In today's rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape, Europe faces an escalating threat from hybrid tactics, where adversaries exploit vulnerabilities to undermine societal functions. Critical infrastructures are increasingly targeted as entry points for sabotage, leading to severe disruptions in essential services. These infrastructures and the entities that operate them are vital to modern society, providing crucial services in sectors such as energy, transportation, drinking water, and digital infrastructure. They are integral to economic stability and the well-being of citizens. Recognizing the urgency of this challenge, there is a growing call for a whole-of-society approach to enhance resilience across communities.
The JRC’s hybrid threats and critical entities resilience (HYCER) team, leverages its long-term experience in these areas to enhance European security and defense. By fostering collaboration among policymakers, analysts, and Member States, the team aims to expand upon its established foundation in these domains. The activities of the HYCER team are organized along two main axes: resilience to hybrid threats and critical entities resilience.
Enhancing Europe’s Resilience against Hybrid Threats requires a whole of society approach involving all communities and government levels to address complex challenges to democratic societies
Strengthening the resilience and security of critical infrastructures and entities is essential for the continuity of essential services and vital functions against compound and systemic risks
Selected publications
During the last years, the topic of Hybrid Threats (HT) dominates the security landscape in Europe. Whereas it may be considered by several stakeholders as a new topic, in fact it is not. It is as old as conflict and warfare, however, repackaged and empowered by new tools, concepts and technologies targeting vulnerabilities in several domains in an unprecedented manner. The proposed conceptual model provides a narrative with a respective visual representation and depicts the main concepts and variables and more importantly their relationships.
Resilience is one key component to counter Hybrid Threats. Resilience against hybrid threats can take advantage of the resilience measures of different domains. It needs to be thoroughly designed and implemented. Developing resilience against hybrid threats requires not only looking at resilience in each area but how to build it systemically considering dependencies and interdependencies between the different parts of society. This report examines what is particular about resilience against Hybrid Threats.
The European security order is undergoing a fundamental transformation, where hybrid threats will likely increase. In this context, this study aims to respond to the evolving geopolitical landscape and provide the Ministries of Defence (MoDs) with a more comprehensive conceptual basis to facilitate the development of the necessary measures to counter hybrid threats. This will enhance the resilience of critical energy infrastructures (CEI) on which the defence sector depends for its well-functioning. This report focuses on (sub)domains for identifying defence-related CEI interdependencies and investigating the tools that adversaries could employ to undermine their performance.
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