Project on Resilience and Security
Vision / Purpose
INSCT seeks to build an interdisciplinary consortium of subject matter experts and institutional partners across multiple academic disciplines, government, private and public sectors committed to the advancement of knowledge on the concept of resilience across the full range of security contexts.
Resilience has been explored in many disciplines that deal with systems operating under conditions of uncertainty. Yet, communication and cooperation is lacking across these disciplines and with policy-makers and decision-makers operating in high risk environments. As an interdisciplinary research institute, INSCT is well-suited to serve as a coordinator-integrator for this cutting-edge, collaborative effort. A balance between theoretical and applied approaches is critical to advancing this concept, thus INSCT looks to conduct interdisciplinary workshops and symposia, publish edited works, and conduct empirical research jointly with scholars and practitioners. This research will be guided by the the overarching research questions and goals below.
Goals / Objectives
1. Identify and define the attributes / variables that contribute to the resilience of complex systems (social, physical, biological), across multiple security contexts (human, community, state, transnational, environmental, economic).
2. Operationalize these attributes / variables across multiple contexts and develop metrics that will allow researchers and agency planners the ability to measure the capacity of complex systems to adapt to stress and external shocks.
3. Enable multidisciplinary scholarship that uses the data and experience of the U.S. government in conflict and disaster-afflicted settings for creating viable solutions to critical national problems.
4. Implement new methods and resources for teaching this important concept in higher education and professional training.
Foundational Research Questions
1. What are the components necessary to achieve resilience and how can the concept of resilience be operationalized by researchers such that resiliency metrics can be developed and tracked across different cases?
2. Which resilience attributes / indicators are most critical to a (community, society, state’s) ability to cope with conflict or catastrophic events? To what extent are these indicators interrelated? Are there readily identifiable thresholds through which, if exceeded, result in system collapse?
3. How can resilience research (a) enhance existing U.S. interagency planning methodologies, and (b) better inform policy makers the requisite need for operational capacities to effectively respond to local and international disasters and crises?
Contact
Nick Armstrong
INSCT Research Fellow
narmstro@maxwell.syr.edu
315-443-2033
