Resilience like many other things can be considered a buzzword. Resilience is being discussed in NATO, in the European Union, as well as many nations are drafting their own resilience strategies and concepts. Recent events, such as, COVID-19 and Suez Canal blockage, reminded countries to review and ramp up their resilience to be able to respond to different modern challenges effectively and rapidly. 
However, we have to start with a question – what exactly is resilience? Why resilience now is forefront in the security discourse? How will this change the life of the regular citizen? How can we asses the level of resilience?

In this episode Ieva Bērziņa, Senior Researcher from National Defence Academy of Latvia, interviews Vitālijs Rakstiņš, Head of Crisis Management Department in Ministry of Defence of Latvia about resilience. 

The interview is part of a series developed in the context of the annual Rīga Conferences organised by the Latvian Transatlantic Organisation in cooperation with the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Latvia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia. This episode is dedicated to The Rīga Conference Future Leaders Forum, which is an event that bring together young leaders that are interested in security, defence and transatlantic matters. The purpose of the series is to keep discussions alive in between consecutive conferences.