UC Riverside

ABSTRACT This special issue examines globalisation and resilience, variously conceived, from a network perspective. In an era that moved from hyperglobalisation to disruption—pandemics, geopolitical tensions, climate risks—we argue that a key orienting question should be how globalisation is being reconfigured across multiplex economic, social and industrial networks. With this special issue, we hope to motivate new bodies of literature deploying social network analysis to diagnose and analyse the resilience of global economic networks to exogenous shocks. Where are such shocks likely to occur? Do they get contained in network subgraphs? Or are they absorbed more equally throughout the network? In any given network, which actors and ties, or types of actors and ties, underpin systemic robustness? The four papers in the issue span a bibliometric synthesis of ‘network resilience’ across domains; an industry‐level measure of supply‐chain disruption linking logistics reliability to US output; a country‐level study connecting embeddedness in the global FDI network to democratic resilience in less‐developed countries; and a firm‐level reconstruction of the EV corporate ownership network. We conclude by highlighting the substantive contributions of these papers, by calling for conceptual clarity on network resilience, and by suggesting a number of fruitful directions for future research.