“In the wake of recent terror-related events, there are increased calls for greater resilience against terror. There are media celebrations of the resilience of the public as well as heartening stories of individual valour in the face of both terrorism and disasters of other kinds – from bushfire to chemical spill to civil unrest. However, there is not often much consensus on what being resilient actually means, of what it looks like, or of how it can best be achieved.

Simply being more ‘resilient’ is not a solution to the problem of terror, nor is it a new form of security. People can be resilient in many different ways and it can be both active and passive – from being willing to give to charity or help a neighbour to knowing local evacuation routes or having the right insurance for the prevailing risks specific to your locale. A city can be resilient – in its streets, spaces, infrastructure, and design; from bomb proof glass in bus shelters to system redundancies in the power grid. An organisation or an economy can be resilient in its capacity to respond and flex under the pressures of global competition. Systems can be as complex as an individual person can, but both can be or become more and less resilient.

Resilience is perhaps best thought of as a way of living enmeshed in collaborative networks and acted out by everyone, from the people on the street to the heads of state. It is designed to allow all involved to get not just ‘back to normal’ but become better off than they were before being exposed to danger.

At its heart, resilience is a strategy of flexibility. It evokes the elastic, the bouncing back, but more than that resilience is a way of becoming more than we were before, of learning from experience, adapting and even transforming to better fit the new context into which we emerge.

Resilience is not to be thought of as a political gambit. It is not a one-shot-cure nor ‘old wine in new skin’. It represents a legitimate means for creating more participatory forms of government for the future.

What remains to be seen is if we as individuals, communities, and nations can rise to the challenge of doing things differently in the years to come, for if we are to become more resilient one thing is certain: we must change.”