Considerations of Resilience in the Homeland Security Literature: Towards Conceptual Convergence?

Scholars and policy makers argue that communities that increase their resilience are better positioned to protect themselves from disruptive events. The popularity of the resilience concept has created challenges for scholars and public policy makers. The most substantial challenge relates to whether there exists sufficient common understanding of resilience to enable the concept to be applied in research and public policy contexts. This article presents the findings of an analysis of resilience discussions in the homeland security literature. The analysis included the 56 articles that reference resilience terminology and are published in the journals: Homeland Security Affairs and the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Our findings indicate that resilience discussions in the homeland security literature seem to be converging towards a hybrid conceptualization of resilience, which suggests that a resilient system would have the capacity to both resist a disturbance and to quickly restore services if a disturbance could not be prevented. Despite this possible movement towards conceptual convergence, additional steps must be taken if resilience is to become a concept that can be used to guide the development and implementation of homeland security policy.