Building resilience and preparedness in an age of sharp power
A new era calls for a new coalition. Democracies need to talk to each other and figure out a more joint approach to foreign interference by ‘sharp power’: authoritarian regimes seeking to undermine our democracies from within and constraining our policy choices by weaponising everything.
To help build societal resilience and civil preparedness against sharp power and other challenges, Defend Democracy will bring together transatlantic stakeholders through the Coalition for Democratic Resilience (C4DR).
C4DR will engage governments and civil society from current and future EU and NATO countries, who are all facing sharp power, also known as hybrid threats.
C4DR will bolster resilience to interconnected threats to democracy primarily by focusing on:
- Strengthening whole-of-society resilience to sharp power through exchanges, coordination, collaboration and capacity building;
- Taking democratic structural measures regarding new and emerging technologies.
C4DR creates a win-win: participating countries can learn from each other about challenges posed by sharp power, as well as about building democratic institutions and good governance – key tenets of the European project.
As sharp power goes increasingly hand in hand with new technologies, participating in C4DR also helps connect the dots by convening sectors and bridging silos. Stakeholders above all praise C4DR for connecting government and civil society in building resilience and preparedness.
C4DR’s launching international conference ‘Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power. Countering Hybrid & Technological Threats to Democracy’ took place on 29 May 2024 and was co-organised with Belgium’s EU Presidency and in collaboration with the European External Action Service.
C4DR’s second conference ‘Preparing and Shielding European Democracy. How to increase the EU’s Preparedness against Hybrid Threats?’ will take place on 4 December 2024, in collaboration with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
- Supported by: Friedrich Naumann Foundation; others support C4DR in kind
- Started: 9 May 2024
- Status: ongoing. Is your country, ministry, region, city, institution, CSO interested in joining the Coalition? Get in touch!