Resilience, Emergencies and the Internet

Security In-Formation

Mareile Kaufmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351968089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book traces how resilience is conceptually grounded in an understanding of the world as interconnected, complex and emergent.

In an interconnected world, we are exposed to radical uncertainties, which require new modes of handling them. Security no longer means the promise of protection, but it is redefined as resilience - as security in-formation. Information and the Internet not only play a key role for our understanding of security in highly connected societies, but also for resilience as a new program of tackling emergencies. Social media, cyber-exercises, the collection of digital data and new developments in Internet policy shape resilience as a new form of security governance. Through case studies in these four areas this book documents and critically discusses the relationship between resilience, the Internet and security governance. It takes the reader on a journey from the rise of complexity narratives in the context of security policy to a discussion of the Internet's influence on resilience practices, and ends with a theory of resilience and the relational. The book shows how the Internet nourishes narratives of connectivity, complexity and emergency in political discourses, and how it brings about new resilience practices.

This book will be of much interest to students of resilience studies, Critical Security Studies, Internet-politics, and International Relations in general.

Part I
Interconnectedness, emergencies and resilience

1
The emergency paradigm

I remember the year resilience became big news. Operating the symbolism of clashing ideologies in an interconnected world the front page of Newsweek’s September 2011 issue featured one of two planes flying into the Twin Towers, subtitled with colossal lettering: “RESILIENCE” (Newsweek 2011). Strikingly, the subtitle of Time magazine’s online feature about the tenth anniversary of 9/11 read: “Portraits of resilience” (Time 2011). Only a few months later the Guardian speculated whether 2012 would in fact be the “year of the R word” (Juniper 2011). The way in which the Guardian’s contextualization of the buzzword speaks to the narratives, conceptual foundations and rationalities that this book investigates is utterly indicative:

New concepts of course reflect the times in which they are born. In the 1960s and 70s, conservation was the buzzword. It implied the need to reduce our impact and to set aside areas where nature could be left unmolested. In the 1980s sustainability became prevalent. It arose from the need to reach an accommodation between efforts to reduce poverty while also meeting pressing environmental goals. Resilience is different. It signals a need to deal with inevitable major shocks, including those which are impossible to predict.

(Juniper 2011)

Indeed, uncertainty and inevitable disaster play a central role in resilience discourses. If one were to think of resilience as a protagonist, it would feature exclusively in discourses, tales and stories of survival in a complex, unpredictable world. It describes an ongoing activity of rebounding or recoiling and springing forward in response to strain – a process that was first formulated for ecosystems (Holling 1973) and in the context of childhood adversities (Garmezy 1973). The concept then moved from ecology and psychology into other disciplines, such as socio-ecology (Adger 2000) and engineering (Roylance 2001), and has finally been adopted into security policy (UNISDR 2005). The term itself, as the peak in resilience articles on Google Trends indicate, is not only tied to narratives of terror attacks, but also to economic crashes or unexpected collapses in schools, sports and human spirit. The domains in which resilience operates are numerous. Since the early 2000s, the referencing index for resilience continued to rise with no stagnation in sight (Google trends 2015, search: “resilience”), and academic publications about resilience have doubled between 2010 and 2015 (cf. Dunn Cavelty et al. 2015). Resilience is no longer big news. It has arrived. The fact that resilience describes character attributes in the online game World of Warcraft or in facelift cosmetics, shows how mundane and everyday the term has become – at least in the Anglophone world. One of the major success stories of resilience is, however, in the field of emergency management and security governance, which is not surprising given the conceptual linkage of resilience to shocks and uncertainty.

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. Within such discourses resilience is framed as the panacea for treating emergencies. The recurrent diction of uncertainty and inevitable disaster indicates that resilience builds upon a broader epistemological fundament of complexity thinking. It implies an understanding of the world as radically interconnected and relational; it describes a world in which the constant interaction of different parts gives rise to emergencies that have to be met with the adaptation and evolution (cf. Hayles 1999; Dillon 2000; Urry 2005a). Insecurity, then, is internal to complex systems. And one such system, proclaimed by security policies, is society itself. Following the rule of complexity, insecurity is a part of society’s functioning and resilience becomes the necessary ability to learn from and adapt to it (Duffield 2012). Resilience thus expresses a specific understanding of the world. And as this understanding becomes settled in political thinking, resilience develops into a way of governing insecurity. The extent to which current discourses and practices in security policy embrace the idea of an interconnected and complex world, how they frame the emergence of emergency as a problem of increased complexity and present resilience as the solution is one of this book’s endeavors. To study resilience as a way of governing means to look at those discourses and practices that share 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 (Bröckling et al. 2011; cf. Foucault 1988). While at first glance resilience seems to represent the optimal form of security governance in a complex, emergency-ridden world, this book points to the peculiarities and ambiguities of this form of governing, which both targets and thrives upon society’s inherent insecurities. It traces the many ways in which resilience asks us to live through emergencies, to live a life in constant trans-formation, and it reflects on the way in which interconnectedness reflects the governmental program of resilience.

This book illuminates the interconnected relational society as well as its inherent insecurities and resilience from a particular angle – the Internet. It is no coincidence that the epistemological awareness of complexity and the limits of certainty, the rise of digital technology and the concept of resilience became prominent aspects of security governance at a similar point in time. This book documents and critically investigates the overlap of these emerging trends in security governance that have not yet been considered together (with exception of Duffield 2016). Chapters 2, 3 and 4 outline theories for consideration and explain how resilience is different from risk and how – with the rise of digital technologies – resilience is both a specific program and a subject of programming within security governance. The growing presence of the Internet in societal interactions nourishes not only narratives of interconnectedness and complexity in political discourses, but it also sets a new stage for resilience policies. The European Union’s Agency for Network and Information Security, for example, reframes the Internet as an “interconnection ecosystem” (ENISA 2011) that is in need of resilience. This, as argued in Chapter 5, affects the very understanding of the Internet as a space. A tool to instill resilience is, for example, a cyber-exercise used in order to safeguard the space that seems to be so crucial to contemporary societies. Cyber-exercises, this book argues in Chapter 6, reveal how resilience works as a way of acting-out security.

Studying resilience as a way of governing the Internet not only provides deeper insights into the ontological, epistemological, temporal and spatial workings of resilience, but it also adds a new dimension to resilience. Through informationalization and digitization of social activities, resilience becomes more than a program of security governance, it becomes subject to programming. Digital humanitarians, Effective altruism, and Disaster resilience through big data are a few of the approaches that harness digital tools and information to instill different forms of resilience governance. Chapter 7 explores how the properties of digital code come to re-determine practices of resilience and self-governing, while Chapter 8 analyzes how social media are being used to deal with emergencies in a self-organized manner. All of these findings are reflected on in the concluding chapter (9), which formulates a theory of resilience and the relational.

As such, this book not only sets out to critically discuss the links between interconnectedness, resilience, emergencies and insecurity, but it does so by investigating resilience as a way of governing the Internet and a way of governing through the Internet. The Internet offers vast opportunities to explore a world and specifically a security that is in-formation (Dillon 2000); it provides a milieu to study interconnectedness and how it relates to resilience as a way of living through emergence and emergencies. The book utilizes these opportunities by combining case studies and theoretical reflections. Its empirical observations are based on a selection of four cases: two of which deepen our understanding of resilience as a way of governing the Internet itself and two that provide insights into resilience as a way of governing through the Internet. All of them are chosen for their explanatory power and their symbolic meaning vis-à-vis resilience as a governmental program. They signify overarching trends in government and have become important milestones in governmental practices with an outspoken reference to resilience and the Internet. They offer insights on the workings of resilience and the way in which rationales, practices, and technologies of resilience and interconnectedness relate to, re-inforce and reflect each other.

The first of four cases is an analysis of the European Internet security policies that the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) implements. Not only do these policies build on a re-imagination of the Internet as a complex ecosystemic space, but the shift in understanding the Internet as an ecosystem also legitimizes and enforces resilience as a way of governing this space. This case combines an analysis of policies and discursive strategies – their inherent understanding of connectedness, hardware, software and insecurity – with an analysis of information technological concepts, such as protocol and the so-called self x. The focus on resilience that operates in specific, interconnected topologies produces insights about the governance of complex and connected spaces at large – a theme that will, in all likelihood, become more important in future security governance.

The second case study focuses on the idea of self x. It illustrates the way in which security exercises are key to instigating self-organization – one of the central aspects of resilience programs. Significantly, self-organization is equally important in the context of technological emergencies, such as cyber-attacks, as it would be in other kinds of disasters. The cyber-exercise not only signifies the role of connectivity for imaginaries of insecurity and resilience, but it also serves as an entry point to understand how affect and being affected becomes an important empirical and theoretical tool to conceptualize resilience as a way of acting-out security. Exercises are a classic tool in security governance and as such, they remain an important source of insight into the workings and rationalities of governmental programs.

The third case study moves from the perspective of exploring resilience as a way of organizing the security of the Internet or connected topologies to the way in which the Internet itself is used to instill resilience practices and form resilient subjects. Chapter 7 investigates different European emergency management practices, documents, and policies that include digital information in their resilience programs. The use of digital information for governmental practices is a growing trend that has been discussed before (cf. Dillon and Reid 2009; Boyd and Crawford 2012; Amoore 2013; Andrejevic and Gates 2014). However, in this case digital information also signifies the rationales and principles of being in-formation and of constantly adapting oneself to given circumstances: a key element of the resilience program. Digital information here foregrounds the logics of patterns and prioritizes a focus on effects over causes, which is also a central feature of resilience itself. Resilience is mainly interested in the reaction to disruption – not in keeping spaces or subjects safe from disruption. As a governmental program it addresses effects. This study shows how various digital resilience practices can be grouped into three aspects of managing the effects of emergencies: (i) mapping the status quo of emergencies; (ii) directing the trajectory of emergencies; and (iii) learning from past emergencies for the future.

The final case study then draws our attention from the significance of the digital for resilience to the networked aspect of the Internet and information. It examines the use of social media during the Norway terror attacks in 2011 to understand how spontaneous, networked resilience practices came about. The case moves the perspective from the resilience program as planned by governmental institutions to the way in which the emergency population itself enacted resilience, what social media users did with their access to information and how/ what they thought about deploying social media during emergencies. This is one of the first studies to involve interviews and look at this trend systematically. While this case can be discussed as a successful installation of governmental practices of freedom and instigation – as a technology of the self – it also illuminates the not-planned and spontaneous aspects of resilience that may question resilience as a top-down program.

The four cases then, not only feed into the systematic study of resilience as a way of governing the Internet, but also as a way of governing through the Internet. The first case of each part focuses rather on the role of governmental institutions in the instigation of resilience, while the second cases of each part provides the perspective of the role of the population and that which potentially challenges governmental rationalities. As the cases indicate, this book focuses mainly on the relationship between the Internet and resilience programs that concern emergency management in Europe and beyond. However, it does not address the connections between humanitarian discourses of resilience and the Internet, as Duffield (2016). The case studies and their respective reflections, however, do feed into a theory of resilience and the relational that has the ability to speak to many different contexts of complexity and in/security. Complexity and insecurity are major themes in various contemporary discourses.

A world in-formation: insecurity revisited

All is movement. We have entered the Information Age. Everything is connected to everything else. These are at least the narratives ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I Interconnectedness, emergencies and resilience
• PART II Resilience as a way of governing the Internet
• PART III Resilience as a way of governing through the Internet
• PART IV Conclusions
• Index