Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War
Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War:
Ukraine Insights Programme
LSE IDEAS & Education for Victory
Bolstering adaptive governance by translating Ukraine’s frontline experience into practical insights and institutional approaches for democracies operating in a prolonged, high‑risk global environment.
Scope: A three‑year multidisciplinary initiative, the Ukraine Insights Programme supports democracies governing under sustained pressure and risk. It focuses on institutions, decision‑processes, and state–society relationships that enable rapid yet accountable action. Ukraine is both a core partner and a hub for operational learning, offering a real‑world demonstration of adaptive governance under full‑scale war and generating lessons for practical options in the UK, EU, and other allied states.
Rationale: Democracies are entering an era of persistent and intensifying security challenges in which military, technological, economic, and informational pressures converge to stress governance systems, not only armed forces. Many democracies improvise under pressure but often lack structured ways to capture and assess governance under extreme pressure and to embed relevant lessons into durable institutional design. The Programme addresses this gap by analysing Ukraine’s evolving governance arrangements to help partners refine and strengthen their own adaptive governance approaches, while scrutinising how such adaptations maintain core democratic checks, balances, and rights.
Approach & Delivery: Demand‑driven and applied, the Programme strengthens collective and national resilience through targeted briefings, roundtables, and executive training grounded in field research in Ukraine. Working with centres of government, militaries, private enterprise, and key ministries across partner democracies, it is delivered by a multidisciplinary team bridging London and Kyiv to connect innovative research with real‑world policy solutions. Its core strength lies in articulating Ukraine’s wartime governance innovations and translating them into multisectoral policy design needed to build resilience in a new age of war. Our approach is whole of society, with engagement extending horizontally from the capital to the frontline and vertically from national to municipal levels.
Policy Tracks: Two interlinked Policy Tracks organise the Programme’s work:
- Frontline Adaptive Governance (Ukraine): Examines how Ukraine has reshaped core governance systems under full‑scale war -- from central coordination and crisis management to digital innovation and local relations. It analyses how decisions evolve over time, highlighting trade‑offs between speed and oversight, central direction and local autonomy, and balancing local innovation with national integration.
- Bolstering Adaptive Governance (Allied Democracies): Engages allied institutions to assess governance under sustained pressure, applying Ukrainian insights to update crisis response, cross‑government coordination, and multi‑level governance. It supports the design of adaptive frameworks and tools that enhance policy agility and democratic resilience over the long term.
Together, the tracks build understanding of how democracies can adjust governance and economic systems to anticipate and adapt to long‑term threats while reinforcing democratic norms.
Impact: The Programme accelerates the real‑time transfer of Ukrainian insights to partners, delivering actionable policy support. Collaboration with senior practitioners ensures recommendations are strategic, grounded, and directly relevant, while explicitly engaging with the democratic safeguards needed to prevent “permanent emergency” governance. Every activity promotes adaptive, scalable resilience, turning field learning into tangible benefits for institutions, policymakers, civil society, and industry.
