Governing (in)security and the politics of resilience: The politics, policy, and practice of building resilience in fragile and conflict-affected contexts

Governments, donors, international organizations, and (international) non-governmental organizations have turned to ‘building resilience’ as a response to political instability, armed conflict, terrorism, and large-scale refugee movements. The existing, multidisciplinary literature on resilience shows resilience to be, at its most basic level, a capacity to recover from adverse events. Security studies, which picked up on resilience from around the mid-2000s, found resilience to presuppose the inevitability of crises due to the complexity of today’s world; to responsibilize those affected by crises; and to indicate states’ inability to secure life, problematizing traditional, top-down modes of security governance. Yet, little is known about what resilience means in the context of (in)security, how it translates into practice, and what the implications are of this global ‘turn to resilience’. The objective of this dissertation is to understand the significance and implications of the turn to resilience in the global context of governing (in)security, by analysing the use of the notion of resilience in policy and practice. It builds on an analysis of European Union policy documents in the area of security, humanitarian, and development, combined with 13 semi-structured interviews with resilience experts (researchers, policymakers) and 40 semi-structured interviews with 47 humanitarian and development professionals working under the banner of the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. First, security, humanitarian, and development policies, policymakers and practitioners seem to understand resilience, above all, in terms of self-reliance. It is the capacity to respond to crisis and recover from adversity – without external support. At the level of government, this means the development of crisis management capacities, whereas at the level of refugees and vulnerable host communities, resilience means ensuring their economic self-reliance th