Forthcoming in Security Dialogue 14(2) 2011

neoliberalism The concept of ‘resilience ’ was frst adopted within systems ecology in the 1970s, where it marked a move away from the homeostasis of Cold War resource management toward the far-from-equilibrium models of second order cybernetics or complex systems theory. Resilience as an operational strategy of risk management has more recently been taken up in fnancial, urban and environmental security discourses, where it refects a general consensus about the necessity of adaptation through endogenous crisis. The generalization of complex systems theory as a methodology of power has ambivalent sources. While on the one hand the redefnition of the concept can be directly traced to the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling, on the other hand, the deployment of complex systems theory is perfectly in accord with the later philosophy of the Austrian neoliberal Friedrich von Hayek. This ambivalence is refected in the trajectory of complex systems theory itself, from critique to methodology of power. 1 Developed within systems ecology in the 1970s, ‘resilience ’ as a science of complex adaptive systems and as an operational strategy of risk management has fourished, progressively asserting itself as