Training vulnerable groups on practical resilience

• In Event: Roundtable Session 5
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Media and information literacy: building youth resilience to manipulative information

Proposal

Considering the evolving nature of threats to values of freedom and democracy in Ukraine and the Baltic states, state authorities and civil society stakeholders need to elaborate on shared understanding and practical implementation of communication- and security-related components of democratic resilience among informationally vulnerable communities.

As a multidimensional concept of sustainability and endurance, resilience provides a suitable framework for shaping a training agenda to address critical vulnerabilities among certain target groups, including youth, whose patterns of information consumption are remarkably influenced by mis- and/or disinformation. Given the evolving processes of media literacy, the practicality of resilience for susceptible citizens can be addressed through the prism of cognitive security and psychological defense. Moreover, it can be organized in both formats: as an engaging on-site training and self-learning process to cover the essential features of resilience such as communication, cooperation, cohesion, coping, credibility, and credo.

Established in 2016 as an international cooperation and networking platform for resilience practitioners, Resilience League annually engages young professionals and recognized experts from the Baltic states, Ukraine, and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe in training debate on various aspects of resilience, including those related to information disorders and media-shaped patterns of group behavior. Applying a cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary approach to the training agenda, Resilience League goes beyond a classical type of “problem-admiring-event” and through scenario-based exercises and creative workshops seeks innovative solutions to be applied in intergenerational education and resilience practices to encourage multisectoral networking and professional interactions, promoting strong interdisciplinarity and addressing other factors that contribute to resilience (e.g., trust, interdependency, co-operation, transparency, social connectedness, and youth prospects).

This presentation will share highlights, results, and lessons learned from Resilience League activities. During 2016-2022, the platform operated as a civic initiative to “train-the-trainers” and has involved and networked more than 400 young professionals with various backgrounds from the Baltics and Ukraine. Skills obtained have been utilized to launch follow-up cooperation projects on making communities more resistant to disinformation, to shape the research agenda on resilience indicators, and to educate policymakers on emerging threats and anticipated consequences of information disorders. Moreover, several alumni of the Resilience League have been professionally engaged by domestic and foreign media to comment on the situation in Ukraine and the Baltic states after the start of Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine since February 2022.

The core outcomes are based on the following assumption: to mitigate known information vulnerabilities and emerging risks, practical knowledge is to be re-learned into skills for better preparedness (including inoculation, prevention, and pre-bunking), resistance and persistence (including critical thinking, creative problem solving and fact-driven decision-making) as well as recuperation and further improvement (including issues of cognitive recovery, mental health, and predictive policymaking on information literacy in formal and nonformal education for youth).

Author

• Dmitri Teperik, International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS)