The Georgian Institute of Politics (GIP) has issued policy paper entitled “National Resilience Strategy for Georgia: Lessons from NATO, EU and beyond."

The policy paper provides some thoughts on how a national resilience-building process should be organized in Georgia and what the Black Sea country can learn from NATO and its member states.

"Developing a high degree of resilience will not only help Georgia protect itself from present and future crises and conflicts but will also contribute to Tbilisi’s Euro-Atlantic integration prospects as it will turn Georgia into a more predictable and desirable partner," said Kornely Kakachia, Bidzina Lebanidze, Salome Kandelaki, who are the authors of this policy paper.

Why Georgia needs a national resilience strategy

According to the authors, resilience-building is an eective approach to deal with the risks and threats emanating from an increasingly complex and interdependent world. This is especially important for smaller/weaker countries which are located on the frontline of heightened geopolitical competition and do not have the luxury of having security or welfare cushions from powerful regional organizations such as NATO and the EU. Georgia is a prime example of such a country. Located in a grey zone between Russia and the EU/NATO, and as a NATO aspirant country, Georgia suers from existential risks, does not enjoy NATO’s military umbrella or EU membership privileges and needs to take care of its own security.

"This makes Georgia one of the most vulnerable countries in the world. Georgia is widely considered as high-risk country. Georgia is exposed to several layers of risk

The first layer Georgia is exposed to is diuse risk: risks that are of a universal or regional nature and do not emanate from specific state actors. They include pandemics, irregular migration, global financial and economic crises, climate change and natural disasters.

The second layer is global risks, those emanating from specific state actors or intentionally directed towards the country. The existence of Georgia’s statehood, its territorial integrity, and its ability to act as an independent state is permanently questioned by Russia which poses a major security threat to the country. Security-related threats are not limited to military confrontation with Russia, however, but also include the areas of cyber security, economy, energy, education and religion.

The third layer encompasses local risks which could exacerbate the country’s exposure to global risks. Local risks include socio-economic risks: economic underdevelopment, high inequality, widespread poverty, as well as high degrees of commodification and social stratification. Local political risks include the politicization of state institutions, the presence of oligarchic clientelist networks1 , societal polarization, political radicalization and the high degree of informality that exists at the cost of institutional consolidation. All this results in a lack of social trust, low public legitimacy and damaged power transfer mechanisms which put the country at permanent risk of political and social instability

A comprehensive resilience strategy can help Georgia deal with these challenges in a more eective and prudent manner. Firstly, the development of comprehensive strategy for resilience-building will lead to the more eective consolidation and use of public and private resources to fulfill important public services both in peacetime and during major disruptions. Secondly, in terms of strategic policy planning, it will contribute to the streamlining of Georgia’s strategic approaches to security, economy, energy, agriculture and many other areas under a single umbrella and avoid counterproductive overlaps, repetitions, and competition among various state agencies. Thirdly, having a comprehensive resilience agenda will improve strategic foresight and risk-scanning capacity both of Georgian authorities and societal actors. A well-designed resilience strategy can help to properly identify and map risks and design strategies for their mitigation. Furthermore, having a clear-cut resilience agenda will help Georgia’s cause on its path towards Euro-Atlantic integration as it will make Georgia a more predictable and reliable partner. Lastly, and most importantly, a comprehensive resilience strategy, will help develop a common national understanding about the country’s general priorities, dangers, risks and opportunities. This can also have a mitigating impact on problems such as polarization, radicalization, political disenfranchisement, and social cleavages", the paper said.

What Georgia can learn from the best practices of NATO and its member states

"As a NATO aspirant country, Georgia would benefit greatly from learning from the best practices of NATO’s resilience-building approaches," the authors of the paper said.

"This has both practical and political importance. While there is no consensus yet about Georgia’s NATO membership, it is important for Georgia to achieve greater proximity to NATO by deepening sectoral cooperation. Being part of NATO’s resilience agenda could oer such opportunity.

NATO defines resilience as “a society’s ability to resist and recover from (…) shocks2 and combines both civil preparedness and military capacity (NATO 2022). It identifies civil preparedness as “a central pillar of Allies’ resilience and a critical enabler for the Alliance’s collective defence” (NATO 2022). According to NATO, civil preparedness needs to fulfil three core functions: (1) continuity of government, (2) continuity of essential services to the population and (3) civil support to military operations (NATO 2022). Based on these three core functions, NATO’s resilience strategy identifies seven baseline indicators for the national resilience of its allies:

- Assured continuity of government and critical government services;

- Resilient energy supplies;

- Ability to deal electively with uncontrolled movement of people;

- Resilient food and water resources;

- Ability to deal with mass casualties and disruptive health crises;

- Resilient civil communications systems; - Resilient transport systems (NATO 2022).

NATO’s strong focus on the civilian components of resilience stems from the acknowledgement of increasing interconnectedness between the military and civilian realms. Ater the end of the Cold War, critical infrastructure and basic state services (such as energy grids, railways, ports, and airfields) have been moving into the hands of the private sector, making NATO’s military structures dependent on civilian and commercial assets and capabilities (NATO 2022). Accordingly, “NATO’s ability to defend itself against an armed attack” depends “not only on its military capabilities but also on the preparedness and resilience of its societies” (Christie and Berzina 2022). Moreover, rapid technological development and economic, financial and cyber interdependence makes societies more vulnerable to both conventional and non-conventional risks (NATO 2022). To remain resilient in such a challenging and complex environment, NATO states need to utilise “a full range of capabilities – military and civilian – and a whole-of-society approach, with active cooperation across government, the private sector and civil society”.

NATO’s focus on the importance of public-private partnership draws very important lessons for Georgia. As a result of neoliberal economic policies and an oten reckless privatization process conducted by Georgia’s current and previous governments, much of country’s critical infrastructure ended up in the hands of private investors. Moreover, as of 2022, there are about 17,000 Russian companies in Georgia, more than half of which have been registered since the start of renewed Russian aggression in Ukraine (TI, 2022). The Georgian government needs to ensure that private companies, especially those owned by Russian investors, keep contributing to the resilient functioning of critical services both in peacetime and during crisis and conflicts.

In terms of agency and competences, NATO views resilience first and foremost as “a national responsibility” (NATO 2022) with the alliance itself having coordinating and consulting functions. According to NATO’s understanding of resilience, “[e]ach Ally needs to be suciently robust and adaptable to deal with and address the entire spectrum of crises envisaged by the Alliance” (NATO 2022). A decentralized and less top-down process of resilience-building will allow aspirant countries such as Georgia to have a bigger say in their own resilience-building process. This will strengthen local ownership of the process by Georgia’s key stakeholders and allow them to better adapt NATO’s resilience-building best-practices to Georgia’s fragile context.

The downside of NATO’s approach to resilience is that it is fairly technical and policy focused. It mostly focuses on improvements in certain policy areas which perhaps could be achieved through capacity building and policy coordination. Yet, the strategy overlooks some significant political and societal aspects of resilience-building which could also be important for transitional countries such as Georgia.

Achieving a high degree of resilience in Georgia could also depend on the quality of political institutions and good governance systems as defined by the extent to which they possess sucient levels of transparency, representability, accountability and inclusiveness. Therefore, technical criteria provided by NATO should be supplemented by political criteria. These could include a more transparent and inclusive process of resilience-building. Good examples of inclusiveness are provided by the Nordic countries. Finland and Sweden, two countries which recently decided to join NATO, utilise a whole-of society approach towards resilience and national security, and are considered to have “valuable national best practices, notably in terms of coherence, robustness, quality of cooperation across government and society, and engagement with the population” (Christie and Berzina 2022). Particularly, the Finnish Comprehensive Security model provides a good example of a closely coordinated public-private partnership which does not only include businesses but all critical stakeholders in the country. According to the Finnish government, “Comprehensive security is the cooperation model of Finnish preparedness, where vital societal functions are handled together by authorities, businesses, NGOs and citizens” (The Security Committee 2022). The Security Committee of Finland is in charge of developing and implementing the comprehensive security plan and coordinating inter-agency work (Garriaud-Maylam 2021). It consists of around 20 senior state ocials and representatives from the private sector and business community", the paper said.

In this context, the authors spoke about the best practices from NATO and EU states:

"Sweden and Finland also have a stronger focus on fighting misinformation and hostile propaganda. Sweden has recently established its own Psychological Defence Agency “to safeguard [Sweden’s] open and democratic society [and] the free formation of opinion" (Swedish Psychological Defence Agency 2022). Psychological defence aims to identify, analyse, prevent, and counter malign foreign influences including “attempts from foreign actors to weaken national resilience and the population’s will to defend the country” (ibid). Observers expect the new agency to “equip the Swedish population with the skills to spot fake news and to take in information ‘with a more critical eye” (.

The Finnish version of psychological defence is called psychological resilience and is part of Finland’s comprehensive security strategy. It is defined as the “ability of individuals, communities, society and the nation to withstand the pressures arising from crisis situations and to recover from their impacts” (The Security Committee 2017, 22). It “is expressed in the citizens’ will to defend their country’s independence as well as in the determination to maintain the livelihood and security of the population in all situations” (ibid). To this day Finland also possesses one of the most comprehensive warning and shelter systems with an ability to host 3.6 million people in 45,000 civil defence shelters.

Finnish society is famous for digital literacy skills and a multi-layered approach to fighting disinformation and propaganda. Finland has occupied first place in the Media Literacy Index for quite some time (CNN 2019). “Thinking critically, factchecking, interpreting and evaluating all the information” has been a focus of the Finnish education system in order to tackle hostile propaganda and misinformation campaigns (Henley 2020). Georgia can learn a great deal from the Scandinavian countries in terms of boosting digital literacy skills. While Georgian society has relatively consolidated views about the main risks and threats the country faces4 , a significant part of the population is still highly exposed to propaganda and fake news both via traditional and online media."

According to the paper, "in areas of cyber security and hybrid warfare, Georgia can also greatly benefit from the experiences of the Baltic States which show many similarities in terms of exposure to conventional and non-conventional local and global risks. Estonia in particular can be seen as a good example of a successful digital society on Russia’s doorstep. The country has been praised for its successful digitalization strategy despite Russia’s constant propaganda and disinformation campaign (NATO PA 2021). Estonia is a country with exemplary digital infrastructure such as X-Road5 . Estonia’s approach to combat disinformation also includes psychological defence (eorts to raise public awareness), strategic communication (consistency in public messaging) and situational awareness (monitoring of information spaces in Estonia, Russia and allied countries) (NATO PA 2021).

Georgia is well-advanced in terms of the digitalisation of public services and it is even ahead of many Western countries. But, as in case of Estonia, digital openness must be accompanied by the increased prioritisation of digital literacy among the population and civil servants and the establishment of secure digital platforms. Priority should be given to the creation of a compartmentalised open-source national digital infrastructure for public services (modelled on Estonian “X-Road” ) and the constant training of public servants. To ensure the safety of sensitive data, additional back up servers outside the country’s borders (a digital embassy) should be created (NATO PA 2021). The digitalisation of public infrastructure should also be subjected to independent audits and should include measures such as data trackers for citizens to see which public authority accesses their data (NATO PA 2021). The provision of more digital transparency should contribute to creating an atmosphere of political trust (legitimacy of public institutions) and social trust (trust among people) - two core components of state and societal resilience.

In response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Ukrainians demonstrated cross-society resistance through the joint eort of the military and security agencies and a high level of societal responsibility and support. The example of Ukraine became a vital lesson for the Euro-Atlantic community (Shelest 2022). However, in the case of Georgia, defective state strategies and weaker institutional resilience causes weaker public engagement with resilience. The example of Ukraine shows that Georgia should build strong intersectoral strategic communication and closely engage the civil society sector to develop strategies, action plans and nationally-tailored resilience objectives.

Georgia can also learn a great deal from its immediate neighbors and regional partners who find themselves in a similar situation in terms of vulnerabilities, risks and threats. Recently Ukraine started to actively incorporate resilience-building approaches in its strategic documents and a broad strategic vision of domestic and foreign policy (Shelest 2022, 2021). The 2020 National Security Strategy, the 2021 Foreign Policy Strategy and the 2021 Military Security Strategy all incorporate national resilience-building as an important pillar of Ukraine’s national security (Shelest 2021)."

The authors of this paper emphasized that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the issue of resilience into renewed focus, especially for frontline states.

"There is now an urgent need to boost their security and statehood against external and internal risks. Resilience is often used interchangeably with national security and defense strategies, but conceptually it goes beyond the security sector and encompasses all key sectoral policy areas. NATO’s comprehensive approach to resilience highlights the complex and well-entrenched nature of the concept.

Even though Georgia is not yet a NATO member state, Tbilisi should be active and take initiatives to develop its own resilience plan and to follow the NATO resilience agenda. Overall, NATO can assist Georgia’s resilience-building in two crucial ways – technically and politically. Firstly, NATO can assist the Georgian authorities and private stakeholders in terms of supporting capacity building and knowledge exchange to meet the seven baseline indicators. If Georgia implements NATO baseline resilience requirements it will not only increase the country’s resilience but also provide domestic stability and more predictability in the eyes of regional and international partners.

Second, NATO can assist in raising public awareness among the Georgian population and civil society about the importance of having a comprehensive resilience strategy. Understandably, political and communication support is a lower priority in NATO’s approach towards its own member states but countries such as Georgia need an external push to understand the importance of resilience. NATO can be central part of this process.

With the assistance of NATO and other strategic partners, Georgia should aim to strengthen itself along multiple dimensions of resilience in order to mitigate its biggest vulnerabilities," the authors of the policy paper added.