Risk, Resilience, and Resistance

This chapter investigates the development of ‘resilience thinking’ in NATO’s post-Cold War discourse and practice and raises questions about the compatibility between the logics of security and resilience. The increasing emphasis on resilience performatively enacts NATO’s self-projection as a comprehensive security organization, much beyond its standard military alliance repertoire. What deterrence and defence are to NATO’s original identity, now resurrected after Russia’s 2022 full-on aggression against Ukraine, resilience has been to the Alliance’s positive post-Cold War sense of self. The article offers a conceptualization and empirical documentation of NATO’s take on resilience, identifying four meanings of the term in NATO’s collective use, pertaining to the Alliance’s political unity, democratic essence, reputation/credibility, and institutional endurance.