In the recent years the Western countries have increasingly used the concept of resilience in the political science and politics discourses. This concept characterizes the reaction of subjects to the impact of shocks of any kind and origin, however, its conventional definition has not been elaborated yet. The authors have turned to semiotics as their theoretical basis and attempted to identify the nature of the relationship between the use of the term "resilience" in the scientific discourse and its application to political practice. They analyzed the scientific interpretations of "resilience" and forms of the use of this concept in the documents, which reflect the approaches to foreign and defense policy of the European Union, Germany, France and Britain. The study showed that the concept of resilience has a very broad denotation and a large number of connotations, which makes its use in the structure of discourse problematic from both syntagmatic and paradigmatic views. Therefore, according to the authors, the pragmatic dimension of the concept, i.e., how the concept is used and interpreted in foreign policy of different states, gains particular importance for comprehending "resilience". At the same time the very amorphousness of the term "resilience" broadens the freedom of maneuver by the interested actors when dealing with equally amorphous risks and threats to the international security, the proliferation of which accompanies the development of globalization.