Societal Resilience as Intangible Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

The concept of societal resilience – the central concept of the National Defence Strategy – is, to a certain degree, not only semantically, but especially pragmatically ambiguous, as the concept has not been operationalised in the literature, on the one hand, and the state societal resilience, implementable through formal, non-formal and informal education, has not benefitted from adequate levers for application, on the other hand. The recent educational reform, achieved through the two laws, on pre-university education and on higher education, adopted in 2023, does not directly contribute to societal resilience. Under these circumstances, of an inadequately designed security education and of a pragmatic ambiguity of the strategy, which means that the communication intentions (obligation, recommendation, suggestion) are not clarified, it is necessary to exceed the classical normative framework that regulates the national educational system and to design the education-resilience binomial as critical national infrastructure. Resilience, coming from the field of safety culture studies, can be considered intangible critical infrastructure, which needs a tangible system defined or possibly defined in the Romanian legislation regarding critical infrastructure, so that it can trigger the mechanism for implementing the projection of the National Defence Strategy. The present article contributes to the identification of possible projective directions of the education-resilience binomial as critical infrastructure.