As resilience becomes a cornerstone of NATO’s strategic posture, the imperative is no longer just to define it – but to embed it in practice. During the annual DEEP Functional Clearing House, at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen from 23 June to 25 June, 2025, Amb. Shota Gvineria from the Baltic Defence College, presented online the essence of the Resilience Reference Curriculum. He stated that the contribution had reflected a critical shift: from conceptualising resilience to operationalising it across defence institutions and societies. The launch of the Resilience Reference Curriculum marked an important step in creating a shared framework. But frameworks alone are not enough. What is needed now is scale, accessibility, and actionable training. This is precisely the goal of the e-Resilience Reference Curriculum (e-RRC), as an ADL course, designed to translate resilience principles into structured learning pathways for military professionals, public servants, and civilian partners across the Alliance and beyond.
By turning a comprehensive guide into a flexible, interactive, and globally accessible learning experience, the e-RRC makes resilience teachable, transferable, and immediately applicable. In doing so, it supports NATO’s efforts to build whole-of-society preparedness, enhance interoperability, and strengthen collective defence in an age of persistent disruption.
The full, authorised transcript of the speech is provided below:
Hello everybody. I’m really sorry that I’m not able to be there with you in person in the beautiful mountains, but I’m still happy to present the Resilience Reference Curriculum. This Reference Curriculum was a bit different from the others because it was the first curriculum requested by the NATO Conference of Commandants. It’s meant not only for partner nations but also for the Allies. We assembled a group of 23 individuals from the military, civilian sector, and academia—experts and practitioners—and aimed to make the team as multinational and cross-domain as possible. From the beginning, we understood that resilience isn’t something that can be addressed with a single solution. You have to understand the context and the many components and factors affecting resilience—both positively and negatively—in different environments. The process was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Defence. After about two years of work, including many in-person and virtual meetings, we published the curriculum in January 2025. We began by confronting the issue of definitions. There is no single definition of resilience that fits all purposes. In disciplines like engineering, psychology, mental health, or climate change, resilience is well-defined and measurable. But in political or defence and security studies, there was a noticeable gap. So, we looked for common denominators—core components embedded across definitions. We found that resilience involves three main capacities: resisting adversity, absorbing and adapting to it, and, most importantly, recovering and returning to some form of normalcy. We used the image of a metal spring to convey this idea. When pressure is applied to a spring, it changes shape, but a resilient one returns to its original form. If it can’t, then it isn’t resilient. Capturing the accumulated knowledge from other disciplines and applying it to defence and security was essential. NATO’s own definition reflects this dual need to both resist and recover from adversity, which distinguishes resilience from related concepts like resistance or robustness. Our approach acknowledged that resilience cannot be developed in the same way across all domains or levels. We needed a guidebook useful to a wide range of stakeholders—from individuals and communities to national and multinational actors like NATO—so they could define, understand, and develop their custom frameworks for resilience. The primary audience was mid- and high-level military and civilian public servants in professional military education institutions. However, the final product is applicable to the private sector, civil society organisations, and state actors as well. Due to the complexity of the topic, we relied heavily on specific examples and real-life vignettes to illustrate resilience. These examples helped deconstruct its main components and identify key factors affecting it. Each section includes guiding questions, context-specific examples, and relevant readings to help users tailor their resilience strategies. We structured the curriculum around four major themes. Our mission was to break away from silo thinking. If you isolate resilience into categories—like military, financial, or informational—it loses meaning in today’s hyperconnected world. Instead, we emphasise understanding the interdependencies between these domains. What happens in the military sphere affects the economic sphere, and vice versa. True resilience requires a coordinated strategy across all domains, not isolated improvements.
Another key insight is that resilience operates across multiple levels: individual, community, organisational, national, and multinational. Each of these also includes both psychological and physical dimensions. A successful strategy must address both of these aspects across all levels. We structured the process as a continuous cycle: anticipation, management, adaptation, recovery. Resilience is not a fixed state—it’s an ongoing process. Just like the spring mentioned earlier, resilience must cycle through these phases continuously in response to ever-changing challenges. In today’s world of uncertainty, volatility, complexity, and ambiguity, understanding and adapting to changing circumstances is crucial. That’s why the curriculum emphasises moving beyond the “whole of government” approach to a “whole of nation” approach. This means involving not just state institutions but also the private sector and civil society. Resilience, in our view, is a triangle of cooperation between state actors, private enterprises, and civil society organisations. The more coordinated this cooperation is—nationally and internationally—the better the chances of developing strong resilience. This curriculum has already been embedded in the Strategic Leadership Course developed for the National Defence University of Ukraine. That initiative was led by the Swedish Defence University in cooperation with the Baltic Defence College. Additionally, at least one civilian university— Rīga Stradiņš University—has used it to build a program for their national security curriculum. The next step is to turn the Resilience Reference Curriculum into an e-Resilience Reference Curriculum ADL Course. This course will go beyond being a guidebook and become a fully teachable program in the DEEP eAcademy environment. Finally, here’s some food for thought. Should our goal be to bounce back to normal after adversity? Or should we aim to bounce forward—learning from crises and becoming better prepared for the next cycle? That’s the kind of resilience thinking we are promoting through this curriculum. Thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to the discussion.