Resilience, the positive flipside of vulnerability? Looking in another direction

Human societies have to cope with different kind of hazards. Extreme physical events constantly cause major disasters (Quarantelli et al., 2006), like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the earthquake that stroke Haïti in 2010, the flooding in Draguignan (France) in 2010, the tidal wave witch destroys the coastal Japanese areas in 2011, the recent hurricane Sandy. Hazards and disasters have been analysed in a great deal of research through three main concepts: hazard, vulnerability and resilience. The link between resilience and vulnerability is questionable, since resilience is often mistaken for the opposite of vulnerability. This opposition is not as simple as it first appeared: societies or places can be both highly vulnerable and highly resilient. Our paper aims at deconstructing the concept of resilience. We will argue that this one term has two different meanings. In risk analysis and engineering practices, resilience is the exact contrary of biophysical vulnerability, whereas in social sciences, this concept is included in the very idea of vulnerability. That's why we propose a new systemic risk model based on the notion of Resiliencery Vulnerability. This model questions the trio of Vulnerability-Event-Resilience to understand the complex relationships that exist between resilience and vulnerability