Out of Service: engaging with infrastructure rupture, failure and collapse

Project Summary

Around 80% of trade moves by sea, making maritime and connected road infrastructures central to international supply chains. Less visible but equally critical are financial and digital infrastructures, as maritime operations depend on banking, payment and computing services. These infrastructures have become sites of geopolitical contestation, as seen in the Russian war against Ukraine and the escalation following the US-Israel attacks on Iran. Maritime infrastructures are targeted in both conflicts, while financial sanctions, including restrictions on payment systems such as SWIFT, have affected Iran and Russia. Yet failure is not limited to deliberate disruption: accidents, human error, neglect, natural hazards, and epidemics can trigger disturbances and cascade across interdependent systems. ‘Critical’ maritime and financial routes are therefore incorporated into security agendas focused on risk monitoring, resilience, and continuity planning. This further underscores that failure is rarely a single event but a series of unfolding processes that blur technical, political, economic, and legal boundaries. This project examines maritime, digital and financial infrastructure failure. It brings multiple disciplines into conversation to ask when failure is recognised and how societies organise around its risks. It focuses on major maritime infrastructure networks to model failure trajectories and assess measures to prevent or contain them.

Ambition:

The project builds on an innovative collaboration between the social sciences (politics, political economy, and geography), computer science, and engineering. The disciplinary communities engage with infrastructures, yet each conceptualises failure differently. By placing infrastructural failure at the centre, the project generates genuine interdisciplinary synergies, enabling new analytical perspectives and more robust approaches to real‑world problems.

The project will address three core questions:

1. What counts as infrastructural rupture, failure, or collapse, and how do different disciplines conceptualize and interpret these terms?
   
   
2. When do infrastructures fail, and what happens when they fail?
   
   
3. What are causes of failure, and do their effects differ?

By tracing how failure unfolds, the project aims to:

•  develop a typology of maritime infrastructural failure (potentially organised by causes, actors, temporalities, and duration of failure); and building further on the defined types;
• empirically model failure trajectories building on data-driven qualitative and quantitative modelling;
• identify entry points for prevention and propose strategies to mitigate, respond to, and ultimately avert failure.

Term:

Michaelmas 2027

Activities and Events:

Will be added in due course