How do societies deal with threats? How do they react to natural catastrophes, industrial catastrophes or terrorism? These are the central questions of the ESR project. The technical term “resilience” in this case stands for the capability of resistance; at the core it is about a society’s competence not only to overcome crises, but to quickly regain its functional integrity by adaptation to new circumstances. This issue appears more and more in the focus of international security research and crisis management; in Germany, resilience research activities are quite underrepresented so far. The ESR project aims at making a contribution to fill that scientific gap. In the centre stands a systematic comparison of Israeli and German experiences in dealing with different catastrophes.

Israel has a wide experience in terrorist violence, while in Germany competences regarding natural and industrial catastrophes are more distinctive. These different initial positions promise to lead to a productive exchange of experiences and examples. To further encourage this communication between actors, the project team will develop a web-based interactive experts exchange system (IEES). This IEES is to serve as a first contact point in search of information concerning resilience; practical experts and scientists from Germany and Israel will enter into an intensive dialogue.

The project is divided into two stages: During a fist stage (March 2010 – February 2011) the team and potential users of the platform develop a prototype and evaluate intermediate results. During a second stage (2011 – 2013) the IEES is to be implemented, displaying information and initiating discussions. The IEES will then be constantly adjusted regarding the feedback of the users