Research on democratic resilience in Ukraine has become one of the most urgent and dynamic areas of inquiry in contemporary political science, with direct implications for EU enlargement, recovery governance, and European security.
Despite a rapidly growing body of scholarship, however, the field remains conceptually fragmented and methodologically underdeveloped. Existing studies often focus on specific actors or sectors and rely on descriptive approaches that struggle to capture how collaborative patterns among state institutions, civil society organisations, businesses, and international partners emerge and shape governance capacity over time.
This two-day workshop addresses these challenges across three interconnected dimensions.
The first focus is conceptual and methodological. The workshop opens by mapping the current landscape of resilience research, including competing definitions, fragmented frameworks, and unresolved tensions between resistance, adaptation, and hybrid approaches, and works toward greater analytical precision. A core aim is to develop shared tools for studying how collaborative governance emerges and consolidates under stress, and how these concepts can be translated into researchable designs. Social network analysis is a well-suited method for capturing relational dynamics at the heart of resilience, and participants will receive hands-on training in integrating it with qualitative and quantitative data sources.
The second focus is theoretical and comparative. The workshop connects resilience research to the broader literature on EU transformative power, accession compliance, and Europeanization. Ukraine is treated not merely as a crisis case but as a theoretically productive lens: its experience of wartime collaborative governance illuminates mechanisms of institutional adaptation, societal coordination, and state–society relations that are analytically relevant well beyond the Ukrainian context.
Participants will work to sharpen conceptual frameworks, distinguishing resistance, adaptation, and hybrid forms of resilience, and to examine how these translate across different political and temporal settings, including post-accession and peace-time environments.
The third focus is policy-relevant and forward-looking. A dedicated roundtable, Europe Under Stress: Translating Ukraine’s Wartime Resilience into European Preparedness and Total Defence , will bring together senior scholars to explore how advances in resilience research can inform European preparedness, civil readiness, and whole-of-society security planning. Ukraine's wartime experience offers lessons that European societies, still navigating the boundary between peacetime normalcy and strategic urgency, have only begun to absorb.
The workshop creates space to examine how resilience knowledge can move from academic frameworks into measurable policy instruments and governance structures.
This event is by invitation only. In case of interest, contact rscas.conferences@eui.eu.
This activity is co-funded by the EUI Widening Europe Programme. The EUI Widening Europe Programme, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research Area.
At the EUI and the Robert Schuman Centre, we are dedicated to removing barriers and providing equal opportunities for everyone. Please indicate in the registration form your accessibility needs, if any. Alternatively, you can contact the logistics organiser of the event.