ABSTRACT
Resilience-a concept with a long history in disciplines such as psychology or ecology-has
recently made it to the desks of security practitioners, national policy-makers and IR (international
relations) scholars. In a world of complexity the idea of resilience, as the ability of social, economic
or ecological systems to autonomously recover after shocks and to adapt to changing environ-
mental conditions, appears promising. Yet, while everybody seems to talk (about) resilience there
is hardly any consent about the concrete ontology of resilience (Brassett et al., 2013, p. 222). Being
related to things as diverse as the human mind, energy infrastructure, ecosystems, and World of
Warcraft characters (as a quick Google search shows) the signifier of resilience becomes increas-
ingly emptied. Resilience seems to be everything-ideology, discourse, governmentality, strategy
or assemblage-yet it is anything but a coherent or fixed program. It is continuously transmog-
rified and deformed by its concrete spatio-temporal context (O’Malley, 2011, p. 55).
