ABSTRACT
Resilience is a common refrain of counter-terrorism and Britons are its quintessential image. But
what used to mean fortitude, moral strength and courage-something that was ‘‘deeply inscribed
in the soul’’ (O’Malley, 2010, p. 488)—now refers to something that is created through state
intervention in response to perceived vulnerability (Furedi, 2007; Howell, 2015b). This study
examines the modes of intervention associated with the ‘‘building community resilience’’
approach to preventing terrorism in the United Kingdom (UK) that was deployed following the
July 7, 2005 attacks on London by ‘‘homegrown’’ terrorists. Following perceptions of broken
communities and broken citizenship that solidified after the riots of 2001, efforts to build
community resilience to terrorism emerged in response to what was seen as an ideological threat
that spread through social mechanisms. I argue that this approach to resilience involves social
interventions aimed at redesigning civil society and citizens to serve the state’s counter-terrorism
goals, which I refer to as civic resilience. Rather than drawing on the social resilience of Muslim
communities as a source of safety, efforts are made to secure social spaces and processes by
rebuilding civil society and citizens around the values of national security and integrating them
into counter-terrorism policing and intelligence methods. The process of building civic resilience
works primarily through social and political relations including citizenship, trust and consent.
While it appears to decentralize responsibility for security to local communities, it rests on a
design logic of integration that seeks to draw the social resources of communities into state-based,
counter-terrorism processes. In other words, civic resilience is designed to shore up the capa-
bilities of the state, rather than communities. This experience speaks to the tensions and contra-
dictions between resilience and security, and the challenges of integrating the two-highlighting
the social and political effects of this effort, particularly for citizenship-and begs the question,
resilience of what.
