Description
Increasingly it is difficult to deny that Europe is beginning to rearm. A raft of funding and policy initiatives have emerged from the European Union, security and defence cooperation agreements are being made with non-members and while still patchy, defence expenditure is rising steadily (SIPRI, 2025). While much attention has been paid to these developments, work is also ongoing on efforts to make European societies more resilient to hybrid threats. For example, the European Commission has also, in line with the Niinistö Report (2024), developed a European Preparedness Union Strategy (European Commission, 2025), which explicitly adopts a whole-of-society approach and proposes the development of a civil defence mechanism.
The EU approach stresses the role of the individual citizen, proposing for example that citizens should ensure they have resources to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours. In this paper however, we problematise the idea of the prepared neoliberal citizen at the heart of civil defence bringing the role of the state in imagining civil defence back in. While security is often perceived as a threshold condition that can be measured and benchmarked, we understand security as a form of political mobilization. What becomes framed as a security issue and how societies respond are political choices with positive and negative consequences for individuals and communities (Guillaume and Grayson 2023). Thus, paradoxically, in offering protection for some, security may also generate inequalities and oppression for others that reproduce social divisions (Fontana 2020; Hussain and Bagguley 2012). As Cronqvist et al (2022: 3) argue “planning, executing and experiencing institutionalised forms of emergency preparedness did not historically—nor does it today—take place in isolation from societal, cultural and political agendas”.
