Governing the network society: a biopolitical critique of resilience

Looking at the way risk is employed within the United Kingdom’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat’s policy of resilience, this article critically examines how contingency is managed within contemporary biopolitical security practices seeking to protect and promote species-life. Underlying these changes, it will be argued, are profound changes in the way species-life is generally understood in terms of a complex adaptive network. Paying particular attention to how contingency is understood within the literature on complex adaptive systems that inform contemporary notions of the ‘network society’, this article will seek to draw a link between risk and governance within the modern ‘network society.’ In doing so, this paper seeks to examine how advances in the protocological control of networks are informing biopolitical security practices and their relation to the governmental rationality of neo-liberalism