Building resilience in telecommunications: Towards a research agenda - Editorial

Other text in scientific journal, 2025

Resilience in telecommunications has become both an urgent policy and a research issue. This editorial will introduce some fundamentals of resilience, introduce the Special Issue on Resilience and its papers, and outline some research and policy concerns.
Digital infrastructures, including submarine cables, terrestrial fiber, and 5G networks, as well as data centers, cloud platforms, Internet exchange points (IXPs), satellites, industrial control systems, and the software stacks that manage them, have become the vital circulatory system of modern economies and societies. Their continuous operation supports everything from payment systems and logistics to democratic decision-making and military command. However, these infrastructures face growing exposure to complex, overlapping risks, including climate shocks, cyberattacks, sabotage, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical competition, economic coercion, and regulatory fragmentation.
“Resilience” has therefore shifted from an engineering afterthought to a core policy goal. Governments and industry must be able to anticipate threats, withstand shocks and disruptions of various kinds, adapt to changing conditions, and recover swiftly. Risks are becoming increasingly multidimensional: climate change exacerbates environmental hazards, complex software stacks introduce systemic and cascading cyber vulnerabilities, supply chains remain vulnerable, and geopolitical rivalries are weaponizing connectivity and supply chains.
Policy toolkits are also expanding. Governments are combining regulation, standards, investment screening, procurement rules, public financing, industrial policies, international agreements, information-sharing mechanisms, and operational capacities, such as cable-repair fleets and maritime surveillance. Legal modernization, including streamlined permitting processes, criminalizing intentional cable damage, and harmonizing definitions of critical entities, is increasingly being addressed. Cross-sector interdependencies, especially those involving energy and logistics, necessitate new joint planning and exercises to prevent cascading failures.
Likewise, there are urgent needs to expand the research frontiers on resilience. While the scientific field of telecommunications policy was established some fifty years ago, there has been little conceptual and empirical research on the interaction between resilience and telecommunications policy up until now. This is despite the obvious fact that resilience is a topic of increasing importance for our societies and for telecommunications policy both in practice and research.
Following these trends and needs, this Special Issue was initiated to develop perspectives for a research agenda on resilient telecommunications policy. The Special Issue would explore policy, regulation, business strategy, and institutional frameworks for a world where threats to resilience (climate events, cyberattacks, war) surge forth without regard to national borders or government mandates, with digital ecosystems of international reach. Papers were invited through an open call for papers with themes building on a workshop convened by Ivey Business School on May 14, 2024, in Toronto, Canada.1 Papers were encouraged to be multidisciplinary, encompassing conceptual, theoretical and empirical studies, quantitative as well as qualitative. A vital condition was that the papers would contribute new perspectives on how telecommunications policy can support resilience. While quite a few papers were submitted, five were accepted and published through the review process. It seems that the research field is only in its starting tracks!