SECURITY STUDIES AND RESEARCH CENTER
Resilience
"The ability of a system to go back to its steady state after experiencing a perturbation" (Holling, 1973)
We study how complex socio-technical systems can recover, adapt, and sustain their critical functions under conditions of destructive, stochastic, and interconnected threats
We live in an age of disturbed equilibrium. The world no longer serves as a stable backdrop for local events - today, it is the background itself that trembles, fractures, and shifts unpredictably. Financial crises, cyberattacks, pandemics, energy failures, social upheavals - these are no longer “anomalies,” but recurring expressions of a deeper systemic truth: complex systems exist in a world where disruption is inevitable. The Resilience of Socio-Technical Systems project was born from a simple yet uncomfortable insight: we cannot prevent everything.
The traditional security logic - building walls, sealing borders, managing risk one threat at a time - loses its effectiveness in a world where disruptions propagate through nonlinear networks and escalate unpredictably. What we need is not total control, but something more subtle and profound: the ability to recover, adapt, and reinforce what matters most. We study resilience as the capacity of a system to absorb impact, restore compromised functions, and reorganise without collapsing into dysfunction. Our interest lies not only in technical parameters, but in hidden dynamics: How do systems reconnect? How is load redistributed? How does diversity protect against collapse?
RESEARCH FOCUS
– Assessment of stochastic risks — those that cannot be predicted in detail, but can be understood in structure;
– Fractalisation and diversification of critical functions in sociotechnical systems — the creation of mechanisms that ensure continuity, reproducibility, and fault tolerance under conditions of partial destruction and dynamic overloads;
– Recovery dynamics — how systems re-emerge from failure, and whether this can be done faster, more intelligently, more sustainably.

We pay particular attention to practical applications in information security and critical infrastructure, where failure often comes at a high cost — social, economic, even existential.

But beneath the technical challenges lies a deeper questions:
What makes a system autopoietic and thriving? How do complex living systems learn from breakdowns? Can failure become a source of growth? And in what sense might humanity - as a vast sociotechnical organism - become not so much sustainable as evolving and architecturally wise?