The latest edition of the journal Renewal takes as its theme the transformation of foreign policy, and David and I have an article in it on ‘risks and resilience in the new global era’.
Pause to reflect on the issues that have really defined politics since the turn of the millennium, and it’s soon clear that risk is the thread that runs through most if not all of them: terrorism, climate change, weapons of mass destruction, energy and resource scarcity, and most recently the credit crunch and the ensuing global economic downturn.
But have policymakers started to develop a political agenda that centres on resilience in the face of such risks? Not yet.
Our article sets out a typology of different types of risk and explores some of the ways that such risks can lead to breakdown, renewal or outright collapse in social, political, economic and ecological systems, before turning to a discussion of what a political agenda focused on resilience might look like. Part of what makes resilience such a complex topic, we argue, is the profound questions that it raises about values and identity:
Resilience is fundamentally about integrity and the capacity to remain ‘whole’. It involves the ability to flex and to absorb threats, and to respond to them in a way that protects, reinterprets, and fulfils identity. It can be summed up as follows: has a threat diminished us, or are we rising as we respond to it?
Our conclusion:
In the end, resilience is about a politics that is ‘progressive’ in a pure sense. Rather than following the ideological imprint of a bygone age, we need to be prepared to take a broad view of the systems that we depend on – and re-order our priorities to ensure that every action we take helps strengthen and defend them. That takes courage, and a farsighted vision of the future. The question is not ‘what risks do we want to avoid?’ but ‘what do we want to be resilient for?’
