perceived as involved in the above outlined perception of disruptive phenomena within the above outlined dimension of the framework of action. In this respects, two types of collective actors are differentiated in regard to their respective form of agency; on the one hand, this pertains social actors who are identified as a part of affected societal systems and, on the other hand, developmental organisation’s. Based on the third reference point of the organisation’s terminological understanding of resilience, the potential of action which is attributed to the former is significantly characterised by an interpretative pattern which, analogously to the first reference point of said terminological understanding, highlights an interrelation between continuity and discontinuity—namely insofar as, in regard to resilience as a structural as well as dynamic capacity of a system, these actors are attributed with the ability to withstand (structural ability) and to adapt to (dynamic ability) disruptive phenomena which become relevant in the above

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o­ utlined constellation of disruptive phenomena (Grassmann 2012, p. 1). Nevertheless, the agency of this type of actors is, thereby, perceived as limited, insofar as even though a respective endangered population is identified as a protagonist of its own future (Grassmann 2012, p. 3), its agency which is linked to the cypher of ‘self-help’ depends on the agency of developmental actors; developmental ‘help’ is perceived as a necessary condition, not as a sufficient condition for ­‘self-help.’ The potential of action which is attributed to developmental actors is, by contrast, decisively shaped by the interpretative pattern of a temporarily differentiated perspective which was already emphasised as central to the organisation’s perception of disruptive phenomena. Namely, it has already been noted that—in regard to the perception of the ‘strengthening of resilience’ as guiding developmental principle and the herewith associated long-term planning perspective which is constitutive for this perception in terms of the outlined framework of action—in light of this specific constellation of disruptive phenomena a connection between different developmental task fields is emphasised as necessary. These task fields are differentiated in temporal perspective, insofar as, hereby, an interlock respectively interdisciplinary action (Grassmann 2012, p. 2) or conceptual coaction of emergency aid (shot-term perspective), reconstruction (medium-term perspective) and development cooperation (long-term perspective) is forced (Grassmann 2012, pp. 1 and 4). Simultaneously to this structural interlock, the coaction with local partners (Grassmann 2012, p. 2)—so to say: a specific type of social actors which are part of affected societal systems—is emphasised as necessary in the course of the ‘strengthening of resilience’, whereby reference is made back to the principle of subsidiarity.9 Linking the above outlined manifestation of the concrete potential of action of developmental actors back to the dimensions of the organisation’s perception of disruptive phenomena and the hereof derived framework of action,10 it is observable that, ­nonetheless, the developmental agency is perceived as limited respectively constricted, too. This can be clearly demonstrated with

9For

a concrete project within which not only coaction on an international but also on a local level is focused see, for example, Maass 2015. 10This

analytically observable linkage is—rather implicitly—even made by the organisation itself, insofar as it states in another document that the strengthening of resilience of prone communities is—in terms of a coaction of emergency aid, reconstruction and development cooperation (potentials of action)—a long term task (framework of action) within which socio-political, natural-space and climatic dangers/hazards have to be considered (perception of disruptive phenomena) (Welthungerhilfe 2018b).

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view to the following, partly already cited quotation which originates from the very beginning of the document: Welthungerhilfe pursues the goal of sustainable food security. Since larger collapses of societal system influence food security to a threatening extent, Welthungerhilfe works towards, at least, cushioning the impacts of disturbances caused by political conflicts, extreme natural phenomena and climate change (Grassmann 2012, p. 1). Since only the effects of concrete disruptive phenomena and not the phenomena themselves are stressed as influenceable, the organisation’s target setting which is orientated towards a sustainable food security as a mainly temporally structured process is merely identified as indirectly controllable. The perception of the aforementioned potential of action of developmental actors or at least of Welthungerhilfe which is embedded in this framework of action, therefore, has to be understood as constricted as well. This perception of limitedness on the level of all three dimensions is, thereby, expressed in the rhetorical usage of language, too, insofar as it simultaneously points out to a perception of crisis on the hand (collapse; to a threatening extent) and a mode of relativisation on the other hand (larger instead of, for example, ‘large’ influence). Prima facie, this might appear irritating, insofar as the former refers to a dramatic, existential perception of crises, whereas the latter does not suggest the same. However, this irritation dissolves in the light of the perception of a limited respectively constricted form of agency, insofar as the specific constellation of disruptive phenomena is indeed outlined as critical and potentially existence-threatening. At the same time and as already mentioned, this situation is interpreted, at least, as indirectly influenceable in terms of the initially outlined developmental potentials of action which, in turn, explains the mode of relativisation.

4.2 How Welthungerhilfe Conceives Resilience—A Comparison to Scientific Understandings As stated in the first section of this article, it is necessary to systematically compare different utilizations of resilience in order to satisfy the approach of a comprehensive ‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’. In case of the investigation presented in this article this implies a comparison which examines similarities— or if applicable: particularities—between the utilization of resilience by Welthungerhilfe and understandings of resilience in scientific contexts as the latter are characterized by rather conceptually founded understandings of resilience and, therefore, feature a suitable horizon of comparison.

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Having the central, in the previous section presented interpretative patterns in mind it can be, first of all, stated that several analytical contours which underlie conceptually founded scientific understandings of resilience on a transdisciplinary level also come into effect with view to the utilization of resilience by Welthungerhilfe. Endress and Rampp, for example, point out that three analytical aspects are widely shared among different scientific disciplines. First, this concerns a phenomenological association which refers to the reaction of (social) units in the context of constellations of disruptive change. Second, against this backdrop a focus is largely placed on the question of how specific (social) units deal with these kind of constellations in light of an existential conservation by referring to terms such as capacity, capability or potential which is, in turn, linked to the questions of their respective resources. And third, this dealing is—often implicitly—understood as a latent process, insofar as it is perceived as characterised by uncertainties and, thus, uncontrollable respectively merely indirect controllable in terms of its effects within a constellation of disruptive change (Endress and Rampp 2015, p. 38). With view to the previous research results of the sequential analysis it can be noted that these three analytical aspects apply to the exemplary case of the organisation’s utilization of resilience, too: As initially presented in the previous section, the perception of a specific constellation of disruptive phenomena which is associated with the reaction of certain (social) units—here basically: societal systems (Grassmann 2012, p. 1) in so-called development countries on the one hand and developmental organisations on the other hand—is a constitutive dimension in the organisation’s conception of the ‘strengthening of resilience’ as a developmental guideline. Thereby, these phenomena of reaction manifest in terms of the dimension of concrete potentials of action which is decisively structured by the principle of subsidiarity as a central interpretative pattern. Furthermore, the second analytical aspects becomes relevant, too, insofar as it is observable that the organisation engages in the capability or potential of the as such perceived directly affected societal systems in terms of resilience as a structural as well as dynamic capacity of a system (Grassmann 2012, p. 1). Thereby, it is perceived as a capacity which enables these societal systems to deal with disruptive phenomena—here: effects of internal and external, short-, medium- and long-term disruptive phenomena (perception of disruptive phenomena)—in order to avoid larger collapses of societal systems (Grassmann 2012, p. 1) or in other words: in order to maintain their existence. With view to the interpretative pattern of the principle of subsidiarity it has, beyond that, became clear that it is perceived as necessary that developmental actors partake in this dealing in terms of a shared framework of action. And as shown at the end of the previous section, the third analytical aspect is also represented in the conceptual understanding of resilience

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by Welthungerhilfe, insofar as, indeed, concrete potentials of action are identified with view to all actors perceived as involved in the organisation’s perception of disruptive phenomena. Nevertheless, these potentials are perceived as limited or constricted in different respects and, hence, implicitly refer to the perception of a latent, by merely indirect controllable process. Whereas the aforementioned analytical aspects draw on a more general level, there are, by now, various different approaches which focus on a cartography of scientific understandings of resilience on a rather systematically differentiated level (see, for example, in this volume Meyen and Schier 2019 and Christmann et al. 2019; Endress and Rampp 2015, p. 42 ff.; Olsson et al. 2015). In the course of such approaches it is largely argued that emphasising the flexibility and damage tolerance of a respective unit on the one hand and a long-term mindset on the other hand as well as an essentialistic, normative and teleological perspective are typical analytical contours for most scientific understandings of resilience. These analytically differentiated aspects are also observable with view to the utilization of resilience by Welthungerhilfe: First, both the third reference point of the organisation’s terminological understanding of resilience as well as the as such perceived capacity to adapt to disruptive phenomena in light of potentially to-be-experienced vulnerability which is attributed to directly affected social actors refer to the analytical aspect of flexibility. Second, a notion of damage tolerance is observable, insofar as the implicit differentiation of ‘smaller’, ‘small’, ‘large’ … and larger collapses of societal systems (Grassmann 2012, p. 1) addresses a—however measurable—damage tolerance of these systems. Third, a long-term mindset is emphasised, insofar as in terms of the dimension of a specific framework of action a long-term planning perspective is constitutive for the organisation’s conception of the ‘strengthening of resilience’ as a developmental guideline. And, last but not least, an analytical perspective which points at the three aforementioned dimensions underlies the organisation’s utilization of resilience, too. Thus, it can be noted that an essentialistic perspective is constitutive for the organisation’s utilization of resilience since resilience is perceived as an observable and, therefore, per se existing capacity of a system (second reference point of the organisation’s terminological understanding of resilience). Furthermore, it has become clear that resilience is perceived in a twofold normative way: Since resilience is terminologically identified as a system capacity which is perceived as worthy to enhance in terms of its conceptual extension (‘strengthening of resilience’ as a guiding developmental principle), it is accordingly perceived as ‘good.’ In contrast, the—also in essentialistic perspective perceived—vulnerability is implicitly labelled as a ‘bad’ feature of societal systems and the units within these systems, especially in respect to social actors. In addition to that, a

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normative-positive connotation can be noted with view to the ‘strengthening of resilience’ as a conceptual guideline, insofar as it is implicitly stressed as a fruitful approach in regard to guarantee a sustainable food security as the foremost goal of the organisation’s developmental practice. The latter aspect, subsequently, points out to a teleological perspective since resilience is explicitly emphasised as an overarching goal of humanitarian aid and development cooperation (Grassmann 2012, p. 1). At this point, it seems like as if the boundary between the ‘strengthening of resilience’ as a guiding developmental principle on the hand and an overarching goal of the general and especially of the organisation’s own developmental practice on the other hand becomes blurred, insofar as a ‘strengthened resilience’ simultaneously can be read as a central goal which has to be achieved in the course of developmental practice. Beyond the so far mentioned similarities to transdisciplinary shared analytical contours of scientific understandings of resilience it can be finally noted that the organisation’s utilization of resilience is closely related to the analytical characteristics of (socio)ecological utilization of resilience. Initially, this becomes clear with view to the terminological understanding of resilience which—as already emphasised several times—explicitly stresses resilience as a system capacity (first point of reference). Hence, a firm systematic lens underlies the utilization of the term which Endress and Rampp (2015, p. 35) as well as Blum et al. (2016, p. 161) highlight as a characteristic feature of (socio)ecological resilience research in contrast to a rather individualistic lens which is observable with view to the disciplinary fields of education science and (developmental) psychology.11 In addition to that, the other two points of reference which were explained in regard to the organisation’s terminological understanding of resilience at the beginning of the previous section are implicitly linked to implications which underlie the (socio)ecological, resilience-related model of panarchy; a model that was originally developed by Gunderson, Holling and Peterson (2002). Specifically, this concerns the interdependencies between different units (so-called ‘adaptive cycles’) which are emphasised as panarchical connections. Thereby, the authors differentiate between two forms of interdependencies, namely ‘remember’ and ‘revolt’:

11At this point it has to be remarked that, in a sense, current resilience research in education science and (developmental) psychology is undergoing a paradigmatic change, insofar as approaches become topical which aim to include a systematic perspective in previous approaches (see, for example, Gabriel 2005 and Fooken 2016). Nevertheless, this is not comparable to the firm systematic lens in (socio)ecology which most likely can be traced back to the respective objective of investigation in the aforementioned two disciplinary fields.

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[T]he ‘revolt‘connection … can cause a critical change in one [smaller and faster] cycle to cascade up to a vulnerable stage in a larger and slower one. The … ‘­remember’ connection … facilitates renewal by drawing on the potential that has been accumulated and stored in a larger, slower cycle. (Gunderson et al. 2002, p. 75)

This constitutive core idea of a twofold appearing interdependent connection between different cycles in a panarchical constellation is implicitly taken up with view to the second terminological, rather structural-theoretical reference point since it refers to the assumption of interdependent connections of different units in an affected societal system, too. In addition to that, the third terminological, rather action-theoretical reference point implicitly refers to the aforementioned revolt-connection if said societal systems are understood as ‘larger/slower cycles’ whose structures, relations and interdependencies can be influenced by social actors as ‘smaller/faster cycles’ within these systems. Further on, a striking distance to the (socio)ecological utilization of resilience can be seen in respect to the organisation’s conceptual extension of resilience. Having the outlined three conceptual dimension in mind which served as a heuristic for systemizing the central, during the sequential analysis worked out interpretative patterns, this can be proved in regard to two different aspects: First, the interpretative pattern of a short-, medium- and long-term perspective on—potential—disruptive phenomena (perception of disruptive phenomena) reflects a temporally differentiated perspective which comes into effect in course of the heuristic models of the adaptive cycle(s) and panarchy, insofar as it is similar to the beforehand quoted differentiation between ‘larger/slower’, so to speak long-term cycles on the one hand and ‘smaller/faster’, so to speak shortterm cycles on the other hand. Second, the interpretative pattern of an interrelation between continuity and discontinuity which addresses the ability of social actors within affected societal systems to withstand and to adapt to disruptive phenomena (potential of action) as well as the closely linked interpretative pattern of an interrelation between disruptive pasts and futures (framework of action) both refer directly to the (socio)ecological resilience discourse. This becomes clear with view to an analytical differentiation which decisively shapes the utilization of resilience in (socio)ecology and in the course of which three different potentials of resilience are identified, namely the dimension of coping (continuity) with disruptive phenomena which already occurred (disruptive pasts) as well as the dimensions of adaptation and transformation (discontinuity) in the light of expected disruptive phenomena (disruptive futures) (Endress and Rampp 2015, p. 38).

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5 Conclusion In this contribution, the results of an empirical investigation are presented which took place in regard to a comprehensive ‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’ as a desideratum of the current, multidisciplinary orientated scientific field of resilience research. To take this research desideratum into account, an analysis was carried out which exploratively examined the utilization of resilience in German development policy by the exemplary case of Welthungerhilfe as a central nongovernmental actor in this material context who—as first field observations have shown—represents a ‘resilience advocate’ in the German development policy discourse on resilience. Following the methodological and methodical foundations of Objective Hermeneutics by performing a sequential analysis of documents in which the organisation explicitly and implicitly focuses on a presentation of its utilization of resilience, the following constitutively interwoven interpretative patterns were identified as central to the organisation’s utilization of the term respectively concept of resilience (Tab. 1): Table 1   How Welthungerhilfe Conceives Resilience—Central Interpretative Patterns Terminological 1st Point of Reference Level • I nterrelation between continuity and discontinuity Conceptual Level

2nd Point of Reference

3rd Point of Reference

• Structural-theoretical perspective

• Action-theoretical perspective

Disruptive Phenomena Framework of Action • Temporally ­differentiated ­perspective (short-, medium- and longterm)

Source: Authors own research

Potentials of Action

• Long-term planning • Principle of subsidiarity (‘help for perspective self-help’; both per• Interrelation between ceived as constricted disruptive pasts and respectively limited) futures • Social actors as elements of societal systems: interrelation between continuity and discontinuity • Developmental actors: temporally differentiated perspective (short-, medium- and longterm)

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Thereby, three logics of interdependency can be identified with view to the worked out interpretative patterns which are systematically presented in the table above: First, the three different points of reference of the organisation’s terminological understanding of resilience which were presented at the beginning of Sect. 4.1 depend on each other in a chronologically opposed direction. Second, the as such perceived developmental guiding principle of the ‘strengthening of resilience’ depends on the fundamental terminological understanding of resilience, insofar as it constitutes a conceptual extension of it. And third, within this conceptual extension a logic of interdependency is observable, insofar as the dimension of the perceived potentials of action unfold within the dimension of a specific framework of action which, in turn, is derived from the organisation’s specific perception of disruptive phenomena as a third constitutive dimension. Furthermore, by discussing these results in comparison to scientific, more conceptually founded understandings of resilience in terms of the approach of a comprehensive ‘sociology of knowledge of resilience’ it became apparent that the organisation’s utilization of resilience does not feature any potentials of meaning or conceptual and analytical contours which are exclusively characteristic for this exemplary case of a developmental utilization of resilience.12 In fact, this comparison has rather shown that it is highly congruent not only with analytical contours that underlie the understanding of resilience on a transdisciplinary scientific level, but also that it has several features in common with the (socio)ecological discourse on resilience. Finally, this can be illustrated more pointedly with view to a definition by Walker et al. which addresses the concept of social-ecological resilience:13 As the authors state, social-ecological resilience has to be understood as the “capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks, and therefore

12In

this respect, only the interpretative pattern of the principle of subsidiarity could be cited as a unique feature of the organisation’s (conceptual) understanding of resilience. However, this interpretative pattern rather refers to an ethical guiding principle which is per se characteristic for the field of development policy (see, for example, Kesselring 2006, p. 331 f.). Therefore, it does not appear obvious to emphasise this as a pattern which specifically emerges in the context of the organisation’s understanding of resilience. 13Social-ecological resilience, ecosystem/ecological resilience and engineering resilience are three concepts of resilience which are central to the (socio)ecological discourse on resilience in genealogical perspective (Folke 2006, p. 259). Essentially, they differ from each other in regard to their respective perspective on the stability respectively equilibration of (resilient) systems (Deppisch 2016, p. 200 f.) which, however, is not further relevant to the argumentation at this point.

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identity, that is, the capacity to change in order to maintain the same identity“(2004, p. 4). So to speak, this could be a short terminological definition of resilience which originates from Welthungerhilfe, insofar as the core idea of this definition complies with the interpretative pattern of an interrelation between continuity (‘absorb disturbance’; or in the words of Welthungerhilfe: to withstand disruptive phenomena) and discontinuity (‘reorganize while undergoing change’; or in the words of Welthungerhilfe: to adapt to disruptive phenomena). To finally pointedly show where exactly the potential of a sequential-analytical, towards a ‘sociology of knowledge’ orientated approach lies, an exemplary comparison of the above summarised research results to the investigation of Kemmerling and Bobar shall be drawn at this point. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the authors also address questions of the utilization of resilience in the context of German development policy by using the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as a guiding heuristic which emphasise a rather critical, power-analytical perspective—a rather deductive methodological approach in contrast to Objective Hermeneutics. Nevertheless, the central argument of their contribution is that with this conceptual lens it is not of foremost interest what developmental resilience is or might be for developmental practice, but how it is utilized (2018, p. 262); hence, one could state that not only a rather critical, but also a social-constructivists perspective is supposedly applied, too. This becomes apparent with view to the first step of the authors investigation which addresses the examination of the focused developmental actors ‘perception of risk’ as a deductively built dimension (2018, p. 254 ff.) which, in turn, is quite similar to the inductively worked out dimension of the perception of disruptive phenomena which was emphasised as central to conception of resilience by Welthungerhilfe in the context of the here presented analysis. In regard to this dimension, Kemmerling and Bobar emphasise that a specific perception of risk is insofar observable as it follows neoliberal rationalities (2018, p. 256). With view to this exemplary aspect it becomes clear that despite the aforementioned implicit claim of social-constructivists research approach, a rather critical analytical perspective is guiding the author’s investigation. As a consequence of this focus, potentials of meaning which underlie the utilization of resilience in the context of an exemplary material case—or in the words of Objective Hermeneutics: interpretative patterns which have to be worked out on the level of latent objective of meanings—‘fall through the cracks’. This is insofar problematic as an adequate fathoming of the analytical potentials of specific utilizations of resilience seems to be constricted in the light of this ‘lack’—might that be in regard to analytical potentials on a field-intern level which, though, ultimately is of interest to Kemmerling

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and Bobar as they close with the argument that resilience “does not prove as an innovative framework for anew tackle developmental question in regard to, for example, poverty alleviation, food security and peacekeeping” (2018, p. 262; own translation). Or might that be in regard to analytical potentials on a field-extern level as it is, for example, of interest in the context of developing and advancing a profound sociological understanding of resilience. In any case, a comprehensive cartography of the utilization of resilience in respective material contexts which fully grasps and systematically compares different understandings and interpretations of resilience within its utilization is indispensable. Therefore, this contribution closes with an advocacy for taking this task further into account by continually working on the advancement of a systematic ‘sociology of knowledge’ as such a comprehensive cartography. The here presented, explorative objective-hermeneutical analysis, thereby, constitutes a first cornerstone of such an approach. Subsequent to the here presented investigation, further steps into the directions of such a cartography would imply to further examine the utilization of resilience in German development policy by objective-hermeneutically analysing how the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development as well as medico internal utilize resilience as two other central stakeholders and, therefore, two alternative exemplary cases of this discourse. In the light of the ‘­battle of interpretations’ between ‘resilience advocates’ and a ‘resilience opponent’ which has been highlighted as a central logic of observation with view to this discourse, the former, thereby, should be consulted in the course of an exemplary case-­ reconstruction which serves for specifying and modifying the here presented research results, insofar as both Welthungerhilfe and the Federal Ministry for ­Economic Cooperation and Development represent developmental ‘resilience advocates.’ In contrast, an exemplary case-reconstruction by means of documents which originate from medico international will most likely bring up new, fundamentally different interpretative patterns since this organisation can be identified as a developmental ‘resilience opponent’ and, thus, is an exemplary case of maximum contrast—a central criteria for the selection of further exemplary cases as Oevermann argues (2000, p. 99 f.); therefore, interpretative patterns which will be worked out in the course such an investigation of a highly contrastive exemplary case have to be systematically compared to the here presented results.

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Appendix Research material: Grassmann 2012 (extract) Original version (German)

Translated version (English)

RESILIENZ Konzept und Praxis der Welthungerhilfe

RESILIENCE Concept and praxis of Welthungerhilfe

Überblick Der Bedarf an humanitärer Hilfe nimmt weltweit erheblich zu und führt das humanitäre System an die Grenzen seiner Belastbarkeit. … Der steigende Bedarf macht darüber hinaus Maßnahmen erforderlich, die es bedrohten Gemeinschaften ermöglichen, wiederholenden Störungen und langfristigen Belastungen standzuhalten und sich anzupassen. […] Dieser „Impuls“ .. gibt Anregungen dazu, was darüber hinaus erforderlich ist, um Resilienz als übergreifendes Ziel in der Humanitären Hilfe und Entwicklungszusammenarbeit zu berücksichtigen.

Overview The demand for humanitarian aid substantially increases on a global scale and leads the humanitarian system up to its breaking point. … In addition to that, this increasing demand necessitates measures which enable threatened communities to withstand and to adapt to repetitive disturbances and long-term burdens. […] This “Impuls” .. gives suggestions concerning what else is required in order to take resilience as an overarching goal in the context of humanitarian aid and development cooperation into account.

Das Konzept der Resilienz Die Welthungerhilfe verfolgt das Ziel der nachhaltigen Ernährungssicherung. Weil größere Zusammenbrüche von gesellschaftlichen Systemen die Ernährungssicherung in bedrohlichem Maße beeinflussen, wirkt die Welthungerhilfe darauf hin, zumindest die Auswirkungen von Störungen durch politische Konflikte, extremen Naturereignissen und Klimawandel abzufedern. Entwicklungschancen müssen abgesichert und zukünftigen Generationen möglichst viele Entscheidungsoptionen offen gehalten werden. […] Mit Blick auf die Gestaltung von Programmen der Welthungerhilfe bleibt festzuhalten, dass Resilienz als eine strukturelle und dynamische Systemeigenschaft zu verstehen ist. Resilienz zeigt sich an dem Zusammenwirken erkennbarer Elemente eines Systems und der sich daraus ergebenden Dynamik. Soziale Akteure können im System nicht nur die Systemstruktur, sondern auch die Beziehungen innerhalb des Systems und die Wechselwirkungen zwischen verschiedenen Hierarchieebenen beeinflussen. […]

The concept of resilience Welthungerhilfe pursues the goal of sustainable food security. Since larger collapses of societal system influence food security to a threatening extent, Welthungerhilfe works towards, at least, cushioning the impacts of disturbances caused by political conflicts, extreme natural phenomena and climate change. Development opportunities have to be ensured and preferably many options of development for future generations have to be kept open. […] With view to the configuration of programs of Welthungerhilfe it remains to be noted that resilience has to be understood as a structural as well as dynamic feature of a system. Resilience is observable in regard to the interaction of apparent elements of a system and the dynamic which is consequentially emerges. Social actors in a certain system can not only influence the structures of this system, but also the relations within the system and the interdependencies between different levels of hierarchy. […]

300 Was hat Welthungerhilfe schon getan? […] Die Stärkung von Resilienz erfordert ein langfristiges Engagement im konzeptionellen Zusammenwirken von Nothilfe, Wiederaufbau und Entwicklungszusammenarbeit unter Berücksichtigung von sozio-politischen sowie naturräumlichen und klimatischen Gefahren. … Bei Vorhaben zur Stärkung der Resilienz bedarf es eines interdisziplinären Handelns zum Kapazitätenaufbau von Individuen und Gemeinschaften. … Mit ihrem Positionspapier zur Förderung der Zivilgesellschaft in Partnerländern und in ihrer aktuellen Strategie hat die Welthungerhilfe ihr Bekenntnis zur Zusammenarbeit mit lokalen Partnern bekräftigt. […]

M. Naumann What has Welthungerhilfe done already? […] In consideration of socio-political as well as natural-space and climatic dangers, the strengthening of resilience requires a long-term engagement in terms of a conceptual coaction of emergency aid, reconstruction and development cooperation. … In case of initiatives which take the strengthening of resilience into account, it requires interdisciplinary action for the capacity-building of individuals and communities. … Welthungerhilfe has confirmed its commitment to cooperating with local partners in a position paper concerning the promotion of civil society in partner countries and in the course of its current strategy. […]

Wege zur Stärkung der Resilienz […] Die gefährdete Bevölkerung muss als Protagonist ihrer eigenen Zukunft verstanden Ways of strengthening resilience und einbezogen werden. […] […] The endangered population has to be understood and involved as the protagoForderungen an die internationale nist of its own future. […] Gemeinschaft Die Erkenntnis, dass die Stärkung der Demands on the international community Resilienz von bedrohten Gemeinschaften It has become clear that the strengthening langfristige Ansätze an der Nahtstelle zwis- of resilience of threatened communities chen Humanitärer Hilfe und Entwicklungrequires long-term approaches at the szusammenarbeit erfordert, ist gereift. … interface of humanitarian aid and development cooperation. …

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Christmann, G., Kilper, H. & Ibert, O. (2019). Resilient cities: Theoretical conceptualisations and observations about the discourse in the social and the planning sciences. In B. Rampp, M. Endress & M. Naumann (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres (pp. 121−147). Wiesbaden: Springer. Department for International Development (2011). Defining disaster resilience: A DFID approach paper. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/186874/defining-disaster-resilience-approach-paper.pdf (accessed on 26 May 2018). Deppisch, S. (2016). Urbane sozial-ökologische Resilienz. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 199–213). Wiesbaden: Springer. Endress, M. (2014). Interpretive sociologies and traditions of hermeneutic. In M. Staudigl & G. Berguno (eds.), Schutzian Phenomenology and Hermeneutic Traditions (pp. 33–54). Dordrecht: Springer. Endress, M. & Rampp, B. (2015). Resilienz als Perspektive auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse. In M. Endress & A. Maurer (eds.), Resilienz im Sozialen: Theoretische und empirische Analysen (pp. 33–55). Wiesbaden: Springer. Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2012). Katastrophenvorsorge und Anpassung an den Klimawandel: Erfahrungen aus der deutschen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit. https://www.bmz.de/de/themen/naturkatastrophen/dokumente_und_links/index.html (accessed on 26 May 2018). Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2013). Strategie der entwicklungsfördernden und strukturbildenden Übergangshilfe (ESÜH): Resilienz stärken – Übergänge schaffen. http://www.bmz.de/de/mediathek/publikationen/archiv/ reihen/strategiepapiere/Strategiepapier330_06_2013.pdf (accessed on 26 May 2018). Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2014). Entwicklung für Frieden und Sicherheit: Entwicklungspolitisches Engagement im Kontext von Konflikt, Fragilität und Gewalt. https://www.bmz.de/de/mediathek/publikationen/reihen/strategiepapiere/Strategiepapier328_04_2013.pdf (accessed on 26 May 2018). Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2015). Katastrophenrisikomanagement. Ansatz und Beiträge der deutschen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit. https://www.bmz.de/de/mediathek/publikationen/reihen/infobroschueren_flyer/infobroschueren/Materialie267_Katastrophenrisikomanagement.pdf (accessed on 26 May 2018). Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2016). Klimawandel – Zeit zu handeln: Klimapolitik im Kontext der Agenda 2030. https://www.bmz.de/de/ mediathek/publikationen/reihen/infobroschueren_flyer/infobroschueren/Materialie262_ klimaschutz_konkret.pdf (accessed on 26 May 2018). Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2017). BMZ Wasserstrategie: Schlüssel zur Umsetzung der Agenda 2030 und des Klimaabkommens. http://www.bmz.de/de/mediathek/publikationen/reihen/strategiepapiere/Strategiepapier404_06_2017.pdf (accessed on 26 May 2018). Folke, C. (2006). Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses. Global Environmental Change 16 (3), 253–267. Fooken, I. (2016). Psychologische Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung. In R. Wink (ed.), Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung (pp. 13–45). Wiesbaden: Springer.

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Oevermann, U. (2001). Die Struktur sozialer Deutungsmuster: Versuch einer Aktualisierung. sozialersinn 2 (1), 35–81. Oevermann, U. (2013). Objektive Hermeneutik als Methodologie der Erfahrungswissenschaften von der sinnstrukturierten Welt. In P. C. Langer, A. Kühner, & P. Schweder (eds.), Reflexive Wissensproduktion: Anregungen zu einem kritischen Methodenverständnis in qualitativer Forschung (pp. 69–98). Wiesbaden: Springer. Oevermann, U., Allert, T., Elisabeth, K. & Krambeck, J. (1987). Structures of meaning and Objective Hermeneutics. In V. Meja, D. Misgel, & N. Stehr (eds.), Modern German sociology (pp. 436–447). New York: Columbia University Press. Olsson, L., Jerneck, A., Thoren, H., Persson, J. & O’Byrne, D. (2015). Why resilience is unappealing to social science: Theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific use of resilience. Science Advances 1 (4). Przyborski, A. & Wohlrab-Sahr, M. (2014). Qualitative Sozialforschung: Ein Arbeitsbuch (4th rev. ed.). München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. Walker, B., Holling, C., Carpenter, S. & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9 (2). Weiss, M., Hartmann, S. & Högl, M. (2018). Resilienz als Trendkonzept: Über die Diffusion von Resilienz in Gesellschaft und Wissenschaft. In M. Kardiri, M. Schneider & R. Gutwald (eds.), Resilienz: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven zu Wandel und Transformation (pp. 13–32). Wiesbaden: Springer. Welthungerhilfe (2018a). Hunger: Verbreitung, Ursachen & Folgen. https://www.welthungerhilfe.de/hunger/ (accessed on 26 May 2018). Welthungerhilfe (2018b). Resilienz: Gewappnet für die nächste Krise. https://www.welthungerhilfe.de/informieren/loesungen/resilienz/ (accessed on 26 May 2018). Wernet, A. (2014). Hermeneutics and Objective Hermeneutics. In: U. Flick (ed.): The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis (pp. 234–246). Los Angeles/London/ New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC: SAGE.

Naumann, Marie  (M.A.) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Trier where she studied Sociology and German Studies until 2015. She is currently working as a Research Assistant in a DFG-funded project which examines socio-historical processes between the 13th and 16th century by analysing how the concept of resilience can be used to add more analytical insights to the investigations of these historical constellations (“Resilience. Phases of Societal Upheaval in Dialogue between Medieval Studies and Sociology”/Project “Theory of Resilience”, University of Trier). Therein integrated, her dissertation project focuses on resilience as a concept of societal self-observation. Her research interests include the following topics: Social Resilience, Sociology of Knowledge, Qualitative Methods of ­ Social Research, Perspectives and Methods of Discourse Analysis.

Cultural Resilience as the Resilience of a Distinctness. Distinctness from What? for What? François Bousquet and Raphaël Mathevet 1 Introduction Most articles in the field of resilience feature research that focuses either on the individual, drawing inspiration from studies conducted in psychology, or on social and ecological systems (SES). The resilience of the individual is defined by Masten and Cicchetti (2016) as, “the potential or manifested capacity of an individual to adapt successfully through multiple processes to challenges that threaten the function, survival, or positive development.” Meanwhile, Folke (2016) defines the resilience of social and ecological systems as, “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedback, and therefore identity.” Researchers from both fields are engaged in the study of community resilience, which looks at how groups survive in the face of adversity, which can be continuous or expressed as shocks. “Community resilience is broadly defined

F. Bousquet ()  CIRAD, UPR GREEN, Montpellier, France E-Mail: [email protected] GREEN, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, Montpellier, France R. Mathevet  CNRS, CEFE, Montpellier, France E-Mail: [email protected] Institut Français de Pondichéry, Pondicherry, India © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_15

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as a community’s collective capacity to function in, respond to, and potentially influence an environment characterized by continuous change, uncertainty, and crisis” (Maclean et al. 2014). For psychologists, community resilience helps to explain the resilience of individuals, while for social science and ecology researchers, it contributes to an understanding of the resilience of SES. It was by referring to communities that Adger (2000) defined social resilience as, “the ability of communities to withstand external shocks due to their social infrastructure.” Numerous authors have emphasized the role of culture in relation to the resilience of individuals, SES, and communities, which has given rise to the concept of cultural resilience. This concept is, however, ambiguous: is it a question of the resilience of culture itself, or resilience through culture? The second is considered most frequently: culture is a resource for the resilience of individuals, communities and SES. The first dimension, the resilience of culture, has been studied less extensively, yet is nonetheless critical: how does this cultural resource persist, is it maintained, does it evolve? These are the questions examined in this article. We will study the resilience of culture first through a literature review, then through a case study set in France. In 1989, the descendents of Spanish immigrants, settled in the south of France for two or even three generations, created a Spanish festival, the Romeria del Encuentro. Why did they wish to express their culture? Did the creation of this festival offer them new opportunities? To find out, we analyzed the group of actors who oversaw this creation, and the reasons for it that they cited. We also describe the different elements making up the festival and the meaning given to each one. We then discuss the lessons learned from this case study. In line with the work of Fredrik Barth (1969, 1981), we consider that a group identity is the expression of a difference—or distinction—with respect to another group. Culture and identity are considered from an interactionist rather than an essentialist perspective. This reflection will lead us to raise the following questions: what is this distinction? Who is the other? Why emphasize this distinction?

2 Literature Review This literature review consists of three parts. The first examines definitions of cultural resilience and the status of resource given by the authors; the second looks at the process enabling the creation, maintenance and evolution of this resource. The third part discusses identity celebrations as an expression of, and claim to, a culture.

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2.1 Cultural Resilience as a Resource Although regularly increasing in number, there are nonetheless few articles referring to cultural resilience. According to Rotarangi and Stephenson (2014), the term “cultural resilience” derives from two different strands of literature. For researchers in the field of social psychology, Fleming and Ledogar (2008) define cultural resilience as “the capacity of a distinct community or cultural system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to retain key elements of structure and identity that preserve its distinctness.” In the social sciences and ecology, Crane (2010) defines cultural resilience “as the ability to maintain livelihoods that satisfy both material and moral (normative) needs in the face of major stresses and shocks.” Rotarangi and Stephenson studied a Māori tribal group of landowners in New Zealand, and consider that their case corresponds more to the definition of cultural resilience provided by Fleming and Ledogar, “whereby the cultural system has absorbed disturbance and reorganized while undergoing change so as to retain key elements of structure and identity that preserve its distinctness. Crane’s (2010, p. 2) definition of cultural resilience is perhaps less fitting to the circumstance because the resilience revealed in our narrative is clearly not just the maintenance of ‘livelihoods that satisfy both material and moral needs,’ in which the forest plays but a minor role at present, but more to do with the maintenance of cultural identity, values, and practices” (Rotarangi and Stephenson 2014). Rotarangi and Stephenson (2014) therefore define cultural resilience as “the ­ capacity of communities to mobilize cultural resources in response to external crises and threats, which in turn shapes individual and community actions related to the recovery process.” In both cases, the researchers consider culture’s ability to operate as a resource within SES that individuals may draw upon in response to external crises or threats, which can either, aid or inhibit community resilience under given conditions. This is the case for Forbes (2013), who studied reindeer herders in the tundra and for whom, “a vibrant cultural system enables people to pursue robust livelihood strategies that provide, in effect, ‘layers of resilience’ that not only enable people to cope with change, but create the potential to translate adversity into opportunities. Culture is a vibrant resource which enables a community to pursue robust livelihood strategies that are characterized by different ‘layers of resilience.’” Clarke and Mayer (2017) studied community recovery following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Their findings reveal that “not all cultural resources that define resilience in reference to certain disasters provided successful mitigation, adaptation, or recovery from the BP spill,” but they nonetheless propose that

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“culture may be viewed as offering a set of resources available to affected individuals and communities in response to external challenges. We refer to this more explicit articulation of culture’s role in resilience as cultural resilience and demonstrate its implications for disaster preparation, response, and recovery.” Cultural resources exist in conjunction with a SES, but they reside in the knowledge of individual actors, and they are used to construct “strategies of action” for everyday life and to confront “problem situations” (Clarke and Mayer 2017). Cultural resource expressed as an identity can benefit the resilience of the individual. “Ethnic identity search refers to the individual’s willingness to engage in a process of learning more about his or her ethnicity. This can involve taking time to learn about the history, traditions, and customs of one’s group; being active in social groups that include members of one’s ethnic group; talking to others about one’s ethnic group; and participating in the cultural practices of one’s ethnic group. It is thought that ethnic identity search is significantly related to resilience in a positive direction because the above activities suggest that the individual is actively involved in a community of people that further his or her understanding and, as such, act as buffers against stress. Thus, not only does the individual benefit from greater learning about one’s ethnic identity, he or she is surrounded by a support network that may also promote resilience” (ClaussEhlers et al. 2006).

2.2 Processual Approach of Cultural Resilience If we agree with these authors that cultural resilience is a resource, the question of the dynamics of this resource then arises. How is it constructed, how does it maintain itself? Crane (2010) on one side, and Rotarangi and Stephenson (2014) on the other, present different perspectives on this question. By considering culture as a resource, Crane applies the adaptive cycle model. “In ecological systems, a severe shock stimulates a ‘release’ phase, which can be expected to be accompanied by violent discharges of energy and temporarily increased entropy. The same sorts of processes can occur within cultural systems, where shocks can stimulate disjunctures between normative values and material practices, creating a sort of cultural ‘release’ process, through which there is relatively rapid change in system organization. In the contexts of cultural transformations, these ‘release’ phases are generally times of tension or conflict for individuals and communities. As in ecosystems, such disruptions may lead to a new stable state of cultural practice (normative and/or material) that is substantially different than the original, and from which it may difficult to return to previous practices and

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norms even when circumstances change” (Crane 2010). Meanwhile, for Rotarangi and Stephenson (2014), cultural resilience is a co-constituted set of long-term relationships between the cultural identity of a people and the set of ­social-ecological relationships within which this identity was founded. The authors reach the ­conclusion that the retention of a cultural identity is not necessarily incompatible with social-ecological transformation, despite significant changes in “structures, functions and feedbacks.” The question is whether the maintenance of an identity is linked to the evolution of social and ecological dynamics, or can the dynamics of cultural resilience as a resource be studied independently of changes in SES?

2.3 Festival as the Expression of Culture How may a culture and the identity of a social group be characterized? We are not pretending to summarize decades of social science research here. We have chosen to focus on the expression of a cultural identity through identity celebrations. What message is conveyed by those who create, maintain and develop identity celebrations? For Davis (2016), “Becoming a social construct rather than an objective reality, the festival develops not only physical characteristics but also affect and meaning. Adopting this multi-layered approach, the festival environment becomes a contextually relevant factor; it creates a location, history, heritage, and reputation supported by brand, authenticity, commitment, and sustainability.” Davis emphasizes the importance of the relationship between the group and the environment created by the festival. The festival relies on and gives meaning to this relationship. “A key asset of any festival is its ability to offer a temporary distinctive environment. Immersion in such an environment allows the individual-environment relationship to develop, and with it meaningful two-way interactions also develop. Individuals therefore become responsible for creating and sustaining the environment, while the environment becomes responsible for influencing thought processes, and a unique setting shaped by individual beliefs is created” (Davis 2016). How may an identity celebration be studied? One must avoid an essentialization as well as the commodification of this event, and focus on the social relations which create and express themselves through the event. “Differences between individuals and groups in the distribution and utilization of culture are integral to the modern reproduction of inequality, particularly to the degree that powerful institutions privilege some over others […] While downplaying the existence of culture as an overarching system, then, we argue that a more contemporary

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approach that looks at patterns in its composition, usage, and distribution within and across social groups offers an opportunity to improve resilience thinking” (Clarke and Mayer 2017). A few authors have studied festivals which convey an identity message. Chen and Tao (2017) studied the evolution of a festival in China and consider that, “ a festival landscape reflects the will of the dominant power group. The traditional Qiqiao Festival was transformed into the Guangzhou Qiqiao Cultural Festival, and the range of celebrators has expanded from villagers to the wider public. This transformation was completed by the government together with the elites and media who constructed an ‘official’ festival memory that differed from the traditional ones. […] Out of curiosity and amusement motivated by the festival landscape and the utilization of the public space at Qiqiao Garden, a festival memory of the citizens and migrants was generated and continually strengthened. The government selectively reconstructed traditional festival landscapes and created new ones unrelated to the local spirit of Zhucun and the villagers’ own narratives, which weakens self-awareness of the evolution of the ‘Qiqiao’ culture and reduces the authenticity of festival memory. The government has constructed an ‘official’ festival memory successfully through the reshaping of a festival landscape.” German festivals in southern Brazil are another example of how festivals emerge. These festivals did not arise spontaneously, informally, or in an anomic manner, they were thought out by members of the city council and entrepreneurs (Malenfant 2009). In 1993, “young people will rediscover the traditions of their grandparents that have been forbidden for political reasons for an entire generation. We will proudly show our music, our dances, our cuisine and above all our joie de vivre” (Malenfant 2009). The festival highlights the arrival of the Germans and how they transformed the forest into civilization. The identity message is expressed through the type of relationship with nature and the transformation of nature. Finally Bertheleu (2000), who studied Lao festivals, draws general conclusions, both on the relation to the environment and on power relations. “Large festivals thus seem conducive to the ritualization, the dramatization of ethnicity, the staging of acts that, very formalized or saturated with emotion, regularly mobilize the support of the public and consolidate an identity that the environment tends to dilute. In the guise of commemoration and outdated folkloric celebrations that seem frozen through repetition, the group does not cease to renew and assert itself, imperceptibly remodeling the contours of Lao ethnicity over the years, adapting it to individual and collective experiences. While the highpoints of festival life thus contribute effectively to the symbolization of ethnicity, the dynamic study of the latter also allows us to see, beneath this symbolic function, the indirect reflection of living conditions and majority/minority relationships as experienced on a daily basis.” (Bertheleu 2000)

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Cultural resilience is a dynamic resource for the individual, the community and the resource. Research should look at how this resource is created, ­maintained and used. Identity festivals express the cultural values of a group and the study of the sense of these festivals and the messages they carry reveals how this cultural resource is used by given social groups.

3 Field Study: La Romeria del Encuentro We studied a Spanish identity celebration by examining both the message expressed in this festival and the interactions between the different actors who created it. Mauguio, a town of 16,000 inhabitants located in Petite Camargue a few kilometers from Montpellier, has the well-established reputation of being the Spanish city in France. Severe drought in the beginning of the 20th century was the first to push people from Lorca, a town in the Murcia region of Spain, to the winegrowing lands of Mauguio. “In 1921, 400 Spaniards were recorded, or 12% of the population […], the proportion rises to 30% in 1931. Only a few Spanish refugees from the civil war came to settle there in the late 1930s. A second wave of Spaniards coming to settle in Mauguio began in the late 1960s and continued until the fall of Francoism” (Hernandez 1995). In 1975, it was thought that half of the population’s ancestors were from Spain, and more precisely, Lorca. In 1989, many years after the flow of Spanish migrants had dried up, several people created in Mauguio a Spanish festival, the “Romeria del Encuentro,” which roughly translates as “the pilgrimage of encounter.” The creation of this festival was studied through the analysis of documents, participant observation, interviews with the main people who created the festival and who animate it today, as well as an analysis of all articles published between 1989 and 2011 in the regional newspaper (Midi Libre) about Romeria. The main elements of the festival are as follows: • bullfights • Spanish cuisine, paella, migas, Spanish wines • dances, sevillana and flamenco • high mass, flamenco mass or rociera mass • concert(s), shows Every year, the festival begins on a Friday evening and ends Sunday evening. It takes place around the arenas within circumscribed boundaries. Casetas, canvas shelters found in Andalusian festivals, welcome passersby who come to drink,

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eat and enjoy the shows with family or friends. In the middle of the casetas is a podium on which the shows are organized. To understand the time when the festival began, the festival’s creation must be situated within a transnational link. We saw earlier that the first Spaniards arrived at the beginning of the 20th century and that the vast majority were economic migrants, most arriving during the Franco period. Although Franco’s migration policies favored these migrations, the general feeling among the Spaniards of Mauguio is one of flight, prompted by a mix of poverty and politics. Franco relinquished power and died in 1975, but it was not until in 1982, with the coming to power of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, that the democratic transition was considered secure. After Franco’s death, one started to get back in touch with and claim a cultural identity. With the dictatorship over, they felt free to express themselves and make claims. (G.V interview, 2011)

The image of Spain that was to be presented was a classical one, not the contemporary expression (Movida—with new wave and punk influences) that was then flourishing on the other side of the Pyrenees and attracting the attention of the European culture world. Against this backdrop, the Romeria festival was born out of a convergence of the interests of two organizations (a bullfighting club and the town hall). The mayor at the time was M.B. Here is his account: Except in the market, there were few expressions of Spanish identity. One might say they did not have a very effusive culture. […] No request came from them; maybe they were talking to each other, but not to us. I was not the one who came up with the idea, but I asked my team to consider ideas for another1 festival, and maybe a Spanish festival. We wanted a cultural dimension. The most cultural was the Romeria, a pagan and sacred mix. Associations were asked to cook Spanish food, serve Spanish drinks, play Spanish music. We imposed on everyone a tablao, a stage in the middle to put on shows. We added the bullfight, the doma vaquera, and a paella competition. It became incredibly popular. It was really Spain that was highlighted.

Here now is the story of G.V., who is considered by Mr. B. and several other people as the chief creator of the festival. G.V. was born in Mauguio and had

1The

other festival mentioned here is the traditional “fete votive.” Camargue has a long and strong tradition which is expressed in every village each year through a festival made of bull games, dances, rituals. Festival ingredients are very different expressing very different values and meanings (see later in the text).

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no Spanish ancestors. One of his grandfathers was Italian. However, he went to school with Spanish friends and says he grew up with a ‘dual culture.’ I was friend with J.V. with whom I was talking and who had the idea of organizing something traditionally Spanish: we could organize a Romeria, a kind of village festival where people participate, make paella in the street, with bullfighting shows. We went to see the mayor who was sensitive to the Spanish population as his electorate. A program was organized in the summer of 1989. The ideas came from J.V., who knew the Spanish Romeria traditions very well. The creation thus came out of a meeting of friends with the mayor who wanted to participate. We called it the Romeria del Encuentro, for the meeting of native French people with others. There were no problems of racism or rejection. We got along together well. When we created the Romeria, the idea was to highlight this mix, taking the essence of the Spanish festival and mixing it with what was going on in France. We did not want it to be rigid or fixed, there was just one framework: people coming to have fun and meet each other. Everyone could find something to enjoy, whether in the bullfights or the mass.

The creation of the Romeria festival thus was based on the coming together of two elements. One was the request of the mayor who was considering possible cultural events in the town that he administered, and who was thought to be in part motivated by a desire to “please the Spaniards” in his electorate. The second element was the initiative of a Mauguio resident (admittedly raised in a dual culture but who was not of Spanish origin) who went to seek ideas outside the Mauguio community. The mayor at the time noted that Mauguio’s Spanish community had not sought to publically express their identity. The success of the festival among them shows that the community certainly was ready, but it seems that the creation of this festival cannot be presented as the fruit of a community-based demand. The three players indicate that it was a question of “trying to please,” to stimulate the meeting of Spaniards and the non-Spaniards, to propose a cultural and festive event in the town. This festival then evolved between 1989 and 2011. We distinguish three phases. The creation phase described above: “have fun through an intercultural encounter.” Following the success of the first year, the Romeria festival developed fairly quickly. The first years revolved around this idea of intercultural fraternity, of towns without borders. The 1993 mass included people dressed in costumes from different cultures in Languedoc, the Camargue and Seville. The local newspaper reported the participation of rugby players, the local sport which has no place in Spanish culture, in the unbridled spirit of post-game celebrations. The growth phase and the emergence of discourse on identity preservation. While steps were being taken to become a twin city with Lorca, the message of authenticity, the truth, appeared in the mid-1990s. In 1996, it was written for

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the first time that, “Mauguio wishes to keep the festival the right size, that of a family celebration.” Starting from this date, an evolution began with a discourse about two combined dangers to be avoided, the danger of the loss of Spanish ­authenticity and the danger of commercialism. In 1997, the casetas were reserved for Mauguio associations, purportedly to ensure authenticity and respect tradition. In 1998, the message became defensive: “against guardianne (a French Camargue dish) and hamburger-fries.” In 2000, the message became very clear: “Elegance acts to calm spirits, Mauguio does not let go, it masters. The Romeria is a family event seeking to strictly respect tradition.” This message of authenticity and respect would be repeated each year. A charter was enacted for casetas holders. “Merguez and fries are forbidden, specific decoration and typical cuisine are required, the music must be traditional Spanish, modern techno music, even if Spanish, is not allowed. Frequent checks will be carried out, the contract provides for the definitive closure by the police of caseta managed by fraudsters who do not comply with the authenticity checks.” In short, not everyone was welcome at the event: “The odors of merguez mask the perfumes of paella, techno music spoils the sevillanas and this may attract a crowd clearly uninterested in Spanish traditions.” In 2002, one of the key players gave a new version of the meaning of the event, “we called it del encuentro because we wanted to make it a place of exchange and encounters for the Spaniards. Our objective was to preserve a unit of culture, tradition, religion.” The third phase: the emergence of social and religious meaning. In 2003, the first fiesta campera (an Andalusian event) was organized, followed by a procession up to the statue of the Virgin. In 2005, the “virgen de las huertas” was brought from Lorca, she was blessed as the protector of market gardeners and featured in a procession taking her first from the fields to the entrance of the village and then into the church. For several years, the mass has no longer been a flamenco mass but a mass with a corro rocierro. It was also in 2005 that the Patio Juventud was inaugurated, which symbolizes the place where Spanish culture is taught to children. The number of casetas decreased. The message conveyed by the main actors of the Romeria became that generally given to established festivals: “The very idea of the Romeria is the encounter, the mix of people from all walks of life, of all beliefs. There is no distinction between Spaniards and French.” With the Spanish identity of the festival ensured and the danger of evolution into a “feria” limited, those in charge of the festival then turned to the task of communicating the meaning of a Romeria. We now find the social and religious discourse attributed to carnivals in general and more specifically to Spanish festivals or Spanish pilgrimages, that of a place and a time of meeting where different social classes mix, normal social codes break down and everyone groups together

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around the codes instituted by the festival. An outside observer, who in the past had been very involved: In Mauguio, what they have tried to do and are close to achieving, is a high mass. It is clear they are not far from communing. There is bullfighting, a form of religion, flamenco, dances, singing, procession, all the ingredients are there. Not much is missing for it to be truly the thing.

These codes and values are those of Spanish authenticity; some see in this identity claim the loss of some of the intercultural original meaning of the festival. An in-depth study of the codes and values associated with the Spanish festival in opposition to the codes and values associated with the values of the local Camargue festival shows that the Spanish festival showcases values of order, control and hierarchy, elegance born of respect for rules and control, while the Camargue festival highlights the values of freedom (Bousquet 2011). This comparison is particularly clear when one looks at the difference between the relationships with bulls in Spanish bullfights and Camargue bull race (Saumade 1994).

4 Discussion Through the study of the identity celebration, and in the light of the literature review, we can contribute to the reflection on the role of cultural resilience as a resource, drawing some conclusions on the process of creation and maintenance of this resource. In a second part of the discussion, we consider cultural resilience as the construction of a distinctness and ask the question: distinctness from what, for what?

4.1 Building and Maintaining a Cultural Resource Agier (2000) postulates that festivals (in his case, the carnival of Bahia) provide an opportunity to address not the identities themselves, but rather their ritualization, which offers the problematic site where one may view “culture making itself” through the staging of identity. In this article, we analyze tradition as a repeated and evolving cultural manifestation. According to Hobsbawn, “invented traditions refer to a set of practices of a ritual and symbolic nature that are normally governed by openly and tacitly accepted rules and seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior through repetition, which automatically implies a repetition of the past. […] The aim and characteristic of traditions, including

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invented traditions, is invariability. […] Invented traditions seem to belong to three overlapping groups: a) those that establish or symbolize social cohesion or belonging to groups, real or artificial communities, b) those that establish or legitimize institutions, statutes or relations of authority, and c) those whose main purpose is socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and codes of conduct” (Hobsbawm [1983] 2006). Within the meaning of Hobsbawm, the Romeria del Encuentro as a whole is an invented tradition. This festival was born against a backdrop in which three situations were combined: i) the loss of the cultural dimension within the Camargue festival, ii) the desire to “please” a group, that is to say, to legitimize the Spanish status, “to introduce status in a world of the contract” (Hobsbawm [1983] 2006) the Spanish arrived and settled on the concrete and then symbolic basis of an employment contract, and iii) the democratic transition in Spain which was erasing the link that Franco had established between tradition and his own power. The Romaria de Encuentro successfully answered the three objectives assigned by Hobsbawn. It symbolizes belonging to a group and social cohesion—the participation of all generations is correctly emphasized, it legitimizes the status of the Spaniards, and it propagates value systems and codes of conduct relatively to another value system and code of conducts conveyed by the Camarguian culture. In the light of the example of the Romeria del Encuentro, what strikes us as important is that to be considered as a resource for resilience in the face of adversity and shocks, one must be able to refer to the culture and it must be legitimized. Rotarangi and Stephenson reached the conclusion that the retention of a cultural identity is not necessarily incompatible with social-ecological transformation, despite significant changes in “structures, functions and feedbacks.” We agree with the idea that a cultural identity can persist alongside change but, in light of our example, we note that the use of this resource can evolve and serve changing messages.

4.2 Use of the Cultural Resource We will focus here on the use of this cultural resource at the collective level. For many researchers, including Crane (2010), it is livelihoods which are at stake, while for Folke (2016), it is identity. Fleming and Ledogar (2008) are more specific: in their view, identity preserves distinctness. Over time, culture plays on the identification process by defining “who we are” and “what we are not.” The conception of identity is relational but also relative to specific issues, such as access to land, access to power, access to economic markets, etc. Barth (1969) showed

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how one may change one’s ethnic group according to challenges and situations. In this reflection on the creation and maintenance of identity as a relationship with others, this notion of distinctness seems to be at the heart of cultural resilience. While resilience is a resource that may be used to cope with adversity or respond to shocks, this resource is built, maintained and supported through the expression of a distinctness. This notion of distinctness raises two questions: distinctness from what? For what (reason)? In the example of the Romeria del Encuentro, we have seen that the festival indeed manifests a desire for identity and that this desire passes through the expression of distinction. During the Romeria, everything not Spanish is rejected; this is the rule of the transnational festival, at the moment of the festival, one is Spanish. The ‘other’ is not the one who is not Spanish, but rather the one uninterested in Spanish culture, meaning who does not live at that moment this ethnicity by refusing the foods, games with nature and music which are its features. If one examines the ingredients of the festival, this distinction is one in relation to Camargue culture and its values (Control and hierarchy for the Spanish culture, freedom for the Camarguian culture). Yet the Spanish of Mauguio are also Camarguais, actors since their birth in cultural events of Camargue life just like the Spanish festival. They hold both identities and in addition to the analysis of these identities differences we identified another important distinction. For Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004), modes of belonging are practices that signal or create an identity, which demonstrate a conscious connection to a particular group. Ways of being are the social relationships and practices in which people engage rather than the identities associated with their action. They have the opportunity to act because they live in this social field. If we look at ways of being, another distinction appears, the distinction with respect to newcomers, representatives of the metropolization represented here by the growth of the neighboring city of Montpellier. This is what Father C. says about the Romeria: It is a way to come together each year, to rediscover small town life, with the expansion of Montpellier.

Regarding ways of being, here is one extract from an interview with a person in charge of the town hall: It is more difficult with the new arrivals, they have trouble integrating. They arrive with their own culture, and do not necessarily work in Mauguio. Mauguio is a bedroom community, they want peace and quiet. It’s dangerous during the festival. They make no effort, and then are in conflict. They complain about the streets being closed off.

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Here is a second extract from an interview with a Spaniard actively engaged in the organization of the Romeria: I am not against the people from Montpellier, it’s not necessarily Montpellier. It’s a bit of a shame that elected officials deny the values of tradition. It’s true that we do not encourage them with these values of tradition, with badly placed laws in Brussels or elsewhere. That kills a town’s soul. For Montpellier, we welcome these new arrivals. Today we listen more to people from outside because they have a good way of speaking, a good way of seeing things, but I think these people forget that we are a farming town and that there are values of tradition and respect. If you don’t like that, you should not live here. At 10 am the street is closed for the abrivado and people complain because they can’t go to the beach … People who sell their houses in Paris or Lyon start laying down their law under the pretext of peace and quiet. I am not a city person because I love the province, having barbeques, talking with people. In a town of 17,000 people, people sold their places in Paris and came down to raise prices. As for our values, elected officials should take note: trying to appease the new arrivals is suffocating the town … we have created a bedroom community, that’s it.

In 2002, Keerle (2004) asked Mauguio residents to build mental maps of their territory. The map of a recently arrived pensioner included his residential area and a vague representation of the city center, while two longtime Mauguio residents, one of Spanish origin and the other not, drew the city center and each highlighted the bullfighting places which they preferred. For Maudet (2006), bullfighting traditions, both Camarguaise and Spanish, affirm an attachment to the land and rurality. The bull can be used in battles over land, as a Mauguio resident told us: As long as there are bulls along the marshes there will be no real estate development. All of the mayors, even north of Montpellier, want to keep bulls to prevent fires and land pressure.

Let us step into the shoes of “the other.” We did not interview many of these “city types” living in Mauguio. However, we were struck by an expression repeated by people watching the youth playing with the bulls: “They are savages!” For a few years the city of Montpellier organized a Camarguais bull race, “Toros d’Ô,” which does not involve killing the bull. This event was the target of anti-bullfighting campaigns under the slogan “Montpellier is not a city of tradition.” In conclusion, in the light of these interview extracts, which focus on relations of belonging but also on ways of being, the search for the other leads us to financially well-off “newcomers” who do not uphold rural values. Facing the

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n­ ewcomer is the “rural” Melgorian (the name used for Mauguio residents), of Spanish origin or not. The question “distinctness for what?” raises the issue of a political project. The “rural” Melgorians, who rely on a double legitimacy, transnational Spanish and Camarguais, which merge in the countryside and the bull, claim to exercise power over the municipality or the federation of municipalities, thereby opposing the “non rural” from the interior and the hegemonic ambition of the city and the agglomeration of Montpellier. For Crane (2010) “cultural transformation will be seen when shocks occur that cause ruptures or disjunctures in the connections between the social institutions, normative values, and the practices of day-to-day life.” From our study, we conclude the group of people mobilize their culture as a resource to face adversity and this mobilization is a political process. The possibility of the mobilization depends on the adversity context and the legitimacy of the culture, and the use of the resource depends on the stakes and the political process. “Custom and interest cannot, any more than purely emotional or strictly rational motives of alliance, establish sure foundations of domination. A broader factor is added: the belief in legitimacy” (Weber 1971). Cultural resilience is maintained for a legitimacy, giving a basis to the distinctness (and conversely to a belonging) whose political project should be questioned.

5 Conclusion In this article, we explore the question of cultural resilience. Most articles consider this resilience to be a resource for coping with adversity and shocks. We have addressed the general question of the creation, maintenance, and evolution of this resource, or the resilience of the cultural resource itself. Through a review of the literature and an analysis of a traditional identity festival, we examine cultural resilience as a set of relations with a social and ecological environment that aim to maintain an identity conceived as a distinctness. Cultural resilience is a resource because it gives legitimacy to a group to stand out and, within the framework of social and ecological systems, support a political project. The question traditionally asked, “Resilience of what? To what?” is thus complemented by a more specific question about cultural resilience: “Cultural resilience as a distinctness from what? For what?”.

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Maclean, K., Cuthill, M. & Ross, H. (2014). Six attributes of social resilience. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 57 (1), 144–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/096 40568.2013.763774. Malenfant, S. (2009). La migration du folklore et des fêtes germaniques au sud du Brésil. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 25 (3), 153–165. Masten, A. S. & Cicchetti, D. (2016). Resilience in development: Progress and transformation. In D. Cicchetti (ed.), Developmental psychopathology Vol. 4: Risk, resilience, and intervention (pp. 271–333). New York: Wiley. Maudet, J.-B. (2006). Le taureau marque son territoire (festivités taurines et identités territoriales du Sud-Oust euopéen à l’Amérique Latine). Annales de Géographie 4 (650), 361–387. Rotarangi, S. & Stephenson, J. (2014). Resilience pivots stability and identity in a socialecological-cultural system. Ecology and Society 19 (1), art. 28. https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol19/iss1/art28/. Saumade, F. (1994). Des sauvages en occident. Les cultures tauromachiques en Camargue et en Andalousie. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Weber, M. (1971). Economie et société. Paris: Plon.

Bousquet, François (HDR Ph.D.) has been looking at the interactions among m ­ ultiple actors for the management of the environment and renewable resources since his Ph.D. on the Inland Niger Delta fishery in Mali 1994. He is interested in the analysis of ­multiple perspectives and looks at how dialogues between heterogeneous actors who have d­ ifferent points of views and different power can favour desirable trajectories for social and e­ cological systems. During the first part of his career (1990–2000), he focused on agent-based ­methodologies and produced platforms and models for multi-stakeholders dialogues. During the second part he co-developed a participatory modelling approach, the companion modelling approach, particularly focusing on the participatory processes involved. In 2010, he oriented his research on the social relations between groups who have different origins and ­different relationships with nature. As a member of Resilience Alliance, he co-organized the 2014 conference on resilience in Montpellier. Mathevet, Raphaël (Dr.) is an ecologist and geographer at the CNRS in the Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive in Montpellier (France). He works on the conservation of biodiversity, protected areas and conservation planning tools, adaptive management and the evaluation of public policies. Working on participatory approaches and decisionsupport modeling, he applies simulation tools and role-playing game in interdisciplinary approaches to resolving management conflicts, especially in the context of wetlands and natural resources management. His most recent work focuses on the concepts of ecological solidarity and stewardship, social-ecological resilience and adaptation, social representations and mental models. During the last decade he focused on environmental history and political ecology but also on science/management and science/policy interfaces. He is a member of several scientific committees at various decision levels (national parks and reserves, IHOPE, UNESCO MAB program).

Resilience through social cohesion: A case study on the role of organizations Bo Tackenberg and Tim Lukas 1 Introduction While the main focus of national and international organizations in the 1990 s has been on ‘sustainable development,’ today their goals concentrate increasingly on promoting resilience. Nowadays, it seems less about fighting the causes of catastrophic events, but rather about enabling people or entire societies to survive in an increasingly uncontrollable and unpredictable world. The concept of resilience promises answers to various security problems. The idea is that resilience plays a part in minimizing risks and threats, and limiting damage events. Resilience is understood as the capability of a society to comparatively quickly cope with a crisis or catastrophe and thus to re-establish the capacity of the people and technical systems affected to act and function as soon as possible. Based on the awareness that an all-encompassing guarantee of security is impossible in a highly developed, networked and increasingly complex world, the focus is less on safeguarding against possible risks than on the creation of general resistance just in case that a catastrophic event occurs despite all precautions. The concept of resilience was initially established by developmental psychologist Emmy Werner (1971) in her so-called Hawaiian study. In a 40-year longitudinal study with 700 children, Werner examined whether and how individuals can develop coping strategies and adapt to different starting conditions: individuals B. Tackenberg () · T. Lukas  Institute for Public Safety and Emergency Management, University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] T. Lukas E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 B. Rampp et al. (eds.), Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_16

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who were capable to develop positive self-concepts in unfavorable starting and living conditions were referred to as ‘resilient’ children. Therefore, the term ‘resilience’ describes a positive but unexpected development tendency under adverse conditions or in other words: the adaptability or resistance of individuals to changing and adverse environmental conditions (Siegrist 2010, p. 32 f.). With an essay by ecologist Crawford S. Holling (1973) on “Resilience and stability of ecological systems,” the concept of resilience advanced to a “key concept” (­­Bröckling 2017) in (social-)ecology. From the 1990 s the concept increasingly spread into various disciplines in the fields of economics and social sciences (see Schnur 2013, p. 337), pursuing a “career” (Bonss 2016) which remains largely unbroken until today. The “Panarchy Model of Adaptive Cycles” by ecologists Crawford S. Holling and Lance H. Gunderson (2002) is regarded as one of the most popular models in the discourse on resilience and has served as the basis for numerous methodological attempts since its initial publication. It illustrates that (environmental and social) systems continuously go through a four-phase cycle under the influence of changing environmental conditions. The resilience capacity of a ­system differs by respective phases and varies in two dimensions: system-­specific accumulated resources (as structural potential) and intrinsic connectivity (e.g., local regulatory forms or actors’ links) (Schnur 2013, p. 338). Finally, in recent years, the concept of resilience received particular attention in the (security) political context, in various fields of practice (including civil protection and development aid) and in numerous other academic disciplines. Because of its wide distribution and open interpretation, a consistent definition of the term remains extremely difficult. In dominant reading, it is a concept to better cope with individual and systemic challenges and crises (Weiss et al. 2018, p. 14). Two basic perspectives can be distinguished from each other: On the one hand, the notion of technical terminology—as it is common in hazard research and groundbreaking in the discourse on resilience—describes the concept as a kind of bounce-back mechanism in which resilient systems are able to return to their original equilibrium state after an external disturbance (Schnur 2013, p. 337). In this regard, resilience is strongly associated with material robustness, which, as engineering resilience, refers particularly to the development of resilient designs and construction methods, for example for critical infrastructures (acatech 2014, p. 8). On the other hand, the focus of a second (ecological) perspective is the analysis of complex adaptive systems. Contrary to the assumptions of a technical understanding, systems are considered to be dynamic and adaptive. They are credited with the ability to not only restore old states of equilibrium after external disturbances, but also to be able to transform into new conditions (Schnur 2013, p. 338). McAslan (2011, p. 7) lists a number of characteristics that, in the vast

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majority of definitions, are attributed to the concept of resilience: “such as the ability to absorb and then recover from an abnormal event; being ready and prepared to face threats and events which are abnormal in terms of their scale, form or timing; an ability and willingness to adapt to a changing and sometimes threatening environment; a tenacity and commitment to survive.”

2 The Concept of Community Resilience The variety of different resilience concepts in diverse and contrasting disciplines may be due to the fact that modern societies are in constant motion and are continuously under pressure to adapt and to resist in the face of multiple problems. It also underlines that research and science strive to work out concepts and theories in order to tackle these problems on various levels in multiple perspectives (Wink 2016). In this article, we do not focus on systematically differentiating the multitude of circulating theories and concepts of resilience nor do we integrate various constructs pluralistically. Rather, we understand resilience as a means to explain the adaptability and resistance of complex human, technical or ecological systems, whose definitional differentiation should be clearly distinguished in regards to other understandings, depending on the topic and the research objective. That is, in our understanding we utilize the term resilience in two respects: first, as an analytical instrument to account for processes of transformation and social change, and second, as an individual and collective resource of socio-physical systems. As part of our research project “Resilience through Social Cohesion— The Role of Organizations (ResOrt),” we focus on the notion of community resilience, whose understanding and context will be outlined below using a theoretical and multidimensional model with reference to theories of social capital, social disorganization and collective efficacy (Sampson 2012). As a consequence, aspects of social trust, shared values and norms, reciprocity, participation and social networks are considered to be central, in other words main aspects of social cohesion in a community. The merely negatively connoted concept of vulnerability has evolved into the much more positive, proactive concept of resilience in the recent catastrophe discourse. This is not surprising, as the frequency and intensity of catastrophic events and major catastrophes increases due to climate change and global warming. For example, governments, civil protection and relief organizations are increasingly concerned with providing immediate assistance to the population in the event of a disaster (Patel et al. 2017). The concept of community resilience, which is primarily used in the context of crises and catastrophes, is aimed at p­ romoting

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self-help abilities of the population and is usually associated with ­ building up local capacities, promoting social support and resources, reducing risks and improving risk communication (Patel et al. 2017). In their literature review, Patel et al. (2017, p. 8) identify three central dimensions of community resilience: 1) the process of change and adaptation, 2) the ability to maintain and stabilize functions, and 3) a set of specific skills. “Community resilience was therefore found to be an amorphous concept that was understood and applied differently by different research groups. In essence, depending on one’s stance, community resilience can either be seen as an ongoing process of adaptation, the simple absence of negative effects, the presence of a range of positive attributes, or a mixture of all three” (Patel et al. 2017, p. 9). We dedicate ourselves to the concept of community resilience from a sociologicalanalytical point of view, with the main focus on the transformative conservation of social systems. Thus, we refer to the basic assumption of socio-ecological resilience research taking up the genuinely sociological insight, “that social change has to be understood as mode of conservation” (Blum et al. 2016, p. 152). We consider resilience as adaptive and coping skills of dynamic social systems in terms of (unexpected) existential challenges or external disturbances, such as natural disasters, economic crises, or rapid social change. The concept of community resilience locates these coping potentials in social processes and the personal and collective capacities of the respective members of society (Ross and Berkes 2014, p. 788). For example, Magis (2010, p. 402) defines community resilience as “the existence, development, and engagement of community resources by community members to thrive in an environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise.” Members of a resilient society or community are interconnected and cooperate in a way that society remains functional even in crisis and catastrophic situations. A resilient society is also characterized by its adaptive potential to a changing social, physical or economic environment. Resilient societies exhibit an ability to learn from past events and make use of the resulting knowledge (Price-­Robertson and Knight 2012, p. 4). In this regard, we distance ourselves from a purely technical ‘bouncing-back’ understanding, and perceive community resilience as an adaptive and coping ability that enables social systems after external disruptions and challenges to not only restore an initial state but to adapt to altered environmental conditions and thus to be able to transform into new states of equilibrium. Community Resilience in this sense means the ability of a community to selfhelp, drawing on collective coping capacities of its members that are already being developed in everyday social interactions in the form of shared values and norms, reciprocity norms, social networks, social participation and social trust—resources that can be seen as characteristics of the social structure which

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form the social cohesion of a community. By considering social cohesion as a socio-structural resource that promotes the formation of collective goods, it seems only plausible, that the resilience of a community crucially depends on the local social structure of urban spaces. For example, scientific literature often assumes that ethnic diversity is negatively related with social capital and aspects of social cohesion.

3 The Research Project ResOrt1 International and national studies show that social cohesion can be regarded as a key factor in increasing resilience towards crisis and disasters (Carroll et al. 2005; Aldrich and Meyer 2014; Townshend et al. 2015). However, the experiences of past crisis and catastrophes show that organizations contributing to the reduction of vulnerability relate very differently to social cohesion. This also applies to the national and international emergency response systems, which are very different concerning the integration of social cohesion into their work. Against this background, the joint research project “Resilience through Social Cohesion—The Role of Organizations” (ResOrt) analyses the role of social cohesion in the work of civil protection organizations, welfare and neighborhood organizations as well as local governments in overcoming crises, catastrophes and social upheavals. For that purpose, different dimensions of social cohesion and the concept of crisis are examined and modeled on the basis of scientific literature in order to analyze the role of social cohesion in the practice of different organizations both nationally and internationally. In addition, the research will examine the (socio-­ spatial) development conditions that foster social cohesion at small-scale level and how social cohesion in districts and neighborhoods can be strengthened by the (cooperative) work of organizations in order to better cope with crises and social upheavals in the future. These questions are addressed in a representative,

1The

joint research project “Resilience through Social Cohesion—The Role of Organizations” (ResOrt), which is funded by the German research program “Humanities, Cultural and Social Sciences,” is being chaired by the Institute of Public Safety and Emergency Management at the University of Wuppertal in cooperation with the German Red Cross and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict. The collaborative project is assisted by the associated partners of the Global Disaster Preparedness Center of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (GDPC), the Association for Social and Cultural Work (VskA) and Caritas International.

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mixed qualitative-quantitative research design, implemented in four German reference regions. On the basis of a written-postal survey, small- and socio-spatial conditions of social cohesion will be examined and aspects of collective efficacy will be captured on the basis of a lost-letter experiment. In addition, interviews and workshops will be conducted with experts from different organizations. As a result, an integrated set of recommendations for action will be concluded on how aspects of social cohesion can be included in the strategic development process of different organizations. This applies for neighborhood development organizations and welfare organizations that explicitly contribute to promoting and strengthening social cohesion by their work, as well as for civil protection organizations and local governments, which only indirectly influence the degree of social cohesion in a community. However, the knowledge of social cohesion can be regarded as a decisive factor in planning and taking action in the event of a disaster, especially for civil protection and relief organizations. The ResOrt project is thus located in transdisciplinary research, at the interface of social science and practice in various organizations that contribute to the reduction of societal vulnerability. The practice-oriented research provides support in many ways: for example, civil protection organizations and local governments are fostered to (better) include aspects of social cohesion in their risk and vulnerability assessments, and welfare and neighborhood actors can be sensitized to crisis situations and their role in it. In addition, the project contributes to a better networking among different actors and to the transfer of relevant insights from empirical field work into the elaboration of integrated action recommendations at various levels of support. Overall, the case study on resilience through social cohesion should help to foster and prepare different organizations for future social crises and rapid social change.

4 Collective Efficacy and Social Cohesion in Times of Crises and Social Upheavals When dealing with the question of what is meant by social cohesion in the scientific context, one quickly realizes that very different and often abstract definitions exist. Although it is a concept that is interdisciplinary interpreted in various ways, the respective underlying understanding is very similar (Dangschat 2011, p. 3). Social cohesion—commonly referred to as the ‘putty of society’—is a concept that tries to explain what unites people in communities and keeps society together at its core. Based on the concept of collective efficacy (Sampson 2012) we

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p­ erceive social cohesion as a central dimension of social capital, that generally refers to usable resources that emerge from social relationships and ­networks (Coleman 1990; Putnam 2000). Social capital is a network resource which results from the willingness of cooperation (Coleman 1988; Putnam 2000; see ­Oberwittler 2005). It can be interpreted as a system of bonds between members of a social group that is useful in the realization of interests (Braun and Voss 2014, p. 88). Thus, as Coleman (1990, p. 302) points out, social capital is a characteristic of social structures that favors certain actions of individuals. For Putnam (2000, p. 22 ff.), on the other hand, social capital realizes the validity of norms of reciprocity and social participation, i.e., the extent of civic engagement. In this reading, social capital is considered less as an individual, but as a socio-structural resource that promotes the formation of collective goods, from which not only individual actors, but a larger community will benefit. Thus social cohesion exists where people know each other, trust each other and share a common set of norms and values (Ziegleder et al. 2011, p. 70). Communities with a high level of social cohesion are characterized by a strong sense of community and belonging that manifests itself in the behavior of their members, especially in a high level of participation and helpfulness. In this line, Chan et al. (2006, p. 290) coin the term social cohesion as: “… a state of affairs concerning both the vertical and the horizontal interactions among members of society as characterized by a set of attitudes and norms that includes trust, a sense of belonging and the willingness to participate and help, as well as their behavioral manifestations.” In this perspective, social cohesion can be regarded as an essential requirement for coping with crises and upheavals and can be seen as a central element in the development of community resilience. The concept of collective efficacy refers to sociologist Robert J. Sampson and is based on theories of social disorganization (Oberwittler et al. 2013), which were originally developed to explain different rates of crime in urban districts and neighborhoods (Sampson 2012, p. 159). The theory of collective efficacy assumes that neighborhood residents are committed to the common good of the neighborhood whenever there is a basis of mutual trust, shared values and norms, and social cohesion among neighbors (Sampson 2012). While social capital can be used to achieve individual or collective goals, collective efficacy—by definition— is intended to serve a common purpose (Oberwittler 2005). In many urban areas, strong network ties among neighbors are increasingly being replaced by weak ties (Granovetter 1973). Collective efficacy therefore emphasizes less the close friendship networks as a central cause of social cohesion in neighborhoods, but rather the shared belief in the collective ability to achieve common goals. Thus,

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collective efficacy is a concept that allows to offer help and support even without close ties in the neighborhood, or in other words: in modern cities, the neighbor does not have to be a good friend for pursuing common goals and interests: “They desire trust with them, not necessarily to eat dinner with them” (Sampson 2012, p. 151). Against this background, the willingness of local residents to intervene can be considered as a key resource for the provision of aid not only in terms of crime and deviant behavior, but also in the development of coping capacities during crises and disaster situations (e.g., Pais et al. 2014). Until now the concept of collective efficacy has been primarily utilized to explain socio-spatially varying crime rates (Friedrichs and Oberwittler 2007, p. 467 ff.), however Sampson (2013) has recently pointed out its potential for explaining informal support action in crisis and catastrophic events. Nonetheless just a few studies have explicitly explored the role of collective efficacy in crisis and disaster situations or periods of rapid social change. Some of them are dedicated to the question of how (natural) disasters affect the perception of collective efficacy (see Benight 2004; Fay-Ramirez et al. 2015; Wickes et al. 2016). In other words, the focus of these studies is less on the effects of collective efficacy on community resilience, but rather on the resilience of collective efficacy itself. While the studies by Benight (2004) and Fay-Ramirez et al. (2015) conclude that the subjective perception of collective efficacy during and after catastrophes is clearly decreasing among those affected, Wickes et al. (2016) prove that collective efficacy increases generally in all neighborhoods, particularly in the disaster-hit areas. In addition, the study of Benight (2004) shows that people with a high sense of collective efficacy are less affected by their losses, and better able to cope with the impending challenges and problems caused by disaster. Other authors further emphasize the importance of collective efficacy as a key resource for the development of coping capacities (i.e., Norris et al. 2008; Sampson 2013; Pais et al 2014). In this regard, Sampson (2013) aptly formulates: “The lesson is that crises are mediated by the social as well as the built environment. Qualities such as the shared willingness to intervene and civic engagement constitute a social resource that helps explain the well-being of communities—in good times and bad. We can measure these qualities and monitor efforts to build and sustain their sometimes fragile hold. Just as humans need social connections as well as physical resources to survive and thrive, so too do communities.” Moreover, Norris et al (2008, p. 141) state that community competence in the face of environmental threats is strongly related with collective action and decision-making, i.e., capacities that can result from collective efficacy.

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However, noticeably more empirical studies deal with the role of social capital in crisis and disaster situations. Against this background, social capital has become an increasingly more decisive factor in the development of crisis and disaster management systems and international development assistance—apart from the traditional construction of (physical) infrastructures. Some studies show that social capital can be regarded as a resilience enhancing network resource for managing crises and disasters (e.g., Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Klinenberg 2015). For example, close social contacts (so-called bonding social capital) facilitate people’s preparedness and awareness in crises and disasters and enables them to localize assistance services more quickly and to seek direct help (Dynes 2006; Hawkins and Maurer 2010; see Aldrich and Meyer 2014). In contrast, networks based on a loose sense of belonging to various social groups (so-called bridging social capital) are proving to be particularly helpful for generating new resources for long-term regeneration after a crisis or catastrophe (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Hawkins and Maurer 2010; see Aldrich and Meyer 2014). Dynes (2005, p. 7) argues: “Consequently, during the emergency period, it is the form of capital that serves as the primary base for a community response. In addition, social capital is the only form of capital which is renewed and enhanced during the emergency period.” Furthermore, the research results of a study by Townshend et al. (2015) pointed out that the social cohesion of a society is also an important resource for dealing with disaster and crisis situations. That is, the extent of social cohesion in a society is particularly evident in crisis catastrophic situations. In this perspective, crises and catastrophes can be interpreted as a kind of litmus test for the degree of social cohesion, a result also found in a study by Carroll et al. (2005). Empirical evidence proves that collective efficacy, social capital and social cohesion should be considered as serious (social) phenomena that promote resilience. These social phenomena shape and promote the will to survive, to regenerate (McAslan 2011, p. 11) and to help others. However, the question remains to what extent these social phenomena can be realized in multi-ethnic societies.

5 Influence of Ethnic Diversity on Social Cohesion and Collective Efficacy The social infrastructure of a city plays a crucial role in preventing and mitigating serious damage in crisis situations and disasters or in times of rapid social change. In addition, disaster recovery is essentially based on a sense of community that connects the members in disaster-affected areas. However, trusting

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neighborhood relations and active participation in social life in multi-ethnic societies are often called into question. Ethnic-cultural heterogeneity and social cohesion frequently seem to be negatively related: with an increase of diversity in a society or community, the willingness to build close relationships with fellow human beings and to stand up for the common good declines. For example, Putnam (2007, p. 137) argues in his seminal article “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century” that “in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Putnam studies the impact of urban and social transition towards a more diverse, multicultural society on social capital, which, according to him, is a resource arising from social networks and the associated validity of reciprocity norms and social trust. He assumes that with an increase of social capital, children grow up healthier and safer, people live a longer and happier life, and democracy as well as economy are in a better state or balance (Putnam 2007, p. 138). However in this respect ethnic diversity and social capital correlate negatively. In the short or long term all modern societies will become more heterogeneous—in the wake of immigration—leading to a steady reduction in social solidarity and participation, close social networks, social trust, and thus social capital and social cohesion. Putnam’s “hunkering down” thesis triggered a continuing debate on the impact of ethnic diversity on social capital, followed by numerous international studies which analyzed the influence of ethnic diversity on social cohesion and empirically examined Putnam’s hypothesis (e.g., Alesina and La Ferrara 2000; Alesina and La Ferrara 2002; Costa and Kahn 2003; Marschall and Stolle 2004; Leigh 2006; Gesthuizen et al. 2009; Tolsma et al. 2009; Fieldhouse and Cutts 2010; ­Portes and Vickstrom 2011; Pendakur and Mata 2012; Ariely 2014; Gundelach 2014; Abascal and Baldassarri 2015; Koopmans and Schaeffer 2015). Many studies dealing with the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and social cohesion use intergroup theories such as the ‘homogeneity-,’ ‘conflict-’ or ‘contact theory’ as a framework of explanation. The homogeneity theory states that humans prefer to interact with those who are similar to them. Vice versa, this would mean that people living in (ethnically) heterogeneous neighborhoods rarely seek contact with others (Gijsberts et al. 2012, p. 528). Explanations based on the conflict theory assume that negative attitudes towards ethnic outgroups arise from competitive relationships between social groups (Gundelach 2014). According to this, members of a majority group feel threatened by ‘outsiders’ due to various factors (e.g., conflicts concerning limited resources), which in turn leads to mistrust and intolerance towards the outgroup as well as to solidarity with their in-group (Fieldhouse and Cutts 2010, p. 290). In this perspective,

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conflicts between different groups increase with a rising number of ‘outsiders’ in the neighborhood. Consequently, ethnically heterogeneous contexts would reinforce social categorization processes along ethnical characteristics, and the general preference of the self-group over the outgroup would be the logical consequence (Gundelach 2014, p. 50). In contrast, the contact theory argues that ethnic diversity contributes to the continuous improvement of intergroup relationships through frequent, albeit random and impersonal, intercultural contact and the continual perception of outgroups (Gundelach 2014, p. 55 ff.). Thus, ethnic diversity in a social context would offer the opportunity for intercultural contact. The negative effects of ethnic diversity on intergroup relationships, as argued from the perspective of conflict theory, would be less pronounced for persons who maintain regular (even impersonal) intergroup contacts (Gundelach 2014, p. 58 ff.). On a regular basis even impersonal contacts could thus contribute to a positive development of intergroup relations in the long run by means of growing familiarity with outside groups (Gundelach 2014, p. 60). The collective efficacy approach originates in the field of criminology and is based on an advancement of social disorganization theory (Shaw and McKay 1942; Oberwittler et al. 2013, p. 48), which locates the decisive causes of delinquent subcultures and high crime rates in the structures of urban spaces and the practiced values, norms and attitudes (Morenoff et al. 2001, p. 519). For example, structural aspects such as poverty, instability or ethnic heterogeneity in residential neighborhoods could have a negative impact on local social organization, which in return results in rising crime rates (Häfele 2013, p. 36). Social disorganization is defined as the inability of a community structure to realize the common values of its inhabitants and to exercise effective social control (Morenoff et al. 2001, p. 519). In previous empirical analyzes, collective efficacy proved to be a good predictor for the prevention of violent offenses at the neighborhood level (­Morenoff et  al. 2001, p. 544). In communities characterized by a high degree of collective efficacy, crime rates are significantly lower than in those with low collective efficacy (e.g., Sampson and Wikström 2008; Nieuwbeerta et al. 2008; Wikström et al. 2012; Mazerolle et al. 2010; see Oberwittler et al. 2013, p. 49). As a concept collective efficacy is very similar to social capital. It is also a social resource at the group level, but one of episodic nature (Mennis et al. 2013, p. 2177). While social capital can be used to achieve collective goals; collective efficacy, by definition, results from the social relationships of a collective. It includes those social relations within a community that lead to participation and mobilization towards a particular common goal or action, thereby influencing informal social control in a community (Sampson et al. 1997). In general, the approach relies less on social networks and interactions per se, but rather on

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generalized trust and behavioral expectations in a collective interest (­Oberwittler et al. 2013, p. 48). The core idea of collective efficacy is that residents successfully engage in the common good of the neighborhood if there is a basis of mutual trust and shared norms. Neighborhoods without social capital are expected to be less capable to achieve shared values and to maintain informal social control that promotes safety and security (Morenoff et al. 2001, p. 519). According to this, the social capital of a neighborhood rather relies on the structure of social organization than on the qualities of the individuals (Morenoff et al. 2001, p. 519). Thus, Sampson et al. (1997) postulate that ethnic diversity in a neighborhood may lead to mutual mistrust among residents, as informal social control is decreasing due to a rather weakly defined set of values and norms. This is particularly noticeable in disadvantaged neighborhoods characterized by a high degree of ethnic minorities. By referring to Putnam’s controversial thesis, the results of Mennis et al. (2013) suggest that ethnic diversity is generally associated with a lower perception of collective efficacy in neighborhood districts. Based on survey results from Germany, France and the Netherlands, Koopmans and Schaeffer (2015) draw similar conclusions. In contrast and by exploiting information from the British Crime Survey, Twigg et al. (2010) point out that there is very little evidence for an influence of ethnic heterogeneity on the assessment of collective efficacy in a residential neighborhood. Some of the empirical findings of the studies examining Putnam’s hypothesis differ widely, which is not surprising given the vague definition and multidimensionality of social cohesion (Ariely 2014, p. 578). Some studies found a negative impact of ethnic diversity on aspects of social cohesion or social capital (e.g., Alesina and La Ferrara 2000, 2002; Costa and Kahn 2003; Leigh 2006; Tolsma et al. 2009; Fieldhouse and Cutts 2010; Portes and Vickstrom 2011; Koopmans and Schaeffer 2015), others show a clearly positive influence (e.g., Marschall and Stolle 2004; Pendakur and Mata 2012; Gundelach 2014). The study by Tolsma et al. (2009) proves that in the Netherlands, ethnic heterogeneity does not have a uniformly negative impact on social cohesion, but adversely affects merely specific forms of social cohesion, such as the willingness to volunteer. Instead, the tolerance towards neighbors from other population groups appears considerably more prominent in ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Exploiting survey data on group affiliation, Alesina and La Ferrara (2000) find that participation in social activities is significantly lower in socially unequal and ethnically heterogeneous places. The results of a follow up study (2002) illustrate that both individual experiences and the characteristics of a community influence the degree of trust in a collective. Thus, ethnic heterogeneity is reflected negatively in social trust. Gundelach (2014) also investigates the influence of ethnic diversity on social trust

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and thus can empirically consolidate the assumptions of contact theory. In an international comparison she found a positive correlation between ethnic diversity in the national context and trust in ethnic outgroups. In addition, ethnic heterogeneity and generalized trust are positively interlinked. Additionally, this conclusion is proved by the empirical results of Marschall and Stolle (2004). In contrast, Gesthuizen et al. (2009) found very different results in a European comparison. The results did not prove Putnam’s core message about the relationship between ethnic diversity and dimensions of social capital. Their empirical findings rather suggest that (net)immigration, as an indicator of ethnic heterogeneity, is positively related to the dimensions of social capital. An exception is the negative impact of migration on interpersonal trust. According to Portes and Vickstrom (2011) a possible reason for the inconsistency of empirical findings could be the very different conceptualization and definition of social cohesion. In many studies, there was either a different understanding of social cohesion or certain sub-components were operationalized differently (Ariely 2014, p. 578). In addition, scientific literature often makes no clear distinction between social capital and social cohesion.

6 Modelling Social Cohesion as Community Resilience Based on a secondary data analysis of national and international scientific publications the research project ResOrt initially addressed the question of what is defined and discussed as social cohesion in a social science context. Based on the literary review five essential components of social cohesion could be identified: social networks, reciprocity, participation, shared values and norms, and social trust. In order to foster and enhance social cohesion, we believe that individuals need to be actively involved in a functioning network that goes beyond close friendships or binding social capital. When Putnam (2000) uses the term of bridging social capital, he addresses mainly formal relationships which are characterized by the affiliation to certain social groups, i.e., a membership in clubs, parties, parental care organizations or the belonging to other organizations such as the workplace. Reciprocity (commitment standards) and trust norms ensure a better coordination of actions in social networks of a society (Adloff and Mau 2005). In our research we focus on generalized reciprocity as it arises in the context of group affiliation. In contrast to direct reciprocity generalized reciprocity, is generated without hope for immediate compensation (Stegbauer 2011, p. 29). In this context group affiliation can mean both a specific group in which close

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contacts are maintained and a group that does not even communicate with each other or only keeps formal contacts. Generalized reciprocity enhances bridging social capital and thus meets the demands of modern societies, in particular the anonymity and informal social contacts of their respective members. In our understanding social trust is a logical consequence of the relationships between individuals. It represents an elementary conceptual component of social capital and is essential for social cohesion (Gundelach 2014, p. 19; Gundelach and ­Freitag 2014, p. 19) as well as for collective efficacy (Sampson et al. 1997). Social trust can be conceptualized as a result of an individual affiliation to social networks and resulting reciprocity norms (Zmerli 2013, p. 135). Shared expectations and a common understanding of values and norms (Sampson 2012, p. 135) foster a sense of belonging and trustworthiness in a community, and feed into the expectation that others act on behalf of the common good. As a productive component of social capital social trust is a requirement/pre-condition for social cooperation (Zmerli 2013, p. 136); it enhances the inclusion of social interaction and the development of social networks (Gundelach 2014, p. 20). Social trust exists apart from close family and friendship bonds and is therefore an effective resource in building social cohesion among neighbors without requiring close relationships. Modern societies undergo continuous processes of change and constantly face the risk of being affected by various disturbances. By reflecting on crises, catastrophes or social upheavals in the project, we do not regard them as purely external, unforeseeable events per se. We rather try to include even those disruptions that are man-made into our theoretical model (Fig. 1) and which can be foreseen to some extent. The (subjective) risk perception of the members of a community is usually a product of social or group-specific values and not oriented towards the ‘objective’ or formal risk. Risks are socially constructed and thus influence the action and behavior of individuals on the level of a constructed reality (Renn 1989, p. 168). Although risks factually exist, human actions are usually determined by perceived risk characteristics. For example, if a risk is perceived as very high, it may individually lead citizens to better prepare for a potential incident (by, i.e., storing food, etc.). With an increase of emergency preparedness, the individual vulnerability to external disruptions or challenges declines. However, the focus of our research is less concentrated on the individual resources of emergency planning, but rather on the willingness of actors to engage in community welfare as well as social resources that emerge in everyday coexistence of community members, such as reciprocity, participation, shared values, social networks and trust. That is, factors that form the social cohesion in a community and, in parallel, represent collective coping capacities in dealing

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Fig. 1   The role of collective efficacy and social cohesion in the enhancement of community resilience

with external disruptions and challenges. We assume that people who have access to collective coping capacities are less vulnerable (e.g., Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Hawkins and Maurer 2010; Klinenberg 2015; Lumbroso et al. 2017) and therefore exhibit a lower risk perception. This, in turn, would mean that with an increase of collective coping capacities, the degree of resilience in a given neighborhood expands—and vice versa. On the other hand, people who have neither access to collective coping capacities nor prepare for emergencies would be much more vulnerable.

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Organizations that contribute to the reduction of vulnerability in society have recently recognized the fundamental significance of social cohesion and thus try to improve (their knowledge on) the social infrastructure of communities. This is especially true for local governments which try to address social problems like segregation, poverty and exclusion by implementing policies which are directed to disadvantaged multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods. Moreover, neighborhood and welfare organizations promote civic and voluntary engagement in urban districts and the development of social networks among neighbors. The focus of their work is not explicitly aimed at fostering individual preparedness for natural disasters; it rather influences social cohesion by creating opportunities for participation and self-organization. Neighborhood and welfare organizations thus help people to develop collective resources that can be resorted in crises and catastrophes. While the work of neighborhood and welfare organizations as well as of local governments comes into effect on a regular basis, civil protection is required only when disaster strikes. Thus, the work of civil protection agencies does not directly influence the degree of social cohesion in everyday life, however, aid organizations and emergency services are strongly reliant on the knowledge about socio-spatial conditions of social cohesion in the case of a crises or catastrophe. It is therefore particularly important to promote the knowledge exchange between organizations that plan and take action for crises and upheavals and those that directly influence social vulnerability.

7 Conclusion The research project ResOrt aims at filling a relevant gap in the recent discourse on resilience. Emphasizing different aspects of the functioning of a community and conceptualizing resilience in the wider framework of collective efficacy and social cohesion, we focus on the role of organizations in adapting to rapid social change. Recently, very little is known about how community resilience can be promoted by (the cooperation of) various organizations. We are operating on the assumption that organizations aiming at the reduction of vulnerability “provide more than advice and material resources—shared expectations and trust are enhanced by coordinated activities” (Sampson 2013). Organizations constitute a network of associations and routine activities that promote collective action, although they are seldom planned as such. What is important is not the existence of a specific type of organization but the overall organizational infrastructure of a community and the overlapping networks among participants which can be stimulated by organizations. In everyday social life, organizations may lay the f­ oundations of

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the social infrastructure where community resilience proves successful (or unsuccessful) in the event of a crisis or a disaster. With that in mind we are interested in the question how collective efficacy and social cohesion are actually perceived by different groups of the population within structurally divergent neighborhoods. Against this background, urban-rural disparities may play a major role, as it can reasonably be assumed that social cohesion appears more pronounced in rural areas, while collective efficacy may point a way out of the challenges of urban anonymity. In comparing rural and urban communities the specific characteristics of cities should not be denied, but our interest is directed to a holistic understanding of the socio-spatial ­conditions that determine the social cohesion of communities in different spatial units—­ particularly in a time when the definition of community depends less on geographical boundaries and when many of the social interactions people engage in occur outside their residential neighborhoods (Unger and Wandersman 1985). We are thus expanding the narrow perspective of the collective efficacy approach, taking into account the informal support activities of residents that may not only reduce crime (as originally formulated in the collective efficacy approach), but also foster collective response actions in the face of crises and large-scale emergencies. Although we assume that collective efficacy and social cohesion can be considered as to promote community resilience, there is also the question of how resilient both concepts are in regards to unexpected situations of crises or disasters. Answering this question not only contributes to applied resilience research and a better practical preparedness for future crises and catastrophes, but also to a theoretical conceptualization and deeper understanding of resilience as community resilience.

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Tackenberg, Bo (M.A.) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wuppertal where he studied Sociology until 2017. He is now working as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Public Safety and Emergency Management, Faculty for Mechanical Engineering and Safety Engineering. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, his research project “Resilience through Social Cohesion – The Role of Organizations” (ResOrt) focuses on the socio-spatial conditions of community resilience in urban and rural neighborhoods.

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Lukas, Tim  (Akad. Rat Dr. phil.) is a sociologist at the University of Wuppertal. He is the head of the Object Security Research Group at the Institute for Security Systems and a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Public Safety and Emergency Management, Faculty for Mechanical Engineering and Safety Engineering. Prior to this he was a Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Criminology at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law. His research interests include Critical Security Studies, Urban Sociology and the Social Ecology of Crime. As the principal investigator he is coordinating the research project “Resilience through Social Cohesion – The Role of Organizations” (ResOrt) which investigates the concept of resilience as community resilience.