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Resilience and Critical Infrastructure: Origins, Theories, and Critiques

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Abstract

This chapter maps the intersection and imbrication of two objects – critical infrastructure (CI) – and then, resilience – over the last decade or so. In so doing, our purpose is to examine what making critical infrastructure resilient might variously mean, whether to governments, infrastructure operators, or diverse publics; and by the same token, how has accepting that resilience is infrastructural altered notions of resilience? Our discussions across this chapter are drawn from two closely related bodies of literature. The first critically examines the political framings of varied notions of resilience, while the second looks at how infrastructural materialities and circulations mediate certain conditions of life and their political imaginings. In bridging these literatures, we would also like to draw particular attention to how certain notions of resilience, notably those deemed ‘neoliberal’ are being exposed, challenged, and even multiplied, through their circulation within the materialities of critical infrastructure.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In his later work, Holling would more refer to these cybernetically informed models of ecosystemic governance as ‘engineering resilience’ in contrast to his complexity informed approach which we would call ‘ecosystems resilience’ (Holling 1996).

  2. 2.

    Cabinet Office, ‘Resilient Communications’ Gov.uk website, https://www.gov.uk/resilient-communications accessed on 6 February 2015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Chris Zebrowski

  2. School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Daniel Sage

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  1. Chris Zebrowski
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  1. Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Robert Dover

  2. Department of War Studies, King's College London, London, United Kingdom

    Huw Dylan

  3. Department of War Studies, King's College London, London, United Kingdom

    Michael S. Goodman

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Zebrowski, C., Sage, D. (2017). Resilience and Critical Infrastructure: Origins, Theories, and Critiques. In: Dover, R., Dylan, H., Goodman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Security, Risk and Intelligence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53675-4_7

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