Resilience has become a familiar language of contemporary security assistance, but its authority effects remain under-specified. This article argues that resilience operates as security governmentality when it renders insecurity governable through risk rationalities, audit practices, data infrastructures, and coordination routines. Its political significance lies not only in asking institutions and populations to adapt to insecurity, but in redistributing practical authority among donors, security institutions, civilian agencies, implementing partners, and communities made visible by programme design. Using an interpretive documentary analysis of Nigeria’s Northeast stabilisation field and border governance field, the article shows that authority shifts differently according to the object being governed. In stabilisation, resilience territorialises intervention through site selection, access management, perception measurement, and narrative verification of recovery. In border governance, it datafies mobility through integrated border management, standards, information systems, and inter-agency platforms. The article contributes to critical security studies by specifying authority redistribution as a mechanism of resilience governance and by showing how contestation is relocated into administrative sites such as indicators, data access, reporting pipelines, and coordination design.

Keywords: resilience, security assistance, security governmentality, authority redistribution, stabilisation, border governance, Nigeria.