ABSTRACT
Resilience has become a guiding theme for the United Nations and European Union as well as for many national policies that address different kinds of emergencies such as developmental, cyber or climate issues. To study resilience as a way of governing means to look at the discourses and practices in security policy that shares the objective of creating resilience. This does not only refer to governance exercised by governmental bodies, but it also includes Foucault's notion of 'self-governing', processes by which the individual acts upon the self. In complex societies, multiple, parallel and highly recursive feedback loops of traveling information lead to emerging formations and reformations. As a result, the possibilities for mastery become increasingly limited as endless interconnections renounce any conscious design and lead to 'unpredictable evolutions'. Finally, this chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
