Post by Amber French-Griette

What comes first, 🐔 resilience or resistance🐣🥚🐣? For me, it's easy: the only one that exists as a verb. (I'll give you a hint: you can't "resiliate"). Even in an era of hybrid war and comprehensive defense, ages-old frames for understanding power and conflict persist. Despite Ukraine's extraordinary society-wide perseverance in the face of Russian aggression, for European institutional actors, power and conflict are still viewed primarily through the prism of violence or the power to destroy/ eliminate. The conclusion we should draw from observing Ukraine's civic shield in action is not that power is violence per se but instead something that is wielded, whether by people within or beyond the military ecosystem. This is good news and makes democracies more robust than dictatorships. Semantic emphasis is often placed on the Ukrainian population's resilience (an end state) instead of on the less visible unarmed resistance (the means their unarmed civilian populations are using to achieve the end state of "resilient"). For many governments, only armies "resist" because the only resistance they themselves can engage in and explain is the armed kind. If you ask me, there is no resilience without resistance; it's not the other way around. It's about a practice, not any sort of policy. It is built from the ground up by populations, as we see in Ukraine and numerous other historical example. How can we understand the relationship between unarmed resistance and democratic and civic resilience? What kinds of resilience are simply unattainable without widespread unarmed resistance, especially in hybrid war, where not every adversarial tactic aims at destroying or eliminating? Can body count alone achieve victory in today's European context? In the past few years, many European governments have begun rejecting in earnest the body-count-only framework and are searching for more comprehensive logics. But will they move quickly enough and will they be willing to invest in society-wide unarmed resistance training... hardly ideal for them under any other circumstances (at least when social trust is poor to begin with)? Will institutional actors be able to identify and resource effective pedagogies, those led by *grassroots civil society*, since people power by definition has to come from the bottom up? What can institutions themselves even do to prepare populations to nonviolently resist hybrid attacks, given that institutional toolboxes limit their own effectiveness to combat contexts? That is a LOT of paradoxes; I am exhausted just typing them out. 🤩 NOW SOME GOOD NEWS. This Wednesday, July 1st, from 16:30 to 18:00 CET: Oleksandra Keudel, Ph.D. and Col. (Ret.) Andrii Ordynovych bring rich Ukrainian perspectives to these complex questions and paradoxes. I'll add my two cents too. Don't miss this rare and incisive research and the practice-oriented lessons learned from Ukraine. ⏬⏬⏬