Resilient society and economy

Belgium combines an exceptional geopolitical position with structural vulnerabilities. As host country to NATO and the European Union, as the port of Europe and as a hub for critical financial infrastructure, our country is both an attractive target and a strategic asset. This paradox is central to Itinera's work on resilience. In a Europe confronted with hybrid threats, defence challenges and economic shocks, reactive policies are no longer sufficient. Itinera analyses how Belgium can transform its institutional complexity, financial constraints and fragmented security governance into a coherent strategy, one that considers defence, economic resilience and social resilience to be inextricably linked. The key question is not how much a society spends in times of crisis, but how it invests in its own continuity.

Resilience is not a state, but a capacity, and it must be built up before it is needed. Itinera starts from the conviction that the major challenges facing Belgium and Europe are not merely sectoral policy issues, but symptoms of a deeper structural deficit: the inability of public systems to adapt quickly enough to a world that has fundamentally changed. Defence, crisis governance, education and industrial policy may seem unrelated at first glance, but they share the same underlying logic. Societies that want to be competitive and secure tomorrow must invest today in two complementary capabilities: the ability to absorb shocks without structural disruption, and the ability to strategically reinvent themselves. Itinera brings these two lenses together in a multi-year research and policy agenda, with an explicit extrapolation to the European level. Because the answers to the challenges of our time rarely fit within a single country's borders.