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POLITICS: 2015 VOL 35(1), 6771

doi: 10.1111/1467-9256.12080

Resilience as Enhancement: Governmentality

and Political Economy beyond
Responsibilisation
Alison Howell
Rutgers University Newark

Resilience is without a doubt growing as a schema for the operation of politics, something to
which scholars interested in politics and international relations are responding from a multi-
plicity of perspectives. One set of analytical tools that has become especially popular for
understanding resilience are those associated with governmentality. Indeed, a number of
the articles included in last years Special Issue of Politics on resilience illuminate our under-
standing of the role of resilience in contemporary governance practices across an array of sites,
including the UKs Community Resilience Programme (Bulley), responses to the 2011 UK
riots (Rogers), international state building (Chandler), urban resilience (Coaffee), and com-
parative analysis of UK and French security strategy (Joseph). Here, I respond in some part to
those articles, but also more generally to a wider and rapidly forming understanding of
resilience as governance.

Studies that approach practices of resilience as governmentality tend to ask what the ana-
lytical tools offered by governmentality can tell us about resilience: what it is doing, how it
is doing it, what it effaces, and so on. The reverse question receives scant attention: How can
contemporary practices that congeal around the concept or discourse of resilience tell us
something about the changing nature of governmentality or the arts of governing? From my
perspective, this is a fruitful line of inquiry precisely because the multiple and proliferating
sites of resilience form a major node of contemporary shifts in governance, and precisely
because we now see resilience cropping up in a number of unconnected sites.

Concepts developed out of studies of governance forged, especially, in the early and mid-
1990s to unpack advanced liberal or neoliberal forms of government do not seem sufficient
for understanding contemporary articulations of resilience. In order to understand and
respond to contemporary governance we need to dispense with any static or rigid idea of what
governance entails to embrace an analytic of the heterogeneity of governmentalities (Walters,
2012). Times have changed. Resilience tells us so. This, of course, is not to suggest that
resilience entails something entirely new, but rather to acknowledge that something at least
partially novel is afoot in the aspirations and techniques increasingly expressed through
resilience. Figuring out what is novel about resilience is a matter of empirics: of sorting out
what, empirically, resilience-oriented forms of governance are doing. This raises questions of
method. From my perspective, there are two simultaneous problems with much of the work
on resilience that applies governmentality: it simultaneously takes resilience (and govern-
ance) both too seriously and not seriously enough. What do I mean by this?

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In terms of taking resilience too seriously my concern is with a method that is too focused
on big policy statements such as those released by the UK Cabinet Office or the US
Department of Homeland Security. A few things can be said about a method that focuses its
attention solely on the discursive analysis of major policy documents. First, it deploys a very
thin concept of discourse to mean language rather than a constellation or assemblage of
discursive practices. Rather than a thin concept of discourse, it is possible to analyse resilience
in terms of a more robust assemblage or dispositif, taken to include, for instance, discourses,
institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scien-
tific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic positions (Foucault, 1980, p. 194)
a loose set-up that coalesces around a problem (such as resilience) (see Dreyfus and
Rabinow, 1982; Veyne, 2010). The second problem with analyses that focus primarily on
major policy documents is that methodologically they tend to treat the archive of resilience
rather narrowly without accounting for minor articulations and contestation in brief, this
strikes me as a kind of governmentality without genealogy. Third, and most importantly
perhaps, a focus on big policy tends to take articulations of resilience too seriously in that
there is a tendency to treat such policy as though it is either successful in its aims, or
imminently so. This problem seems particularly pointed in the arguments that resilience
responsibilises subjects. I will pick up this point in more detail below, but before doing so I
want to move onto a second point about methodology: that studies that treat resilience
primarily as neoliberal governmentality often simultaneously fail to take the novelty of the
aspirations of resilience programming (such as civil contingency planning, emergency pre-
paredness, humanitarian activity, disaster response or military resilience training) seriously
enough. How does this work?

Key here is that one of the interesting challenges that the contemporary explosion of
resilience engages us in is the question of how to think through the relations between
governmentality and political economy, as a number of the contributions to the Special Issue
show. Clearly, governmental articulations of resilience have much to do with shifts in the
relationship between state and citizens, and with the role states will or will not play in
providing for the welfare of citizens. It is no coincidence that resilience and austerity are
growing together simultaneously in a number of settings, but by not taking resilience seri-
ously enough, this relationship is theorised as one of misdirection or effacement: that resilience
is a ploy to efface austerity.

Here, I want to return to the question of responsibilisation which is frequently figured as

the technique tying together governance and political economy (or, resilience and austerity).
This argument generally runs roughly as follows: that in a context of austerity resilience is a
mode of neoliberal governmentality that seeks to shift responsibility from the state to the
subject by responbilising them for their own self-help in dealing with increasing uncertainties
and potentially traumatic events (terrorist attacks, natural disasters, civil disorder, financial
crises, etc.). A few things should be said here.

First, this formulation betrays a nostalgia for the welfare state (a nostalgia perhaps not shared
by those who have chronicled how women, queers, racialised people, those institutionalised
in psychiatric facilities, and indigenous peoples in settler societies have had vexed relations
with the welfare state). Second, this view treats governance as a very top-down process.
Again, in part this is a result of a methodological focus on articulations of big policy and a
thin notion of discourse. To some extent, subjects then are treated as dupes (and not, for
instance, engaged in multiple contestations, shaping, or even taking pleasure in governance).
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This ostensible process of responsibilising subjects for their own resilience is thus considered
a form of governance that effaces political-economic relations of austerity by essentially
attempting to trick subjects into being self-governing and self-reliant. Further, this leaves
analysis of government in an analytical bind: either resilience-oriented governance is treated
as somehow successful and a fait-accompli (i.e. it responsibilises subjects) or governance is
treated as a justificatory practice: a misdirection and effacement of an ostensibly latent truth
about the political economy (i.e. that resilience is just a propaganda tool of austerity). Again,
this does not take resilience, or for that matter governance, seriously enough. Neither is a vast
charade. Rather, we can get further by taking the earnestness of both governance and
resilience seriously, and by taking seriously the novelty expressed through resilience as an
aspiration of governance. What happens when we do so?

By taking resilience seriously, we can begin to loosen the grip that responsibilisation has on
our analytical endeavours to explore empirically what resilience does do, beyond, though
perhaps sometimes in combination with, responsibilisation. My sense is that resilience is less
about responsibilisation (a technique tied to recent but perhaps fading or accelerating forms
of (neo)liberalism) than it is about enhancement. Thus, I propose the following: as a technique
of governance, resilience works primarily through an attempt to enhance its targets: a more
ambitious aim than responsibilisation. This, I suspect, is true wherever resilience involves a
concept of not just bouncing back (from disasters, attacks, crises, etc.), but of bouncing
forward. This idea of bouncing forward (i.e. of benefitting from the experience of encoun-
tering a potentially dangerous or traumatic event) can increasingly be seen in a number of
unconnected articulations of resilience, from emergency preparedness and disaster response
(Manyena et al., 2011), to humanitarian aid (International Federation of Red Cross and Red
Crescent Societies, 2012), to military mental health policy (see Howell, forthcoming), and in
the fields of ecology, engineering and psychology, to name a few.

In my own research on psychological resilience in military settings (especially the US Army,

but also the Canadian Forces and to some extent the Australian Defence Forces, as well as
resilience coordination at NATO), resilience sits precisely at the crux of governmentality and
political economy (Howell, forthcoming). The mental health of soldiers is understood in
military settings as a twofold problem: first, one of maximising human resources for
warfighting, and second, one of minimising costs. Resilience programming is seen as a
solution to this twofold problematisation. It is a mode of governance aimed at optimising
military force, and an attempt to reduce health care costs by pre-empting mental distress in
soldiers within a political economy of shrinking defence expenditure. In this context, the
responsibilisation argument seems to make sense, and could run something like: militaries
are responsibilising soldiers for their own mental health in an effort to optimise this popula-
tion and in so doing, they are effacing a politics of austerity in which welfare entitlements for
soldiers are shrinking. In some ways, this statement makes a good deal of sense. However, it
does not get at some of the empirical novelty of resilience programming in military settings.
Rather, my observation is that military resilience programming aims to do more than
responsibilise soldiers. It aims to enhance them.

In the early years of the war on terror there was much excitement about the promise of
technology in general, and possibilities for soldier enhancement in particular, which were
thought of mainly in terms the interface between bodies and technologies. But the cyborg
soldier never really materialised (soldiers often did not even have basic body armour). So, this
enthusiasm waned as the war wore on, both among academics and in the pages of, for
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instance, Wired magazine (see Bell, 2007; Lupton, forthcoming). But soldier enhancement has
developed along new less showy lines: military resilience programming (which is mandatory
for all US Army soldiers) is now aspiring to enhance the psyche of soldiers. This kind of
enhancement of the mental resilience and agility of soldiers aims to produce soldiers who will
not only withstand, but even grow from the experience of deployment, particularly in a
context of counterinsurgency. But what of political economy?
Austerity is important here, but not because resilience is about effacing economic relations.
Resilience-oriented governance projects are rather more ambitious than that precisely
because they tend to attempt not just to responsibilise but to enhance the thriving of citizens
or soldiers in conditions of austerity. What is interesting here is the way in which the
circulation of psychological resilience can be empirically traced: the architects of the US Army
programme first launched resilience training in schools, then developed it for the military
(gathering significant financial resources and therefore research and other capacities in the
process) and then circulated it back into the civilian education sector (Howell, 2012). My
point here is that the relationship between governance and political economy is more
complex and rooted than the effacement argument allows. That is to say, if we take resilience
seriously, we can see how it is not just smoke and mirrors, but a term around which novel
governance innovations and assemblages have congealed precisely through and within rela-
tions of political economy that are transforming what is broadly entailed in the relations
between states and citizens. This, unfortunately, is potentially far more troubling.
On the other hand, I would like to pick up a thread mentioned above: that the
responsibilisation argument ends up in an analytical bind one end of which is to treat
resilience-oriented governance as successful and a fait accompli. This is far from the case.
Rather, failure is always to a greater or lesser degree intrinsic to governance (Howell, 2010; Li,
2007; Walters, 2012) precisely because governance, and in this case specifically resilience, is
always to some extent fantastical and utopian. There is an element of the absurd in much
resilience activity, and as the Editors of the Special Issue aver, resilience is far more incomplete
and contestable than is usually acknowledged (Brassett, Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2013,
p. 5).1 Researching how, precisely, this plays out in multiple settings will no doubt be one of
the exciting avenues of future research on resilience.

About the author

Alison Howell is an Assistant Professor in Political Science and an affiliate member of Womens and Gender Studies
at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research addresses the global politics of medicine, particularly as it relates to
warfare, military organisation and security. Her book Madness in International Relations (Routledge, 2011) examines the
role of psychology in global security practices. Her work has also been published in Review of International Studies,
Security Dialogue, Alternatives, Studies in Social Justice and International Political Sociology. She is an Associate Editor of
Critical Military Studies, and an editorial board member of Critical Studies on Security. Alison Howell, Department of
Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark, Hill Hall, 360 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
E-mail: alison.howell@rutgers.edu

Note
1 This line of argument is developed further in Brassett and Vaughan-Williams (forthcoming).

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