Abstract

This chapter seeks to introduce the paradigm of resilience and to contrast it to the liberal internationalist understandings of reactive international intervention to secure people threatened by conflict, deprivation, or disasters. Resilience is defined here as the capacity to positively or successfully cope with, adapt to, and recover from security crises, and is widely employed as a framework for addressing a broad range of interrelated security threats stemming from conflict, poverty, and environmental concerns. Resilience thus concerns the capacities of societies, communities, and individuals as the targets of security interventions rather than attempting to deal with security crises merely at the level of their manifestations – i.e. the provision of post-hoc aid or humanitarian relief or military intervention to remove war criminals or dictatorial regimes. Resilience seeks to address security questions at the deeper level of social causation in order to provide sustainable solutions enabling communities to understand, to cope with, and to successfully manage security threats.