Enhancing Georgia’s resilience in uncertain times

Resilience, as a significant civil-military concept, has recently become key to the agendas of international actors, such the EU and the NATO, to support sustainable development and effective crisis-management in the partner states. From this perspective, it is interesting and politically relevant to explore how NATO-promoted resilience-building can help Georgia to tackle main risks and threats and rebound from crises the country has been exposed to. Specifically, three topics are particularly relevant and have been unexplored so far in this regard: (1) what are the domestic/local sources of resilience and, more generally, what is the state of the art regarding resilience-building in Georgia; (2) what are the key components of NATO-promoted resilience-building and which part of them can be deployed in non-member partner countries; (3) how NATO’s resilience agenda can strengthen sources of resilience in Georgia and which instrument- and policy-mix the alliance should use to maximize the positive outputs of its resilience-building agenda.

The goal of the project “Enhancing Georgia’s resilience in uncertain times” is to raise public awareness about NATO’s role and impact beyond the formal membership process in Georgia, with a specific focus on NATO-promoted resilience-building in Georgia. The project aims to inspire a broad policy and public discussion in Georgia about the importance of fostering resilience with the final goal of defining and promoting Georgia’s nationally-tailored resilience agenda. 

Project objectives:

• Defining Georgia’s resilience goals by assessing the state’s key risks, threats, vulnerabilities, degree of civil preparedness, and further needs in support of establishing the national system of resilience;
• Supporting broader dialogue about Georgia’s resilience objectives by advocacy work with the relevant state institutions, strategic communication with the international experts from NATO member states as well as experience-sharing with Ukraine;
• Increasing visibility and understanding of the Georgian public and policy community about NATO-promoted resilience-building with a focus on risk assessment, civil preparedness, military capacity and other activities for strengthening resilience through collective effort.

Project activities:

• Developing policy paper about nationally-tailored resilience goals of Georgia
• Organizing closed presentation of the research preliminary results and recommendations before the representatives of the relevant ministries, MPs as well as the NLO and NATO PDD representatives
• Workshop for Georgian experts about NATO’s resilience principles and objectives
• International public discussion about resilience, analyzing the NATO experience of tackling the security challenges through the collective effort of the member states; and addressing threats, vulnerabilities and experiences of the non-NATO member states like Ukraine and Georgia that are being targeted by the Russian aggression.