Resilience and national security

Resilience is a challenging topic to review. The lay view of resilience derives from its Latin origin (Brown 2014) to spring back or recover quickly after an incident. However, while the term is used frequently and with enthusiasm by academics, practitioners and others, it lacks precision and has multiple interpretations (Duijnhoven and Neef 2014; Shaw and Maythorne 2013). Unsurprisingly therefore, the resilience literature is expansive. To illustrate, a search of common search engines for "community resilience" alone, a subtopic of resilience relevant to national security, resulted in over 28 million outputs (Leykin et al. 2013).