Resilience and defence in an era of global tensions and uncertainty: What can NATO learn from nature?

Stig Rune Sellevåg; Peter D E Biggins; Paul Martin

doi:10.1080/03071847.2025.2572570

Resilience and defence in an era of global tensions and uncertainty: What can NATO learn from nature?

Stig Rune Sellevåg
, Peter D E Biggins
, Paul Martin

Imperial College London

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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Abstract

Resilience is critical to NATO, but its implementation is challenging. Stig Rune Sellevåg, Peter D E Biggins and Paul Martin argue that NATO’s approach to resilience should build on knowledge of how natural systems persist and evolve. The selection of advantageous configurations for systemic persistence is important for resilience. This requires, as a minimum, maintaining stability, learning and novelty generation. NATO should consider capabilities for anticipating tipping points and a reconfiguration strategy for dealing with risks for systemic collapse. Importantly, resilience requires active processes where ‘blue-sky thinking’ and novel ideas are turned into practical solutions, taking into consideration human thinking and behaviour.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	80-88
Number of pages	9
Journal	The RUSI Journal
Volume	170
Issue number	6-7
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2025.2572570
Publication status	Published - 19 Dec 2025

Bibliographical note

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has
been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by
the author(s) or with their consent.

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Cite this

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title = "Resilience and defence in an era of global tensions and uncertainty: What can NATO learn from nature?",

abstract = "Resilience is critical to NATO, but its implementation is challenging. Stig Rune Sellev{\aa}g, Peter D E Biggins and Paul Martin argue that NATO{\textquoteright}s approach to resilience should build on knowledge of how natural systems persist and evolve. The selection of advantageous configurations for systemic persistence is important for resilience. This requires, as a minimum, maintaining stability, learning and novelty generation. NATO should consider capabilities for anticipating tipping points and a reconfiguration strategy for dealing with risks for systemic collapse. Importantly, resilience requires active processes where {\textquoteleft}blue-sky thinking{\textquoteright} and novel ideas are turned into practical solutions, taking into consideration human thinking and behaviour.",

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Resilience and defence in an era of global tensions and uncertainty: What can NATO learn from nature?

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