What can four years of full-scale war teach European societies that are not at war, but can no longer afford to assume they are safe?
Ukraine's experience has generated something no peacetime framework could have produced: a real-time record of how societies organise under existential threat. At the core of that record is multi-stakeholder collaboration among local state actors, civil society networks, and businesses, acting not in parallel but in concert. Civil society stepped in where the state could not reach. Businesses reconfigured supply chains and financed public goods. Communities maintained governance capacity under conditions that European preparedness planners are only beginning to take seriously. The question is no longer whether this experience is relevant to Europe, but how much of it can travel, and how fast.
This public roundtable brings together leading scholars to examine what resilience research can offer to European policymakers. The discussion will address a conceptual divide with direct practical stakes: does resilience mean resistance, holding institutional ground under pressure, or adaptation, reorganising in response to disruption, or both, in different combinations depending on context? The answer shapes what preparedness looks like: which capacities need to be built in advance, which activate only under stress, and which may be structurally unavailable to societies that have not faced an acute threat. It also demands a harder question: whether resilience as currently operationalised in EU internal and external policies is adequate to what the moment demands.
The roundtable will also ask how this knowledge crosses the wartime–peacetime divide. European societies face a security environment that demands whole-of-society readiness without the forcing function of active conflict, and that readiness must be built not only within member states but across them, through the transnational civil society networks that are increasingly the connective tissue of European democratic resilience. How do you cultivate collaborative resilience deliberately, before a crisis arrives? The EU's existing participatory infrastructure, citizens' assemblies and deliberative panels, offers an underleveraged but democratically legitimate venue for exactly this work: building the multi-stakeholder foundations of public preparedness before it becomes a public emergency.
A final question runs beneath all others: how does knowledge become policy? The rich traditions of preparedness studies and Europeanization research carry tools that governance structures, civil readiness programmes, and total defence strategies urgently need, yet the path from academic framework to institutional practice remains poorly mapped. The roundtable will reflect on what it would take for scholarship on resilience and preparedness to become genuinely embedded in the European security architecture, and what responsibilities that places on the academic community itself.
Discussants:
- Veronica Anghel (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute)
- Trine Flockhart (Florence School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute)
- Oksana Huss (NATO Defense College)
- Kalypso Nicolaidis (Florence School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute)
- Chair and Moderator: Inna Melnykovska (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute)
The roundtable is part of the two-day workshop "Building Capacity for Integrated Resilience Research on Ukraine and Beyond," organised by Dr. Inna Melnykovska (Jean Monnet Fellow, Robert Schuman Centre, EUI) and supported by the EUI Widening Europe Programme.
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.
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