Books by Chris Zebrowski
At the turn of the twenty-first century, resilience has
become a ‘buzz-word’ within fields as di... more At the turn of the twenty-first century, resilience has
become a ‘buzz-word’ within fields as diverse as network
engineering, ecosystems management and military training
programmes. Uniting these fields is a common problem.
Resilience has emerged as a response to this problematic.
By drawing attention to the complex historical processes
and significant governmental efforts required to make
resilience possible this book aims to open up a space
through which the value of resilience may be more critically
interrogated.It will be of interest to students and scholars
of international relations, security studies and conflict
resolution.
Journal Articles by Chris Zebrowski
Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses
The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been prem... more The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been premised on a profound re-evaluation of the referents of security governance. Together, the discovery of the ‘myth’ of panic and the natural resilience of populations has encouraged the spread of resilience strategies which aim to promote the adaptive and self-organisational capacities of populations in emergency. This article seeks to advance an alternative to this positivist explanation: that the appearance of ‘resilient populations’ is the correlate of a broader restructuring of rationalities and practices comprising liberal governance. Tracing the evolution of the figure of the ‘natural’ underpinning liberal governmentalities through the historical development of ecology and economics, this article looks to make explicit the epistemological order supportive of neoliberal governance. In doing so, this article identifies the historical conditions of possibility for ‘resilient populations’ to emerge as a referent of governance.
Political Perspectives
Looking at the way risk is employed within the United Kingdom’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat’s... more Looking at the way risk is employed within the United Kingdom’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat’s policy of resilience, this article critically examines how contingency is managed within contemporary biopolitical security practices seeking to protect and promote species-life. Underlying these changes, it will be argued, are profound changes in the way species-life is generally understood in terms of a complex adaptive
network. Paying particular attention to how contingency is understood within the literature on complex adaptive systems that inform contemporary notions of the ‘network society’, this article will seek to draw a link between risk and governance within the modern ‘network society.’ In doing so, this paper seeks to examine how advances in the protocological control of networks are informing biopolitical security practices and their relation to the governmental rationality of neo-liberalism.
Book Chapters by Chris Zebrowski
The Politics of Hope: Agency, Governance and Critique in the Anthropocene, 2024
Crises, by definition, are a time of significant potential change. Hope similarly arises from a c... more Crises, by definition, are a time of significant potential change. Hope similarly arises from a conviction in the possibility of change. However, hope can also be problematic. One can harbour false hopes, allow fantasies to become a barrier to productive change, and lose hope. This chapter interrogates the problematic figure of hope in the wake of Covid-19. It asks why, in light of profound vulnerabilities, injustices and insecurity, the deep abiding hope at present for many is simply for a return to normality? This chapter considers the complex, if not contradictory ways hope and hopelessness are manifest; asking whether we are experiencing a crisis of hope, and what can be hoped for in a world so afflicted by crisis by examining how critique, cynicism and cruel optimism were enacted through the framing of the Covid-19 crisis within the British media. It concludes with a reflection on the role of critique and the possibility of holding out a ‘hope against hope’ in an era of polycrisis
2016) "Resilience and Critical Infrastructure: Origins, Theories and Critiques" (with Dan Sage) i... more 2016) "Resilience and Critical Infrastructure: Origins, Theories and Critiques" (with Dan Sage) in Dover, R. & Goodman, M. (eds.) International Security Handbook (Palgrave MacMillan)
In this chapter we discuss the value of genealogy as a critical method to study security. A gene... more In this chapter we discuss the value of genealogy as a critical method to study security. A genealogical method would treat security not simply as an object of research, but as something embedded in historical struggles over truth, knowledge, authority, expertise and power. This is more complicated then it seems. The aim is to avoid assuming that we know what security is. This is especially important today. We are witnessing the proliferation of knowledge, practices, and technologies that are somehow associated with security but that also destabilize the analytical categories through which we had come to make sense of 'security', such as the internal and the external, war and peace, the national and international, law enforcement and the military.
Book Reviews by Chris Zebrowski
Author's response to the book review forum on Zebrowski, C. "The Value of Resilience: Securing Li... more Author's response to the book review forum on Zebrowski, C. "The Value of Resilience: Securing Life in the Twenty First Century" as published in Resilence: International Policies, Practices and Discourses
Papers by Chris Zebrowski
The Value of Resilience, 2015
Choice Reviews Online, 2008
Resilience, 2016
I would like to begin by thanking each of the reviewers for such careful and provocative readings... more I would like to begin by thanking each of the reviewers for such careful and provocative readings. I'm delighted that the book was well-received and even happier to see the new lines of questioning it has provoked-well beyond those which preoccupied me when writing it. Given the limited space available I will not, unfortunately, be able to address all of the questions and concerns raised in the reviews. Instead, I would like to use this response section to address a series of questions running across all three reviews concerning the relation between time/temporalities, politics and resilience.
Resilience, 2013
The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been prem... more The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been premised on a profound re-evaluation of the referents of security governance. Together, the discovery of the 'myth' of panic and the natural resilience of populations has encouraged the spread of resilience strategies which aim to promote the adaptive and self-organizational capacities of populations in emergency. This article seeks to advance an alternative to this positivist explanation: that the appearance of 'resilient populations' is the correlate of a broader restructuring of rationalities and practices comprising liberal governance. Tracing the evolution of the figure of the natural underpinning liberal governmentalities through the historical development of Ecology and Economics, this article looks to make explicit the epistemological order supportive of neoliberal governance. In doing so, this article identifies the historical conditions of possibility for 'resilient populations' to emerge as a referent of governance
Political Perspectives, 2009
All contributions are accepted for publication on the understanding that they represent the origi... more All contributions are accepted for publication on the understanding that they represent the original work of their authors. This does not, however, preclude publication elsewhere.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
Critical studies on security, May 4, 2021
Since its restructuring at the turn of the century, UK Civil Contingencies has promoted informati... more Since its restructuring at the turn of the century, UK Civil Contingencies has promoted information-circulation as the primary means of binding together multi-agency emergency response assemblages. Breaking from the top-down hierarchical diagram of governance which characterised Civil Defence, a more agile and resilient approach to emergency response was envisioned to address the forms of threat anticipated in the 21 century (Zebrowski 2016). Key to this new design was the role of information circulation in enhancing collaboration within and across responder agencies. Enhancing quality and access to information would permit decision making power within emergency events to be devolved to local responders. Rather than imposing command and control from the top-down, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) would permit emergency responses to self-organise from the bottom-up: promising to improve the speed and efficiency of emergency responses (Zebrowski 2019), while also inspiring myriad critiques of the professed ‘neoliberal’ responsibilization of emergency response. Viewed from our ongoing qualitative research within the UK’s Covid-19 response it is clear that this informational vision of emergency response has fundamentally broken down. The calamitous management of the response in the UK has been defined by centralised, top-down decision-making and serious impediments to the free flow of information between different levels of government and emergency responders. While such propensities are far from a new aspect of UK resilience practice (Sage, Fussey, and Dainty 2015), their occurrence has intensified and expanded during Covid-19. This is perhaps all the more notable given the UK’s efforts over the past decade to position itself at the vanguard of a professed new resilience paradigm of ICT, centring around the primary object of analysis of our research and analysis here: a collaborative emergency response platform called ResilienceDirect. In this short contribution, we reflect briefly on how this informational vision of emergency response has been undermined within the UK response to Covid-19. We argue that the reemergence of command-and-control approaches to emergency governance has marginalised the role of local responders and undermined the effectiveness of the UK’s Covid-19 response. Our analysis is informed by interviews we have conducted with 41 emergency response professionals involved in the UK Covid-19 response between August and December 2020. A concluding section will reflect on the implications of this analysis for emergency policy and understandings of neoliberal resilience and security.
Routledge eBooks, Oct 10, 2018
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
Strong emergency collaboration is commonly assumed to involve a joyful passage to trust and confi... more Strong emergency collaboration is commonly assumed to involve a joyful passage to trust and confidence. Organizations are said to collaborate when fear and suspicion are overcome. Thus, negative, or sad, affects—such as anger, fear, disdain, despair, frustration—appear opposed to emergency collaboration. In this hybrid theoretical‐empirical paper we challenge these assumptions by elaborating the affect theories of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza with ethnographic research on emergency collaboration undertaken before and during the UK emergency response to COVID‐19. Moving beyond considerations of sad affects as either undermining collaboration, or as moderators of excessive trust, we explore how a range of sad affects are both prevalent and potentially beneficial within trustful emergency collaboration. Rather than celebrate such affects, our analysis contributes by drawing attention to the overlooked role of vacillations of affect between joy and sadness within e...
Critical Studies on Security, 2021
Since its restructuring at the turn of the century, UK Civil Contingencies has promoted informati... more Since its restructuring at the turn of the century, UK Civil Contingencies has promoted information-circulation as the primary means of binding together multi-agency emergency response assemblages. Breaking from the top-down hierarchical diagram of governance which characterised Civil Defence, a more agile and resilient approach to emergency response was envisioned to address the forms of threat anticipated in the 21 century (Zebrowski 2016). Key to this new design was the role of information circulation in enhancing collaboration within and across responder agencies. Enhancing quality and access to information would permit decision making power within emergency events to be devolved to local responders. Rather than imposing command and control from the top-down, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) would permit emergency responses to self-organise from the bottom-up: promising to improve the speed and efficiency of emergency responses (Zebrowski 2019), while also inspiring myriad critiques of the professed ‘neoliberal’ responsibilization of emergency response. Viewed from our ongoing qualitative research within the UK’s Covid-19 response it is clear that this informational vision of emergency response has fundamentally broken down. The calamitous management of the response in the UK has been defined by centralised, top-down decision-making and serious impediments to the free flow of information between different levels of government and emergency responders. While such propensities are far from a new aspect of UK resilience practice (Sage, Fussey, and Dainty 2015), their occurrence has intensified and expanded during Covid-19. This is perhaps all the more notable given the UK’s efforts over the past decade to position itself at the vanguard of a professed new resilience paradigm of ICT, centring around the primary object of analysis of our research and analysis here: a collaborative emergency response platform called ResilienceDirect. In this short contribution, we reflect briefly on how this informational vision of emergency response has been undermined within the UK response to Covid-19. We argue that the reemergence of command-and-control approaches to emergency governance has marginalised the role of local responders and undermined the effectiveness of the UK’s Covid-19 response. Our analysis is informed by interviews we have conducted with 41 emergency response professionals involved in the UK Covid-19 response between August and December 2020. A concluding section will reflect on the implications of this analysis for emergency policy and understandings of neoliberal resilience and security.
The Palgrave Handbook of Security, Risk and Intelligence, 2017
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Books by Chris Zebrowski
become a ‘buzz-word’ within fields as diverse as network
engineering, ecosystems management and military training
programmes. Uniting these fields is a common problem.
Resilience has emerged as a response to this problematic.
By drawing attention to the complex historical processes
and significant governmental efforts required to make
resilience possible this book aims to open up a space
through which the value of resilience may be more critically
interrogated.It will be of interest to students and scholars
of international relations, security studies and conflict
resolution.
Journal Articles by Chris Zebrowski
network. Paying particular attention to how contingency is understood within the literature on complex adaptive systems that inform contemporary notions of the ‘network society’, this article will seek to draw a link between risk and governance within the modern ‘network society.’ In doing so, this paper seeks to examine how advances in the protocological control of networks are informing biopolitical security practices and their relation to the governmental rationality of neo-liberalism.
Book Chapters by Chris Zebrowski
Book Reviews by Chris Zebrowski
Papers by Chris Zebrowski
become a ‘buzz-word’ within fields as diverse as network
engineering, ecosystems management and military training
programmes. Uniting these fields is a common problem.
Resilience has emerged as a response to this problematic.
By drawing attention to the complex historical processes
and significant governmental efforts required to make
resilience possible this book aims to open up a space
through which the value of resilience may be more critically
interrogated.It will be of interest to students and scholars
of international relations, security studies and conflict
resolution.
network. Paying particular attention to how contingency is understood within the literature on complex adaptive systems that inform contemporary notions of the ‘network society’, this article will seek to draw a link between risk and governance within the modern ‘network society.’ In doing so, this paper seeks to examine how advances in the protocological control of networks are informing biopolitical security practices and their relation to the governmental rationality of neo-liberalism.