Our colleagues from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv organized their annual conference, this year on the topic of Resilience and Democracy: A Need for New Ethical, Solidarity, and Security Infrastructures (February 28 – March 3, 2023). As a part of the conference, in cooperation with the Catholic Universities Partnership, they prepared a special session on Resilience and Democracy with speakers from most of the partnership universities: Filip Krauze from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Marie Eliadze from Sulkhan Saba Orbeliani University in Tbilisi, Ivan Koniar from the Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Clemens Sedmak from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame, Tamas Adamy from Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Budapets, Brad Safarik from Université Catholique de l’Ouest and Volodymyr Turchynovskyy from the Ukrainian Catholic University who chaired the whole session.  Participants of the panel explored various aspects of both the notion of democracy and resilience, ranging from the issue of disinformation, the democratic resilience and the Russian invasion to the situation in Africa.

Our university was represented by Ivan Koniar who focused in his talk on resilience from the perspective of the crises Europe had been facing over the last decades. He pointed out that the European Union could be characterized, drawing on Jean Monnet, as being a sum of solutions to various crises. Finally, he concluded with a reflection on whether we can choose some of our steps in this challenging world and pointed out it seemed resilience was not a matter of choice but necessity.