Fragility and resilience in the European Union’s security strategy: comparing policy paradigms

The article takes fragility and resilience as distinct policy paradigms, and proposes a structured, focused comparison of how they informed and changed the EU approach to conflict and crisis management in time. The first section provides a cumulative synthesis of the debate on fragility and resilience in the international and European security discourse and practice on the background of which their comparison is built. By analysing the founding documents respectively endorsing fragility and resilience in the European context, namely the 2003 European Security Strategy and the 2016 EUGS in addition to the existing literature on these topics, the two paradigms are examined in terms of 1) what understanding of the international system they advance; 2) where they identify the locus of the threat; 3) which role they attribute to the international community 4) and the type of solutions they proposed. In accordance with our results, we conclude that the two paradigms are not in competition, since they emerged from and reflected a contingent shift in global and local environments. Moreover, rather than providing a novel lens to better look at conflict and crisis situation, resilience is found to offer more insights into the EU’s perception of its role in these contexts.