NATO: Resilience Reference Curriculum (DEEP, 2025)

Resilience Reference Curriculum is a teaching framework published by NATO Headquarters in Brussels in January 2025 under the Alliance’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. It runs to 142 pages and it is addressed to instructors rather than to households. Its readers are the staff colleges, defence academies and security studies institutes that train officers and civil servants, and its purpose is to give them a common structure from which to build courses on resilience. The Resistance Hub hosts the English edition in full.

What this document is

The document prints its own scope in its opening pages: “The Resilience Reference Curriculum (RRC) is designed to address ‘resilience’ and its role in the contemporary world of uncertainties, disruptions, interdependence, and technological breakthroughs.” Its stated purpose is to give “every interested stakeholder (military, civilian, public, or private) with a comprehensive package of information” sufficient to understand resilience, to assess threats to it, and to develop and measure resilience strategies. The word reference is doing real work in the title. This is not a syllabus to be taught as written. It is a structured body of material from which instructors design their own courses, and the document says so directly: “Based on the RRC, the instructors should be able to design courses.”

Its architecture is four themes, eleven modules and forty seven lessons. Every lesson is laid out to the same template, and that template is what makes the volume a curriculum rather than a policy paper. Each one prints a Description, a set of Learning Objectives, Issues for Consideration in Designing the Lesson, Potential Questions, Learning Methods and Assessment, Core Readings and Supplementary Readings. The unit of delivery is a lesson plan with its reading list attached, which means an institution can lift a module out of the volume and run it without further design work.

Theme 1 does the definitional work, and it is unusually candid about the state of the field. It records that researchers in defence and security “have not yet agreed on a universally accepted theoretical framework”, then sets the competing definitions side by side. British doctrine is quoted from the Civil Protection Lexicon, the United States definition from a 2011 White House document, and NATO’s own from paragraph 26 of the 2022 Strategic Concept: the “capacity to prepare for, resist, respond to, and quickly recover from strategic shocks and disruptions, and ensure the continuity of the Alliance’s activities”. From there it builds the framework the rest of the volume uses: five measurable levels of resilience, running individual, community, organisational, national and multinational, and a split between physical and psychological elements.

Themes 2 and 3 divide the problem between the state and the society. Theme 2 covers the whole-of-government approach, the instruments of national power abbreviated in the document as DIMEFIL, civil-military interdependencies, and the international and regional frameworks within which resilience is coordinated. Theme 3 turns to whole-of-society, and it is the part of the volume closest to The Resistance Hub’s own subject matter. Lesson 3.2.2 places civil preparedness, civil defence and civil resistance side by side and defines each against the others. Lesson 3.2.3 handles traditional and total defence models. Module T3-M3 treats inclusivity, civic education and democratic governance as resilience variables rather than as political goods, which is a harder-edged framing than the phrasing suggests.

Theme 4 is the operational half and the largest, at eighteen lessons in three parallel sets of six. It runs the same five levels through three stages: anticipating, meaning developing and planning for resilience; managing and sustaining it; and assessing it. The symmetry is deliberate, so an instructor can teach one level all the way through or one stage across all levels. Throughout the volume the lessons carry vignettes, short extracts from real cases with references for further reading, and each lesson closes on core and supplementary readings drawn from both academic literature and government sources. Lesson 3.2.2 is worth singling out: its worked example on communicating civil preparedness cites the national brochures issued by Latvia in 2022, Lithuania in 2015, Singapore in 2021 and Sweden in 2024, two of which The Resistance Hub also hosts.

The seven baseline requirements, as printed

Contents

Provenance and lineage

The volume names its own project team. The Project Leads and Curriculum Designers are Ambassador Shota Gvineria of the Baltic Defence College, Dr Torsten Sevecke of the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr Command and Staff College, and Dr Alan Stolberg of the RAND Corporation. Four Theme Leads are named: Assoc. Prof. Dalia Bankauskaitė of Vilnius University, Dr Mattias Eken of RAND Europe, Dr Aleks Nesic of the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, and Celeste Raver, Ph.D., of the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy. Seventeen further contributors are listed by name and institution, drawn from NATO International Staff, the Partnership for Peace Consortium, and universities and research institutes in Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Israel, Latvia, Türkiye, Ukraine and the United States.

Editorial responsibility sits with the Partnership for Peace Consortium. The document credits its Reference Curriculum Lead Editors as Ambassador Shota Gvineria of the Baltic Defence College and Major Martin Schuster of the Partnership for Peace Consortium. Layout coordination and distribution are credited to Gabriella Lurwig-Gendarme of NATO International Staff, working within the Defence Education Enhancement Programme. The print reference 0672-24 NATO Graphics and Printing appears on the final page. DEEP maintains a series of reference curricula on other subjects, and this volume is a member of that series rather than a standalone publication.

Its doctrinal lineage is short and explicit. The seven baseline requirements it teaches were agreed by NATO at the 2016 Warsaw Summit. The definition of resilience it works from is quoted from paragraph 26 of the 2022 Strategic Concept, and the foreword opens on a line from the same document. The obligation underneath both is traced to Article 3 of the Washington Treaty, on self-help and mutual aid. The curriculum does not make policy and does not claim to. It teaches policy that already exists, and its contribution is the pedagogical structure rather than the doctrine.

One point of classification is worth settling, because the hosted filename invites the wrong reading. The file is stored here as North-America-NATO-Preparedness-Guide-English.pdf and sits alongside national civil-defence brochures. It is not one. The national guides in that set are public-facing handbooks mailed or issued to residents, written at reading level for a general population, and telling a household what to do when a siren sounds. This document is professional military education material, written for instructors at defence academies and staff colleges, and it contains no instructions to the public at all. The overlap is the subject, not the genre. The one place the two genres meet is Lesson 3.2.2, where the national brochures appear as teaching examples of how governments communicate civil preparedness.

No rights notice is printed anywhere in the file. That is an observation about the document’s front matter, imprint and closing credits, and nothing more. It is not a statement that the work is in the public domain, it is not a licence, and it grants nothing. Readers who need to reproduce the curriculum should approach NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme, whose distribution contact is printed on the final page.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

This is the doctrinal ceiling of our resilience coverage. Where the national brochures show what a state tells its population, the Resilience Reference Curriculum shows what a state teaches the people who write those brochures, and the two read very differently. It anchors the structured guides in our Resilience Toolkit, and it supplies the five-level framework, individual through multinational, that we use to keep those guides in a consistent order. It is indexed with the national documents on Global Resilience Guides, with the caveat about genre set out above.

Its whole-of-society material is the direct counterpart to our argument in Small States’ Total Defense Strategy, and Lesson 3.2.2, which separates civil preparedness from civil defence from civil resistance, is the cleanest statement of a distinction that runs through the whole of our coverage. Readers who want the resistance side of that boundary handled at doctrinal depth should read it against the Resistance Operating Concept, which starts where the curriculum’s civil resistance lesson stops. The two national brochures the curriculum cites as best practice are both hosted here in full: Sweden: In Case of Crisis or War and Lithuania: Prepare to Survive Emergencies and War.

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