Keynote in NEEDS 2026 Conference:
Resilience by Design during Polycrisis Era: Lithuania’s Next Steps Toward a Total Defence Posture and Comprehensive Crisis Management
The contemporary security environment is increasingly shaped not only by conventional military risks, but also by intensifying hybrid threats that simultaneously target the state and society. Like other frontline democracies, Lithuania faces mounting hybrid threats in the form of cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, hostile influence operations, instrumentalized migration, disruption of essential services, critical infrastructure sabotage, economic pressure, and persistent attempts to exploit social polarization and institutional vulnerabilities. Such threats are deliberately calibrated to remain below the threshold of open warfare while gradually eroding governance capacity, public trust, and social cohesion. In the broader context of the polycrisis era, in which natural and human-made risks related to security, energy, health, technology, the environment, and the cognitive domain increasingly intersect, resilience can no longer be understood as merely a reactive or sector-specific function. Rather, resilience in peacetime must be embedded by design into national security architecture, crisis governance, and societal preparedness in order to strengthen the capacity of both the state and society to withstand military and non-military threats in wartime.
Against this backdrop, Lithuania’s evolving total defence posture reflects an effort to adapt to an increasingly aggressive and polycrisis security environment by integrating multiple dimensions of resilience. The objective is not only to safeguard statehood, but also to mitigate the impact of a broad spectrum of threats that directly affect the well-being of society. In strengthening its resilience, Lithuania has increasingly embraced both a whole-of-government and a whole-of-society approach. This is manifested in the development of a more integrated comprehensive crisis management model, a coordinated framework for civilian and military preparedness, and the active involvement of society in crisis management through the promotion of individual responsibility, non-governmental engagement, and volunteerism. Within the broader framework of total defence, Lithuania is also advancing a civil defence concept, preparing an action plan to counter disinformation, conducting national mobilization exercises, and expanding public training in resilience to hybrid threats and civic resistance. The range of strategic decisions, policy measures, and action plans underpinning this resilience-by-design approach is extensive.
A wide array of actors contributes to the development of total defence and comprehensive crisis management in Lithuania, including state institutions, municipalities, local communities, non-governmental organizations, and individual civic initiatives. Yet Lithuania is constructing this system not under conditions of stability and enduring peace, but amid persistent and growing pressure. These challenges are amplified not only by shifts in the security environment and broader geopolitical turbulence, but also by rapid technological transformation. For this very reason, Lithuania’s experience is significant: resilience by design is being built not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical response to continuous uncertainty and strategic exposure. Although much remains fragmented, incomplete, and still to be institutionalized, the cumulative effect of everyday resilience measures is already contributing to the emergence of a more resilient state and a more resilient society. Resilience in the polycrisis era can be deliberately cultivated, expanded, and sustained step by step.
About the speaker
Dr Ieva Gajauskaitė helps translate Resilience from concept into practice—designing resilience into the systems and institutions that must function under pressure. She currently leads Lithuania’s work on resilience against hybrid threats as Head of Division within the Total Defence and Crisis Management Group at the Ministry of National Defence, while also heading the Analysis Bureau at the National Crisis Management Centre, supporting decision-makers with structured assessment and early insight. She was an Associate Professor at the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania and earned her PhD in Political Science at Vytautas Magnus University. Her expertise spans hybrid threats, foreign interference, resilience and crisis governance, and democratic resilience.
