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.
- Partnering with Ukraine | Rearming Europe through defence industrial cooperation
- From the Black Sea to the British Isles
- Oleksiy Honcharuk Seminar
- How Myanmar’s War Became the World’s Second Biggest Drone Fight
- Ukraine's Drone Ecosystem and the Defence of Europe: Lessons Lost Can't be Learned
- July Workshop: "People and Procurement: UK-UA Defence Cooperation and the Future of Warfare
- November conference at Lancaster House delivered in collaboration with FCDO and Ukrainian Embassy London: "From the Black Sea to the British Isles: Cooperation in Contested Waters"
Chris Alden is Senior Advisor.
Professor Chris Alden teaches International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he is Deputy Head of the Department (PhD and Research). He is also Director of LSE IDEAS. He is a Research Associate with South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).
Matthew Arnold is Programme Director.
Matthew Arnold is an academic and policy analyst specializing in politics and governance in conflict-affected countries. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and has previously worked as a Senior Economist with the Irrawaddy Policy Exchange in Yangon, Myanmar. He formerly served as The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Myanmar, after holding various roles with the Foundation in Yangon and Bangkok. Before his work in Myanmar, he conducted extensive research on conflict, governance, and state fragility in Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, and Thailand. Arnold has been a Senior Research Fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, focusing on foreign interventionism and post-conflict reconstruction in weak states, and has regularly taught on these topics at Tsukuba University in Japan. He also served as a U.S. Department of Defense civil servant in Afghanistan. Earlier in his career, he worked with the UN World Food Programme, managing refugee operations in Ethiopia and responding to humanitarian crises in Africa and Asia. Prior to that, and as a Fulbright Fellow, he worked as a wildlife economist for the Government of Namibia. Arnold is the co-author of two books - Militias and the Challenges of Post-Conflict Peace (Zed Books) and South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence (Oxford University Press). He has published in leading journals such as Asian Survey, International Peacekeeping, Journal of Modern African Studies, and Conflict, Security and Development. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Jack Matlack is Project Associate.
Jon-Wyatt "Jack" Matlack recently submitted a doctoral dissertation on U.S. Army and German Army ways of warfare in Cold War large-scale training exercises. Previously, Jack was a visiting fellow at LSE Ideas as the Anthony D. Smith Fellow, and as well at the Centre for Military History and Social Sciences of the German Armed Forces (ZMSBw). His research and publication areas encompass NATO maritime strategy, multinational military alliances and state sovereignty, and military training and maneuvers. At LSE Ideas, Jack focuses on the intersection between whole-of-society civil-military engagement, unmanned systems, arms procurement, and multinational unmanned systems training. His recent publications include the LSE Research Report Ukraine's Drone Ecosystem and the Defence of Europe: Lessons Lost Can't be Learned. He also works in strategy consulting.
Oliver Gill is Principal Investigator.
Oliver Gill is Ukraine Programme Manager and Principal Researcher for the Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War Programme at LSE IDEAS. After completing a master’s in international relations at King’s College London with a focus on information warfare and AI, his research now focuses on Black Sea security, Ukrainian defence innovation, information and influence operations, training in the armed forces, and emerging and disruptive technologies’ impact on defence and security. Oliver also operates the Education for Victory capacity building programme, bringing together senior civil servants, business and third sector workers, and military personnel to address the challenges of reconstruction and recovery.