Introduction: resilience and the Anthropocene: the stakes of ‘renaturalising’ politics

The Anthropocene marks a new geological epoch in which human activity (and specifically Western production and consumption practices) has become a geological force. It also profoundly destabilizes the grounds of Western political philosophy. Visions of a dynamic earth system wholly indifferent to human survival liquefy modernity’s division between nature and politics. Critical thought has only begun to scratch the surface of the Anthropocene’s re-naturalization of politics. This special issue of Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses explores the politics of resilience within the wider cultural and political moment of the Anthropocene. It is within the field of resilience thinking that the implications of the Anthropocene for forms of governance are beginning to be sketched out and experimental practices are undertaken. Foregrounding the Anthropocene imaginary’s re-naturalization of politics enables us to consider the political possibilities of resilience from a different angle, one that is irreducible to neoliberal post-political rule.

A World without Causation: Big Data and the Coming of Age of Posthumanism

Advocates of Big Data assert that we are in the midst of an epistemological revolution, promising the displacement of the modernist methodological hegemony of causal analysis and theory generation. It is alleged that the growing ‘deluge’ of digitally generated data, and the development of computational algorithms to analyse them, has enabled new inductive ways of accessing everyday relational interactions through their ‘datafication’. This paper critically engages with these discourses of Big Data and complexity, particularly as they operate in the discipline of International Relations, where it is alleged that Big Data approaches have the potential for developing self-governing societal capacities for resilience and adaptation through the real-time reflexive awareness and management of risks and problems as they arise. The epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning Big Data are then analysed to suggest that critical and posthumanist approaches have come of age through these discourses, enabling process-based and relational understandings to be translated into policy and governance practices. The paper thus raises some questions for the development of critical approaches to new posthuman forms of governance and knowledge production.

Resilience and critique

I would like to thank Philip Hammond and Julian Reid for their thoughtful reviews. For Reid, the ‘life’ focus of resilience thinking is just another liberal/ neoliberal governmentality, enabling the reproduction and extension of biopolitical rule, thus my book provides interesting insights, but is not necessarily essential for the making of such claims. For Hammond, the conceptual distinctions made in the book shed some useful insights into current discussions of how policy understandings are being transformed and the emergence of the new doxa of complexity and its relational ontology (drawing adherents from across the, now defunct, Left–Right ideological divide).

Resilience and the ‘everyday’: beyond the paradox of ‘liberal peace’

Over the last decade there has been a shift towards critical understandings of ‘liberal peace’ approaches to international intervention, which argue that local culture holds the key to the effectiveness of peace interventions. In this ‘bottom-up’ approach, peace, reconciliation, and a ‘culture of law’ then become secondary effects of sociocultural norms and values. However, these liberal peace critiques have remained trapped in the paradox of liberal peace: the inability to go beyond the binaries of liberal universalism and cultural relativism. This understanding will be contrasted with the rise of ‘resilience’ approaches to intervention – which build on this attention to the particular context of application but move beyond this paradox through philosophical pragmatism and the focus on concrete social practices. This article clarifies the nature of this shift through the focus on the shifting understanding of international intervention to address the failings of the ‘war on drugs’ in the Americas.

How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure: Big Data, Resilience and Emergent Causality

In modernity, failure was the discourse of critique, today, it is increasingly the discourse of power: failure has changed its allegiances. Over the last two decades, failure has been enfolded into discourses of power, facilitating the development of new policy approaches. Foremost among governing approaches that seek to include and to govern through failure is that of resilience. This article seeks to reflect upon how the understanding of failure has become transformed in this process, particularly linking this transformation to the radical appreciation of contingency and of the limits to instrumental cause-and-effect approaches to rule. Whereas modernity was shaped by a contestation over failure as an epistemological boundary, under conditions of contingency and complexity there appears to be a new consensus on failure as an ontological necessity. This problematic ‘ontological turn’ is illustrated using examples of changing approaches to risks, especially anthropogenic understandings of environmental threats, formerly seen as ‘natural’.

Linking the ecosystem service approach to social preferences and needs in integrated coastal land use management - a planning approach

Coastal zones with their natural and societal subsystems are exposed to rapid changes and pressures on resources. Scarcity of space and impacts of climate change are prominent drivers of land use and adaptation management today. Necessary modifications to present land use management strategies and schemes influence both the structures of coastal communities and the ecosystems involved. Approaches to identify the impacts and account for (i) the linkages between social references and needs and (ii) ecosystem services in coastal zones have been largely absent. The presented method focuses on improving the inclusion of ecosystem services in planning processes and clarifies the linkages with social impacts. In this study, fourteen stakeholders in decisionmaking on land use planning in the region of Krummhörn (northwestern Germany, southern North Sea coastal region) conducted a regional participative and informal process for local planning capable to adapt to climate driven changes. It is argued that scientific and practical implications of this integrated assessment focus on multifunctional options and contribute to more sustainable practices in future land use planning. The method operationalizes the ecosystem service approach and social impact analysis and demonstrates that social demands and provision of ecosystem services are inherently connected.

Democracy, cosmopolitanism and national identity in a ‘globalising’ world

Broadly globalising processes have been in train for centuries, but contemporary discourse about globalisation is here located within a specific historical context, particularly characterised by new forms of communications and the pressures on states produced by the decline of Keynesianism and the end of the Cold War. Coincident changes also led to a growing interest in national identities, marked not least by the founding of this journal in 1999. Globalisation, a series of processes rather than a single force, has a range of effects on states, nations and national identities, including accommodation and adaptation as well as resistance. Indeed, globalising forces, such as democratisation, are shown to require nation-building. Attempts to impose order on international society through cosmopolitan devices are arguably more inimical to national identities. As with nations, cosmopolitanism involves an imagined community. Because this necessarily exists outside time, the building of a sense of trust and commonality across people and territory is however more challenging. Without popular ownership, it is argued, cosmopolitanism is often more likely to appear a threat than a boon. Building a global civil society, or indeed local democracies, is also unlikely when so many societies still lack local versions anchored in some form of national identity.