Terrorism and community resilience

Introduced by Bill Durodie, Senior Lecturer in Risk and Security at Cranfield University. For the past three years, Bill co-ordinated a team of researchers looking at the UK response to 9/11. Part of this work compared social responses to crises and disasters across different cultures and across different historical periods. This showed the key factor determining how people behave in an emergency to be - not the cause of the emergency - but rather the sense of social meaning attached to it. It is this evolving social, cultural and political background that all emergency planners and responders need to appreciate and tap-into if their own technical solutions are not to become a part of the problem.