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The article introduces the special issue by exploring the full potential of "resilience" as a governing regime of the European Union and other international institutions. Developing a more comprehensive understanding of the concept is important for three reasons. One, it gives an opportunity to see resilience not only as a quality of a system, but also as a way of thinking, and a process inherent to "the local" that cannot be externally engineered. Two, as an analytic of governance, resilience challenges the current fundamentals of top-down global governance and refocuses it on the role of "the local" and "the person" to make it more responsive to people's needs. Three, resilience cannot be understood without exploring where and how it is constitutedthat is, without unpacking "the local" ordering domain to see how ontological insecurity and a sense of "good life" could contribute to the emergence of more adaptive governing systems.

Studying European Politics can be a challenge! And this is not surprising: even the best scholarly minds of European politics often struggle to give precise definition to such a young, but already so complex and constantly evolving polity as the European Union, and are increasingly at odds with identifying its prospects for survival. One way to achieve a better understanding of the subject is to utilize a threshold concept approach, which is essentially a “less is more” approach that chooses to work with a few “founding” concepts, and identifies a “road map” for independent learning of broader but essentially inter‐connected issues of the discipline. The threshold concept approach becomes even more effective if combined with enactive learning—that is, learning‐by‐doing, through role taking and simulation of the threshold concepts during seminars. Such learning evidently exceeds the boundaries of conventional knowledge and becomes a useful transferable investment for the future.

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