Searching for resilience: A conceptual excavation

Resilience has become a concept that has increasingly informed political and policy discussions around disaster planning and preparedness. In this article, we explore this "resilience creep" and examine the different ways in which this concept has been used in making sense of how to respond to contemporary threats to national security. In order to do this, we establish a typology of resilience that enables us to identify both the overlapping and the contradictory uses that this term has been put to. In addition, this typology affords the opportunity to reflect upon what is made visible and invisible in contemporary resilience speak and to highlight the dangers that may lie in continuing with an uncritical embrace of this concept.