Rethinking resilience: Articulating community and the UK riots

This article addresses 'resilience' as 'governmentality'. Three key 'forms' of resilience are identified: organisational, technological and community. A focus on community resilience shows that both positive and negative forms of governmentality are possible. The positive aligns well with progressive approaches to participatory governance. The negative, emerging from the prioritisation of organisational and technological concerns, aligns well with state-centric and neoliberal tactics of crime control and citizen responsibility. This article interrogates the tension between positive and negative forms of resilience as governmentality through the lens of the UK riots in 2011.