NDC Insight 05-2025: Not Withstanding? An Upbeat Perspective on Societies’ Will to Fight, by Roderick Parkes1
- NATO must be ready for a Ukraine-style attack on its territory. But it lacks meaningful metrics on whether citizens will step up.
- This paper argues that our individual judgement of society’s will to fight stems from how we approach future uncertainty more broadly.
- In the security world, we’re trained to expect the worst, and not to bank on societal resolve. But that pessimistic approach to the future can create divisive myths.
- And these myths, when fed into policy, may quietly suppress will to fight. The goal of the paper is therefore to correct those biases to create a starting place for future policy.
- Since you, the reader, likely help shape that policy, it pays to know your own bias – and to learn to trust.
NDC Public Affairs Office
- Roderick Parkes is a researcher in the Research Division of the NATO Defence College. ↩︎
NATO Defense College