ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the operationalization of resilience strategies within UK civil contingencies management as a response to this security problematic. It traces this problematic to associated transformations in the political imaginary of social order as exemplified in the academic debates surrounding the advent of the network society in the 1990s. The chapter demonstrates how complexity sciences were drawn upon to inform and optimize resilience strategies designed to respond to the problematic of radical contingency of contemporary threat. It shows how the shared problematic of the radical uncertainty of threat opened an avenue for the transfer of military solutions to civilian machineries of emergency governance. The chapter traces the long-running dialogue between the military and those responsible for emergency responses. Resilience strategies are premised on a very different account of the nature of social order, subjectivity and the emergency corresponding to a particular speciation of life advanced by neoliberal rationalities of governance.
