Rethinking Societal Resilience as Deterrence: A Feminist Perspective on NATO and Ukraine's Experience

ABSTRACT

Recent shifts in European security have placed resilience at the center of deterrence and defense strategies. While resilience has traditionally been understood as the ability to withstand disruption and sustain military operations, there have been calls for a whole‐of‐society approach that strengthens societies against hybrid threats and disinformation operations from NATO adversaries. In this view, societal resilience rests on social cohesion, trust, and government legitimacy, strengthening deterrence by denial. Drawing on NATO's strategic documents and the broader European security policy debate, we argue that societal resilience continues to be framed in masculine and militarized terms, privileging state preparedness over the social conditions that make societies resilient. This narrow framing contradicts the whole‐of‐society approach and hampers the very idea of a more resilient society based on social cohesion, equality, inclusivity, and trust. We connect feminist security and resilience scholarship, the Women, Peace and Security critique, and critical scholarship on deterrence, resilience, and hybrid threats to analyze the gendered assumptions of contemporary European security debates, including those inspired by Ukraine's wartime experience. In doing so, we advance a feminist conceptualization of societal resilience as deterrence that moves beyond state preparedness by pluralizing its actors, levels of analysis, and objects of security.