Civil Resistance Capability: Interdisciplinary Dimensions of a Scientific Problem

This article substantiates the necessity of scholarly development of the concept of “civil resistance capability” in the context of the full-scale and hybrid war waged against Ukraine. The relevance of the topic stems from the growing need to conceptualize the role of the civilian population in the architecture of national resistance and in ensuring the resilience of society under prolonged threats. The aim of the study is to formulate an interdisciplinary conceptual framework for this new term and to determine its semantic content, structural components, and its connections with related categories in the fields of social, behavioral, and security sciences. To achieve the stated objective, the research applies methods of conceptual analysis, systematization, comparative-terminological review, elements of structural-functional modeling, and interdisciplinary synthesis. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenological exploration of psychological, sociocultural, axiological, and behavioral determinants of the civilian population’s resistance capacity. The study proposes an original definition of “civil resistance capability” as an integrative quality of individuals and communities, manifested in the ability to offer conscious, motivated, and morally grounded resistance to an aggressor by mobilizing value-based, cognitive, volitional, communicative, and socio-organizational resources. Six basic structural components of the phenomenon are outlined: value-motivational, cognitive, emotional-volitional, social, communicative, and behavioral. An adaptive-mobilizational model of their interaction is proposed. The concept is distinguished from related terms such as psychological resilience, mobilizational readiness, self-organization, and resistance by examining its semantic capacity and functional designation. The practical value of the results lies in the applicability of the proposed conceptualization to the development of legal frameworks, educational programs, psychodiagnostic tools, and strategic documents aimed at enhancing societal resilience and organizing national resistance effectively. The study’s conclusions identify prospects for future empirical investigations focused on the operationalization of the construct, adaptation of measurement methodologies, and integration of resistance capability into broader security policies.