BLOGI 2/2025 #WISETALKS

The OSCE’s resilience to what?

I participated in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Helsinki+50 conference as a Wider Security Network alumnus. During the conference, I noticed something bothering me as a doctoral researcher investigating resilience.

The theme of the 2025 Finnish Chairpersonship of OSCE is resilience, with guiding principles of 1. Respect the OSCE principles and commitments, 2. Respond to today’s challenges, and 3. Prepare the OSCE for the future.

In the conference, the principles were shortened to words Respect – Respond – Prepare. To me, this order sounded a bit odd.

Resilience is understood in various ways, and the concept has found ground in many fields. The main problem with the concept of resilience is its vagueness. In this sense, it could be said that no interpretation of resilience is wrong. In Finland’s OSCE programme resilience is defined as a state’s “ability to respond to crises and recover from them”, cooperation being the key component to succeed. This is one way to define societal resilience.

Resilience is often discussed with different phases or components such as “absorb, re-organize, learn and adapt” (Folke 2006), “resistance, recovery, transformation” (Joakim et al. 2015), “prepare, absorb, recover, adapt” (Linkov et al. 2014) and “absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacity” (Dewulf et al. 2019). These phases are introduced in a specific, temporal order reflecting a resilient system’s functioning during a disturbance: preparing for the disturbance, absorbing its effects, recovering from the shock, adapting to the new situation after the event, and finally, transforming so that a similar disturbance would not shake the core of the system anymore.

This is why Respect - Respond - Prepare seems to be in the wrong order. From an academic and operational point of view, preparedness comes first, response second. Chronologically, respect would come last and coincide with recovering or bouncing back to the normal system state. This would mean that states return to adhering to the OSCE’s principles that have been questioned during the disturbance.

Nevertheless, the real-world context overrides the resilience settings that my brain is tuned to. We live in, and the OSCE works in, a situation with many disturbances right now. The main disturbance to the OSCE is Russia’s war on Ukraine. In this situation, the OSCE must call for its principles that have been violated by Russia to be respected. It also must respond to the war today.
However, many stakeholders have debated if the OSCE is able to respond effectively. This has caused another fundamental shock to the OSCE: its existential crisis. The central takeaway from the Helsinki+50 conference was that the OSCE needs to decide where it stands now and consider seriously what its future as an international organization will be.

Shocks that test a system’s resilience and processes that support its resilience are complex and rarely linear in the real world. One of the questions resilience scholars often need to ask is to what shocks a system, or an actor, needs to be resilient to. Indeed, response to the crisis in Ukraine and re-establishing the OSCE’s value to the international community are at the same time separate and interconnected problems that require action. This does not mean that the OSCE should choose one over the other. Instead, it means that to respond to either of the situations, they need to analyse these two shocks and identify the different resilience phases they are in so that it is possible to manage the situation.

While still Responding today to the crisis in Ukraine, the OSCE has to find ways to deal with the critique of its existence. I suggest the organisation add more phases of resilience for the next Chairpersonship: Respond to the existential crisis by analysing the situation and listening to the questions asked, Re-organize the OSCE system to maintain its core identity, Adapt by learning from the past (or current) setbacks and disturbances, and if necessary, Transform to a new system state to become more resilient to other shocks in the future. Then, Prepare for those future shocks to Respond to them effectively when needed... And the resilience loop is ready! Considering resilience as a continuous process can help the OSCE to regain legitimacy in the international setting and increase its ability to cope with and recover from shocks that question its relevance. Otherwise, it will be challenging to solve the existential crisis.

In fact, all organisations should consider how resilient their identity and existence are. For example, human rights and environmental organisations’ work is increasingly questioned by global political forces. If organizational actors that work for safety and security, human rights and the environment fall under political pressures, how does that affect the resilience of our societies, vulnerable populations and ecosystems?
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The world is full of disturbances, and we humans can cope with most of them. In social-ecological resilience theory, every disturbance is a chance for fundamental system transformation. I hope that the current struggles will not discourage us but inspire us to find ways to transform society and the world into a more peaceful, just, kind, and sustainable place for all humans and other-than-human creatures on this planet.
 
Vilma Ristikangas

Wider Security Network Alumnus 2024-2025
Doctoral researcher at Aalto University
Water and Environmental Engineering, Water and Development Research Group
Sustainability Transformation Doctoral Education Pilot