10. Security Through Resilience: Contemporary Challenges in the Anthropocene

The concept of resilience has rapidly spread throughout the policy world, driven by the desire to use systems theories and process understandings to develop new security approaches for coping, bouncing-back and adaptive improvement in the face of shocks and disturbances. However, this chapter argues that under the auspices of the Anthropocene, the assumptions and goals of resilience become problematic. This is because external interventions often ignore feedback effects, meaning that attempts to resolve problems through focusing upon enabling and capacity-building can be seen as counterproductive “fire-fighting” rather than tackling causation. Even more radical "alternative" or "community-based" approaches, relying upon interventions to enable so-called "natural" processes, either through an emphasis on local and traditional knowledge or new monitoring technologies, constitute problems for resilience advocacy: firstly, the problem of unrecognized exploitation; and secondly, the problem of continuing to sacrifice others to maintain unsustainable Western modes of consumption and production.