Resilience Barometer: Countering Malign Foreign Interference — Methodology and Results of a Pilot Study in Moldova

Lutsevych et al.'s Resilience Barometer is a methodological innovation: a structured framework for measuring societal resilience to malign foreign interference across five pillars — governance, civil society, media, societal cohesion, and strategic communications. Piloted with Moldovan and international experts around the October 2023 Moldovan local elections, the barometer produces a quantified resilience score that can be tracked over time and compared across countries.

The counter-FIMI field has long struggled with the absence of agreed metrics for resilience — making it impossible to assess whether protective investments are working. The Barometer's five-pillar framework, developed through expert elicitation and field testing in one of Europe's most FIMI-exposed democracies, provides a validated methodology explicitly designed for replication.