Resilience Strategies in EU Foreign Policy

The European Union’s foreign policy has increasingly adopted resilience as a guiding principle to navigate a volatile international environment. Originating in the 2016 Global Strategy, resilience strategies have sought to strengthen the ability of partner societies and internal governance structures to withstand and recover from crises ranging from geopolitical conflict and hybrid threats to pandemics and climate change. Initially conceived as a means to support bottom-up societal capacities, resilience has been reinterpreted over time to incorporate pragmatic defence measures and a strategic geopolitical outlook. This evolution reflects a tension between the EU’s normative commitment to values-based diplomacy and the imperative to safeguard the rules-based international order. Instruments such as the Strategic Compass and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, alongside dedicated resilience dialogue frameworks, exemplify the EU’s efforts to calibrate external action with internal fortification. In practice, this has translated into tailored support for governance reforms, social cohesion initiatives and risk-prevention mechanisms in neighbouring regions. At the global level, resilience strategies have underscored the EU’s drive for strategic autonomy, seeking to reduce dependency on external actors while reinforcing multilateral institutions. However, scholars note that the defensive turn may erode the normative character of EU external action and risk securitising developmental agendas. Moving forward, balancing principled engagement with pragmatic defence remains central to sustaining the EU’s role as a stabilising actor in a contested world.

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Resilience Strategies in EU Foreign Policy publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in resilience strategies in eu foreign policy across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Resilience: Capacity of systems or societies to absorb, adapt to and recover from external shocks.

Liberal international order: System of rules and norms underpinning the post-Cold War global governance architecture.

Strategic autonomy: Ability of the EU to pursue security and foreign policy objectives independently while balancing external partnerships.

Normative power: Influence derived from projecting values such as human rights, rule of law and democratic principles.

Local ownership: Principle that resilience strategies should be rooted in the agency and practices of communities directly affected.

References

1. Resilience as the EU Global Strategy’s new leitmotif: pragmatic, problematic or promising?. Contemporary Security Policy (2016).
2. Rescuing the liberal international order: crisis, resilience and EU security policy. International Affairs (2023).
3. Conceptual politics and resilience-at-work in the European Union. Review of International Studies (2023).
4. Reclaiming resilience back: A local turn in EU external governance. Contemporary Security Policy (2019).