Commentary
Democratic Security
Ending Denial in Srebrenica Would Serve Hungary’s Foreign Policy
2 July 2026
Alina Sarnatska presented the conclusions of the Resilient Futures Fellows workshop on the European Centre for Democratic Resilience Stakeholder Platform on 25 June 2026
The European Centre for Democratic Resilience is a new hub established at the heart of the European Democracy Shield project and aims to strengthen Europe’s collective capacity to anticipate, detect and respond to threats to democracy, including foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI).
Its Stakeholder Platform is the channel through which independent actors, including civil society organisations, researchers, academia, media and practitioners, are meant to feed expertise, research and field experience into that work. Many countries only began building resilience after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and a large group of them is still missing a workable model. A well-designed platform could empower and gather civil society stakeholders from across the EU member states to develop a practical, cross-sectoral and European space in which to find solutions.
The Brussels meeting brought together the FIMI defenders’ community and the EU Commission to exchange views, conclusions and recommendations on how to co-shape the European Democracy Shield’s bodies. Discussions covered the evolution of FIMI threats, response tools, particularly those that use AI, regulatory developments and the whole-of-society approach, with the Stakeholder Platform a central theme. At this two day event connecting panel discussions and practical workshops, the room gave space for in-depth brainstorming attended by the EU institutions (the European External Action Service, the European Commission’s directorates-general for Justice and Communication), Member State representations (Poland, Lithuania and Romania), Members of the European Parliament, and civil society and research bodies including the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), EU DisinfoLab, Faktabaari, Lie Detectors, Debunk.org and Alliance4Europe.
The discussions focused on ten steps of the creation of the platform. They addressed, among others, the mission, technical construction, the institutional and management structure, resources and financing and predominantly user profiling and lavish participation.
In Brussels, Alina Sarnatska, a Ukrainian playwright, combat medic and Resilient Futures Fellow, presented the findings of our recent Fellows workshop. Speaking at the Civil Society in Action against FIMI panel, she set out how civil society can be built into the new European Centre for Democratic Resilience. Her intervention drew directly on the policy brief that followed the workshop, co-authored with Marta Dermańska, Magda Jakubowska and Dmitri Teperik, as well as lessons learned from Ukraine’s recent experience.
Click on the image to access the report
Key recommendations
The team set out six points for the platform to deliver real value:
- Build it as a structured mechanism for cooperation between civil society, practitioners, researchers, media actors, private-sector experts, national authorities and EU institutions, not as a one-directional consultation.
- Anchor its core function in knowledge exchange, joint problem-solving, policy feedback and practical cooperation on democratic resilience and countering FIMI.
- Keep the initial mandate clear and limited, focused on concrete challenges such as FIMI response, civic preparedness, local resilience and cross-sector cooperation, and avoid becoming a passive archive of documents.
- Build trust through transparent governance, adaptable administration, clear rules of conduct, quality control and visible mechanisms showing how stakeholder input is reviewed, processed and used.
- Integrate Ukrainian experience as applied knowledge, drawing in particular on civil society coordination and horizontal volunteer networks that operate under pressure
- Measure success by the quality and influence of outputs and the scale of cross-border cooperation rather than by counting users or uploaded materials
What comes next
The Brussels presentation is a step, not an endpoint. Visegrad Insight and the Res Publica Foundation, together with the Resilient Futures Fellows and the PZU Foundation, will continue developing these recommendations and feeding them into the design of the ECDR Stakeholder Platform, so that the platform becomes a working space connecting civic knowledge with institutional action.
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