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This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights and duplication or sale of all or part is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for research, private study, criticism/review or educational purposes. Electronic or print copies are for your own personal, non- commercial use and shall not be passed to any other individual. No quotation may be published without proper acknowledgement. For any other use, or to quote extensively from the work, permission must be obtained from the copyright holder/s. The Biopolitics of Resilience Chris Zebrowski Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in International Relations April 2012 Keele University 0 Abstract This thesis analyses resilience as a value which constitutes a telos for contemporary liberal security initiatives. In recent years, resilience strategies have been increasingly employed within liberal states a means of responding to the radical contingency of threat. Rather than seeking to protect a referent through prophylactic measures, resilience strategies aim to optimize the capacity of complex systems to rapidly adapt to, and evolve through, crises. The advent of resilience strategies is premised upon a radical re-evaluation of the referents of security as complex systems. The discovery of the natural resilience of systems integral to liberal life has enabled strategies of emergency governance seeking to harness these processes, and optimize their conditions of ‘freedom’. By naturalising resilience these accounts serve to render its value self-evident. This thesis problematises these accounts by offering a biopolitical genealogy directed at elucidating the historical conditions of possibility for resilience to emerge as a security value. This thesis takes as its empirical referent the case of the historical evolution of a British machinery of governance for responding to emergencies. Analysis makes explicit distinct, and indeed rival, rationalities of governance which can be read from its evolving design. Resilience is demonstrated to be an expression of an emergent neoliberal order of governance. Applying a biopolitical security analytic inspired by Foucault, this genealogy traces the historical consolidation of this order in respect of transformations in the regime of power/knowledge enacted by apparatus of security. A biopolitical genealogy demonstrates that resilience is the correlate of a broader restructuring of the rationalities and practices comprising liberal security governance. By drawing attention to the complex historical processes and significant governmental efforts required to make resilience possible this thesis aims to open up a space through which the value of resilience may be more critically interrogated. 1 Contents Abstract......................................................................................................................................1 Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................4 Introduction: The Value of Resilience..................................................................................6 The Value(s) of Security.............................................................................................12 Genealogy and the Critique of Values........................................................................17 Resilience and the Biopolitics of Security..................................................................24 Chapter Outline..............................................................................................................30 1 State of Emergency....................................................................................................33 Harnessing Uncertainty: Esprit de Corps and Moral Forces.....................................37 War Becomes Vital: Securing the Essentials of Life in the First World War..............44 A British Machinery of Emergency Governance.........................................................47 Essentials of life in the Emergency Powers Act (1920)...............................................51 Panic and the Origins of British Civil Defence...........................................................56 Operational Research and the ‘Scientification’ of War..............................................61 Generalizing Emergency: The Emergencies Committee.............................................66 States of Emergency: The Civil Contingencies Unit....................................................69 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................73 2 Protect or Survive......................................................................................................77 Establishing Stability and Eradicating Fear in the Welfare State...............................81 Insuring Against Nuclear War: Post-war Civil Defence.............................................86 Imagining Armageddon: The Strath Report................................................................90 Civil Defence Post-Strath: Preparing for Armageddon..............................................98 The Non-Visible: Ensuring National Survival.............................................................99 The Visible: Mobilizing Anxieties...............................................................................104 Security in the Welfare/Warfare State.........................................................................107 3 The Nature of Neoliberal Governance....................................................................111 The nature of Nature...................................................................................................116 Nature isn’t Normal: The Birth of Resilience.............................................................122 Neoliberalism and Catastrophe-led Growth..............................................................127 Environmentality and the Government of ‘Natural’ Systems.....................................133 Conclusion...................................................................................................................136 2 4 Securing Emergence..................................................................................................140 The Contemporary Threat Environment...................................................................144 Transformation: The Revolution in Military Affairs..................................................152 Optimizing Network-Centric Warriors.......................................................................159 Emergent security.......................................................................................................163 Harnessing Emergence: Resilience and UK Civil Contingencies Planning..............168 Conclusion...................................................................................................................173 5 The Chronopolitics of Resilience.............................................................................177 Resilient by Design.....................................................................................................181 The Subject of Technology.........................................................................................186 Exercising Resilience.................................................................................................196 The Chronopolitics of Resilience...............................................................................206 Conclusion...................................................................................................................214 Conclusion..............................................................................................................................218 Bibliography...........................................................................................................................230 3 Acknowledgements This thesis was made possible by the support and encouragement of numerous individuals. I am most indebted to my supervisors Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Peter Adey who have been enormously generous with their time and attention. You cannot begin to imagine how much I have gained from your guidance, encouragement, and constructive provocations. Thank you. I have also been fortunate to benefit from an engagement with those who have made Keele University a stimulating environment to work. Thanks to Emma Anderson, Tim Doyle, Rob Emerton, Juliette Hallaire, Daniel Hausknost, Emma Murray, Lucianno Nuzzo, Helen Parr, Barry Ryan and Phil Slann for giving me the opportunity to air ideas and for your always constructive feedback. Special thanks to Corey Mortimer-Walker for being a good friend and invaluable interlocutor along the way. I am also grateful for the financial support provided by the Institute for Law, Politics and Justice at Keele University. This thesis has also profited from my engagement with a community of critical scholars too numerous to fully account for here. I have been particularly fortunate to have had the opportunity to become involved with the International Collaboratory of Critical Methods in Security Studies (ICCM) where I have enjoyed close collaboration with Philippe Bonditti, Andrew Neal and Sven Opitz as part of the ‘Genealogies, Histories, Time’ cluster. I gratefully acknowledge the influence of our discussions and debates on the methodological design of this study. Finally, I am most grateful for the