Geopolitical disruptions in global supply chains: a state-of-the-art literature review

Abstract

This paper systematically reviews the literature on the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains to identify primary discourses, emergent themes and key gaps to set a future research agenda. The guiding research question is ‘how do geopolitical disruptions affect the configuration, flow, and management of global supply chains?’. The study applies a systematic literature review of 50 papers from the Association of Business Schools’ (ABS) ranked academic journals in the fields of operations, production, and supply chain management published between 1995 and 2022. Through an in-depth literature analysis, this paper demarcates geopolitical disruptions and the resulting impact on supply chains as a new subfield of research. The results indicate that the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains can be mitigated through: (1) supply chain re-design including regionalisation, back-shoring, and moving away from just-in-time delivery models as well as (2) the implementation of emerging technologies, such as blockchain, 3D printing and artificial intelligence, to improve supply chain transparency and the development of modularised manufacturing. This paper is one of the first to define the current state of research and thinking on the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains, laying a firm foundation for future research by setting a detailed research agenda based on identified gaps.

Keywords:

• Supply chain design
• geopolitics
• Brexit
• trade war
• COVID-19
• supply chain disruption
• manufacturing location decision
• Russia-Ukraine war

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS:

• SDG 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

1. Introduction

Since 2016, the Western world has witnessed a shift towards nationalism and protectionism that has led to tensions between nation states (Bieber 2018; Colantone and Stanig 2019; Noland 2019). On June 23rd, 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union, setting in motion four long years of uncertainty for UK businesses, including labour shortages and stock-outs on store shelves. In the same year, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States with the slogan of ‘Make America Great Again’ and encouraging businesses to re-shore production to the US. Shortly after his election, President Trump instigated a trade war with China, imposing tariffs on key commodities (Hille 2020). These tariffs led to many companies moving production out of China, not to the US as President Trump hoped, but to nearby Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore (Aeppel 2021). If the disruptions caused by these two events were not severe enough, COVID-19 began its rapid spread across the world in late 2019, leading many nation states to lurch towards protectionism. Take, for example, the US Government’s Defense Production Act that restricted the export of vaccines and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), or India’s restriction on the export of medicines that treat the symptoms of the virus (Williams and Stacey 2021). The pandemic undermined the ‘global value chain’ model – a production network paradigm which has characterised the world economy over the past 30 years (Barbieri et al. 2020), highlighting the vulnerability of interdependent economies and subsequent risks to supply chains (Mena, Karatzas, and Hansen 2022). More recently, the 2022 Russian invasion in the Ukraine has caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket while cutting off a major artery of trade. This led to a widespread energy crisis within Europe. In 2021, supplies from Russia covered approximately 40% of the EU-27’s natural gas consumption; with Germany – the EU’s largest economy – receiving 65% of their gas supply from Russia (Halm 2022). The implementation of sanctions impacted the security of continuous operations and the competitiveness of Europe’s most gas-reliant industries, such as chemicals, steel, cement, glass, refining and coking, and paper and printing production (Hollinger et al. 2022). In response to gas price hikes, European governments introduced price caps to protect private households. Some countries, such as Germany, went even further and extended price protection measures towards industry at a cost of €200bn (Burchard 2022).

A common theme between these events is that conflict between nation states has interfered with the smooth flow of global supply chains. Indeed, the compounding disruptions caused by these geopolitical disputes have prompted many firms to reconsider the design of their global supply chains entirely (Roscoe et al. 2022).

Clearly, there is an urgent need to understand how to manage supply chain disruptions caused by current geopolitical events. However, this literature is yet to be treated as a cohesive body of knowledge. Indeed, systematic literature reviews on supply chain risk and disruptions tend to focus on events such as terrorism (Barnes and Oloruntoba 2005; Khan, Akhtar, and Merali 2018), natural disasters (Kochan and Nowicki 2018) and financial crises (Jüttner and Maklan 2011). These reviews focus primarily on how firms manage and avoid such disruptions using innovation and risk management techniques (Sabahi and Parast 2019). So far, the topic of geopolitical disruptions and their impact on supply chains has received limited comprehensive treatment.

The purpose of this systematic review is to examine the current literature on geopolitical disruptions (Brexit, the US-China Trade War, COVID-19) from an operations and supply chain management perspective. The aim is to identify the primary discourses, emergent themes and key gaps in order to set a future research agenda for this pressing topic. To achieve this goal, we ask and answer the following research question: How do geopolitical disruptions affect the configuration, flow, and management of global supply chains?

To answer this question, a systematic literature review approach (Denyer and Tranfield 2009) was chosen, including 50 articles extracted from Association of Business Schools’ (ABS) ranked academic journals in the fields of operations, production and supply chain management. The study identifies that geopolitical disruptions in supply chains constitute a new subfield of research. The reviewed articles situate the issue of geopolitical disruptions in a variety of contexts, starting from the design of more resilient supply chains (Scholten and Bosman 2016; Urciuoli et al. 2014; Yu and Greeven 2020) and ending on effectively managing the bullwhip effect (Croson et al. 2013). Three main themes were discerned from this discourse: tensions between nation states, supply chain design and the role of technology. In the following sections, these key themes are discussed in greater depth to identify gaps and emerging discourses. Subsequently, several promising areas for future research are outlined and a detailed research agenda is set. This review provides practitioners with an overview and analysis of strategies undertaken by managers and entrepreneurs facing the impacts of geopolitical disruptions on their supply chains. The study’s emphasis on inherent risks of geopolitical developments is supposed to provide key support for managerial decision making.

2. Previous literature on supply chains disruptions

In recent years, supply chain disruptions have received significant interest in academic literature, not least due to COVID-19 and its repercussions for operations and supply chains (Schleper et al. 2021). As a result, many systematic and rigorous literature reviews have been conducted, synthesising the current knowledge on this topic. To eliminate repetition in this review, 27 literature reviews have been examined and evaluated, which at least in part discuss disruptions to the supply chains (see Appendix A for the list and summary).

One of the earlier reviews by Shen and Li (2016) categorised the supply chain disruption literature into three major areas, namely: demand disruption, supply disruption, and disruption risk. A review by Bier, Lange, and Glock (2019) looked at mitigating supply chain disruptions for complex supply chain structures, introducing the network perspective as a point of differentiation. Katsaliaki, Galetsi, and Kumar (2022) discern that the reviewed papers fall under one of the following categories: the ripple effect, quantitative approaches for the analysis of supply chain disruptions, cost–benefit analysis of resilience versus disruptions, recovery strategies and IT technologies for enhancing resilience. In addition, the article provides a list of 34 future research directions organised into seven themes. These relate to research about effective resilience strategies, supply chain disruptions in specific sectors, human resources management, behavioural analysis and modelling approaches emphasising the ripple effect. Agrawal and Jain (2021) distinguish supply disruptions, internal disruptions, customer disruptions and external disruptions. In their review, they link the concept of supply chain disruptions directly with resilience, stating that ‘SCR [supply chain resilience] strategies help the firm to overcome disruption’ (Agrawal and Jain 2021, 2496). According to Shekarian and Mellat Parast (2020) a fundamental challenge in achieving supply chain resilience to disruptions is to identify antecedents to disruptions and assess the relative importance of each antecedent. Further the authors identified that collaboration and flexibility in supply chains are the most important strategies to cope with disruptions. Duong and Chong (2020) underline that despite best practices to improve supply chain resilience, disruptions and their impact on the flow of materials, products or services are inevitable. Grzybowska and Stachowiak’s (2022) review points to different temporal characters of disruptions and how they vary by severity—listing different frequencies of disruptions and intervals between them and trying to quantify losses caused by disruptions as the measure of their seriousness. Typically, the longer the disruption or recovery period lasts, the higher is the negative impact on companies’ profit (Llaguno, Mula, and Campuzano-Bolarin 2021).

Chowdhury et al. (2021, 20) assert that the articles’ analysis ‘reveals abundant opportunities for research on the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of supply chains.’ While several articles have been published since the COVID-19 pandemic began, studies that are systematic, methodologically sound, and well-grounded in theory are still rare. Pujawan and Bah (2021) review mentions five major issues arising in the discourse in the context of COVID-19, namely the rising importance of safety, digitalisation, and localisation of the supply chain, as well as rethinking the meaning of efficiency and vaccine production and distribution. Most mitigation actions that were mentioned in previous literature reviews, such as redundancy and flexibility, are still referred to as possible strategies to mitigate supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19. Shi, Liu, and Zhang (2021) found that most articles investigate the impacts of the pandemic on supply chain management in various industries, also exploring the response strategies or proposing corresponding recovery plans. The future research directions that all the analysed literature reviews on COVID-19 impact pose are fairly similar and include the following questions: how to enhance resiliency during and post-pandemic?; how can supply chains recover in the post-pandemic era?; what are the challenges in implementing resilience strategies such as back-shoring, how does the restructuring of logistics and supply chain networks affect their global operations? how can various stakeholders such as governments, NGOs, firms, and supply chain partners work together to minimise the impact of disruptions?; finally, how to use new technological advances to cope with disruptions? (Chowdhury et al. 2021; Montoya-Torres, Muñoz-Villamizar, and Mejia-Argueta 2021; Pujawan and Bah 2021; Qrunfleh et al. 2022; Shi, Liu, and Zhang 2021)

Propagation of disruptions is another recurring theme in many reviews (Bier, Lange, and Glock 2019; Duong and Chong 2020; Etemadi et al. 2021; Ivanov et al. 2017; Llaguno, Mula, and Campuzano-Bolarin 2021). Llaguno, Mula, and Campuzano-Bolarin (2021) define the ripple effect on supply chains as an event which occurs when disruption in one node spreads throughout the supply chain and impacts its performance, design and planning parameters. Etemadi et al. (2021) add that the ripple effect in the supply chain occurs if severe disruptions affect supply chain performance, such as demand, sales, stock return, service level, and costs. A review by Shekarian and Mellat Parast (2020) analyses the available body of literature from the perspective of supply chain resilience enhancers, listing flexibility, agility, collaboration, and redundancy as supply chain characteristics mitigating disruptions’ impacts. Duong and Chong (2020) review focusses more narrowly on addressing only collaboration as a mitigating factor. Both reviews underlie that collaboration in supply chains leads to better information sharing and visibility, while Duong and Chong (2020) expand on these findings, underlying that collaboration among supply chain actors allows for continuous inventory adjustment that helps to respond quickly to disruptions.

The challenge to employ the newest technological advances looms large in literature reviews on supply chain disruptions. The identified reviews focus on specific technologies such as blockchain (Alkhudary, Queiroz, and Féniès 2022; Etemadi et al. 2021) and data analytics (Iftikhar, Ali, et al. 2022). Alkhudary, Queiroz, and Féniès (2022) based on reviewed papers, establish that blockchain does not help mitigate disruption risk when used in a single enterprise unit; its value derives from an application across several units or organisations as an enhancer of information-sharing capabilities. In comparison, Etemadi et al. (2021) review highlights possible challenges related to blockchain, such as privacy and security from cyber threats. The need for further research on the use of blockchain technology in the supply chain is acknowledged in both reviews.

Interestingly, none of the analysed reviews focuses on the concept of geopolitical disruptions or tries to establish common characteristics, risks, and mitigation strategies among this specific category of supply chain disruptions. This gap may partly stem from the novelty of this term – defined as conflicts or disputes between nation states that interfere in the smooth flow of goods and services in global supply chains. However, even before the term ‘geopolitical disruption’ was used in the supply chain literature (Alexander et al. 2022; Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021; Roscoe et al. 2020, 2022), the disruptions that could be classified as such have long been prevalent. The closest in-scope review is Charpin’s (2022), that looks at nationalism as a trigger for supply chain disruptions. Charpin (2022) observes that nationalism can lead to supply chain disruptions for foreign MNEs, and that political risk factors should thus be integrated into supply chain management studies. However, in his review, he focuses more on nationalist sentiments, economic nationalism, and national animosity instead of relations between the nation states as a source of disruptions.

3. Research methodology

This project follows Denyer and Tranfield’s (2009) five-step guidelines on conducting systematic literature reviews, including question formulation, locating studies, study selection and evaluation, analysis and synthesis, as well as reporting and applying the results.

3.1. Locating studies

Web of Science and Scopus databases were searched to minimise bias and include a wide range of sources. These databases are considered extensive, are available at academic institutions and were used in literature reviews pertaining to supply chains (see Burgess, Singh, and Koroglu 2006; Xu et al. 2020). Several defined search terms were used as search criteria, including ‘supply chain’, ‘global value chain’, ‘disruption’, combined with the following search terms, ‘trade war’, ‘US China trade war’, ‘Brexit’, ‘resilience’, ‘geopolitics’. The selected keywords were subsequently used to construct search strings with the Boolean AND connector using a combination of the search fields (Table 1). There was no specified time horizon selected for locating studies. The search was carried out for the last time in December 2022, as a full-text search. We adopted keywords based on an extensive reading of literature on supply chain disruptions. We then combined these keywords with events from recent years which were named geopolitical events that impacted supply chains. As sources to identify these events, we used reputable news outlets (e.g. Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal), think tank and consultancy reports (e.g. CSIS, Chatham House, McKinsey, Brookings Institution).

Table 1. Keywords and search strings.

Construct	Keywords	Search strings	Databases
Supply chain’s geopolitical disruptions	Ukraine, war, supply chain, Brexit, Sino-US Trade War, resilience, coronavirus, COVID, trade war, US China trade war, geopolitics, disruption, resilience, political risk, sanction	‘geopolitic* disruption*’ OR ‘Brexit* supply chain*’   OR ‘Geopolitic* supply chain*’ OR ‘US China trade war supply chain*’ OR ‘trade war supply chain*’ OR ‘US China Trade War’ OR ‘Trade War’ OR ‘Sino-US Trade War’ OR ‘Brexit’ OR ‘Trade war supply chain’ OR ‘Coronavirus supply chain’ OR ‘COVID supply chain’ OR ‘supply chain disruption’  OR ‘resilience supply chain’  OR ‘resilience Coronavirus’  OR ‘resilience Brexit’  OR ‘political risk supply chain’ OR ‘sanction supply chain’  OR ‘Ukraine war’	Web of Science Scopus

3.2. Study selection and evaluation

To ensure transparency, a systematic review needs to employ a set of explicit selection criteria, to evaluate the relevance of each paper found in relation to the review question (Denyer and Tranfield 2009). A list of inclusion and exclusion criteria (Table 2) were used for the first screening. The main inclusion criterion was to limit the search to articles published in the Association of Business Schools (ABS) Academic Journal Guide (AJG) listed journals; these were rated as category 1, 2, 3 or 4 to ensure the quality of the sources. The 2021 edition of the AJG was used for enlisting 1588 journal titles from 22 subject areas as used by AJG, spanning from accounting to strategy.

Table 2. Inclusion and exclusion criteria for systematic literature review.

Inclusion criteria	Exclusion criteria	Rationale
Published in ABS rank 1–4 journals.	Articles published outside of rank 1–4 ABS journals were not included even if topically relevant.	Association of Business Schools’ list of 1588 journal titles from 22 subject areas is considered as a quality standard for peer-reviewed journals in management.
Geopolitical disruptions within the context of supply chains is at least one of the foci of the paper.	Articles referring to geopolitical disruptions in the context of financial flows, trade war effects and scenarios and terrorism were not included. The same applies to articles dealing purely with supply chains resilience without component of geopolitical impacts.	The aim of the review is to understand how geopolitical disruptions affect the configuration, flow, and management of global supply chains.
Published in English language.	Published in other languages than English.	English is a dominant language in a field of supply chain management.
Different types of articles considered (empirical and conceptual).	N/A.	The focus of the study is to assess and synthesise the various approaches to the concept of geopolitical disruption of supply chains.

Since the preliminary search results were in the thousands of entries before applying inclusion criteria, both an automatised and manual approach was applied to minimise the room for mistakes in article selection.

To identify ABS rank 1–4 journal articles only, the complete list of AJG journals was extracted from Pdf to Excel sheet file, including their unique ISSN numbers. Then the ISSN numbers were included in every search on Scopus and Web of Science to obtain the articles only published in AJG-listed journals in the search results. The search results were saved in Excel format, aggregated, and further filtered with Microsoft Office Excel’s highlight duplicate values function to eliminate duplicates. This step left 1138 articles for further screening. After critically reading and discussing the abstracts, the following exclusion criteria were applied: removing the papers that were focused on finance, trade and business history. A vast body of literature quantitatively models the effects of trade wars and potential scenarios. At the same time, the focal point of this study is supply chains from the perspective of managerial studies—the elimination of such papers led to the exclusion of 799 articles. The remaining 339 articles underwent the second screening that further assessed their relevance in the context of the research question. From this screening, 199 articles were excluded due to their low relevance in answering the review question. Another 90 articles were identified as duplicates at this stage. This left a final sample of 50 articles for systematic review (listed in Appendix B). The flowchart-based illustration of the selection and evaluation process is provided in Figure 1, presented according to PRISMA guidelines.

Figure 1. Study selection and evaluation.

3.3. Analysis and synthesis

The goal of the analysis was to break down individual studies into parts and describe how they relate to each other. The synthesis aims to make associations between parts from different studies, with the aim of not merely restating the information therein but to develop new knowledge that is not apparent when the individual papers are analysed in separation (Denyer and Tranfield 2009). An analysis of 50 articles was conducted by summarising the studies in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The synthesis was applied by making associations between themes identified in each article to answer the review question.

3.4. Developing a conceptual mapping framework

Discerning three main themes within the discourse helped to provide insights into the main research question: How do geopolitical disruptions affect the configuration, flow, and management of global supply chains? The concept map (see Figure 2) was created to highlight the concepts distilled from the literature review and see how they cut across the identified themes. The value of a concept map lies in identifying key ideas to understand the theory, concepts and relationships between them (Rowley 2012). During the analysis, the researcher uses three processes: subsumption, progressive differentiation and integrative reconciliation. In subsumption, lower-order concepts are subsumed under higher-order concepts, while in progressive differentiation, concepts are broken down into finer components. Progressive differentiation is similar to the process of analysis, while integrative reconciliation occurs when the analyst attempts to reconcile and link concepts on the left side of the map with those on the right. This corresponds to the process of synthesis (Daley and Torre 2010).

Figure 2. Concept mapping framework.

Figure 2 shows the result of mapping geopolitical impacts on the supply chains based on the structured literature review. Geopolitical events in Figure 2, lead to an impact on the supply chains. On one hand, this impact leads to technological innovation through disruption and on the other hand to the efforts to re-design the existing supply chains. On the side of technological innovation, two categories of new technologies emerge. One category includes sensors that collect data across different stages of supply chains, Internet of Things networks that communicate and exchange information from sensors, and Big Data analytics tools that can harness the large volume of data points to produce useful insights for decision-makers. The second category is based on the modularisation of the production process. This relies on smart additive manufacturing and 3D printing that allows the cost-effective manufacturing of customised goods closer to major centres of demand (i.e. edge manufacturing). The concept of edge manufacturing directly borrows from the computer sciences where ‘edge computing’ is ubiquitously used and represents the architecture where computing capacities are situated at the edge of the network, namely close to the consumers and their devices to provide a higher level of responsiveness (Satyanarayanan 2017). As the arrow in Figure 2 shows, the modularisation of production, identified within Theme 3 ‘technology’, supports the trend of supply chain regionalisation identified within Theme 2 ‘supply chain design’. Similarly, the data-based category of technology supports the novel approaches to stock management highlighted in Theme 2, with the potential to provide higher transparency to the stock levels across the supply chains in real-time. Supply chain re-design efforts, as a consequence of geopolitical disruptions, narrow down to regionalisation of supply chains strategies and aforementioned stock management techniques. Regionalisation of supply chains can be broken down into relocation/construction of manufacturing and storage facilities in new geographical areas, ideally with a view of establishing an independent, self-sufficient supply chain, free from geopolitical disturbances. Considering the complexity of today’s supply chains, e.g. in the automotive or portable electronics industry, such ideas are very difficult if not impossible to implement. Particularly the complexity from the perspective of the supply base (Ateş and Memiş 2021), plays a role here. The structured literature review identified the gaps in our understanding of the viability and costs of supply chain decoupling. Green lines in Figure 2 point out other identified research gaps which are further discussed in the following section.

3.5. Reporting and using the results

The findings section contains a summary and synthesis of all reviewed articles. It also states what is known and unknown about the review question (Denyer and Tranfield 2009). The following section outlines findings on how geopolitical disruptions affect the configuration, flow, and management of global supply chains.

4. Findings

The findings from the structured literature review are outlined below, each of which advances the understanding of how geopolitical disruptions affect global supply chains. First, to trace and evaluate the developments in the relevant literature, a descriptive analysis of the 50 articles is presented below, detailing the publication year, the relevant academic journals and the subject area. Second, the main themes identified in the literature are synthesised, analysed and discussed. Finally, a model is developed through a concept mapping framework that visually illustrates the relationships between constructs and highlights the potential solutions to mitigate the impact of geopolitical disruptions on the supply chains.

4.1. Descriptive analysis

The 50 articles identified through the systematic literature review are analysed in this section with respect to the publication year, journal and subject area in order to understand the trends in this body of literature relevant to answering the review question.

Figure 3 presents a distribution of articles by the year of publication. There were no limits applied regarding the year of publication in locating studies stage. Still, 78% of articles were published in 2020 or later. This indicates that the investigation of the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains is a fairly new area of research. There was a high concentration of articles in 2020, with 30% of articles published in this year. This timeline correlates with an escalation in the US-China trade war, reaching its peak in 2019 when the US raised tariffs to 25% on $200bn of Chinese imports and COVID-19 outbreak subsequently raising a level of interest among the researchers in these phenomena in general and their impact on supply chains in particular.

Figure 3. Number of studies per year of publication.

Table 3 presents the distribution of journals where the articles were published. The 50 papers identified in the literature review were published in 23 different journals: article concentration per journal was rather modest. Indeed 65% of the journals had only one article published. Only four journals, the International Journal of Production Research, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Production and Operations Management and Production Planning and Control, had four or more articles published that became a part of systematic literature review. These are rank 3 and 4 journals publishing papers mainly in the field of supply chain management and manufacturing.

Table 3. Number of articles published in academic journals.

Journal	Number of articles	%
International Journal of Production Research	11	22
Production Planning and Control	6	12
International Journal of Operations & Production Management	6	12
Production and Operations Management	4	8
Journal of Operations Management	2	4
MIT Sloan Management Review	2	4
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal	2	4
Journal of Business Logistics	2	4
Benchmarking – An International Journal	1	2
American Economic Review	1	2
Applied Economics	1	2
British Journal of Management	1	2
California Management Review	1	2
Computers and Industrial Engineering	1	2
Decision Sciences	1	2
International Journal of Logistics	1	2
Journal of Business Research	1	2
Journal of Modelling and Management	1	2
Omega	1	2
Technological Forecasting and Social Change	1	2
Technovation	1	2
Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review	1	2
Industrial Marketing Management	1	2

In the literature, various research methodologies were applied to address the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains. Figure 4 shows 5 methodologies discerned across the reviewed articles together with their distribution. Each article included in the review was classified according to its primary methodology.

Figure 4. Classification of methodologies under systematic literature review.

ABS divides journals into subject areas. Table 4 shows how analysed articles are distributed among different subject areas. Notably, 36 articles out of 50 analysed under the literature review were published in journals that fall into ABS’ Operations and Technology Management subject area. The remaining 14 articles fall into as different categories as Sector Studies or Innovation, highlighting the multidisciplinary approaches to the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains in the literature.

Table 4. Subject areas.

ABS subject area	Number of articles	%
Operations and Technology Management	36	72
General Management, Ethics and Social Responsibility	5	10
Operations, Research and Management Sciences	3	6
Economics, Econometrics and Statistics	2	4
Innovation	2	4
Sector Studies	1	2
Marketing	1	2

4.2. Key themes and findings

The qualitative coding procedure was used to identify the themes. Coding started with an iterative analysis of the selected papers to become familiar with their content. Then the ‘conventional approach’ was adopted, which is generally used in studies aiming to describe a phenomenon when existing theory or research literature is limited (Hsieh and Shannon 2005). Following the ‘conventional approach’ methodology, coding categories were derived directly from the text data. After the content analysis, the results were discussed between the co-authors, where the emerging theme categories and sub-categories of descriptions were confronted and validated through several meetings over a period of 6 months.

The review revealed that the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains constitutes a new subfield of research. Most of the articles included in this review treat geopolitical disruptions to supply chains as a peripheral concept, while their key focus lies somewhere else; be it the event triggering the disruption (for instance, COVID-19, trade war, etc.) or well-discussed concepts from the operations management literature (e.g. the bullwhip effect, supply chain resilience, etc.). While the frequency, complexity, and impact of geopolitical disruptions to supply chains on a broader economy justify the establishment of the new research subfield with its own theoretical grounding and broad research agenda. The reviewed articles situate the issue of geopolitical disruptions in a variety of contexts, starting from the design of more resilient supply chains (Kull and Closs 2008; Scholten and Bosman 2016; Yildiz et al. 2015) and ending on the bullwhip effect (Croson et al. 2013). Three main themes were discerned from this discourse, which will be explained in detail.

4.2.1. Theme 1 – tensions between nation states

This theme includes research centred around specific geopolitical events with implications for the configuration, flow and management of global supply chains. In the reviewed body of literature, this includes Brexit (Hendry et al. 2019; Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021; Moradlou, Fratocchi, et al. 2021; Roscoe et al. 2020), US-China trade war (Handfield, Graham, and Burns 2020; Moosa et al. 2020; Ossa 2014), COVID-19 pandemic (Chowdhury et al. 2021; Handfield, Graham, and Burns 2020; Sodhi, Tang, and Willenson 2021; van Hoek 2020; van Hoek and Dobrzykowski 2021) and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Butt and Shah 2020; Nikjow et al. 2021; Ram and Zhang 2020).

Brexit is perceived in the literature as a unique event; thus, it is argued that the process of building resilience is different. This singularity comes from its high systemic impact, the short time available to prepare and the uncertainty of its consequences. Hendry et al. (2019) point out that in the case of Brexit, resilience is considered in relation to constitutional change and that this type of event has never been analysed in the context of supply chains. While supply chain disruptions are the new normal and building supply chain resilience is considered essential for firms (Blessley and Mudambi 2022). Moradlou, Reefke, et al. (2021) and Roscoe et al. (2020) explicitly use the term ‘geopolitical disruption’ in reference to Brexit, generalising that during geopolitical disruptions, managers need to make decisions in tight time frames, with incomplete and imperfect information and to deal with high perceived uncertainty. To deal with this uncertainty, companies need to first and foremost recognise opportunities and threats. This strategy is described as ‘sensing’ through the lense of dynamic capabilities theory (Hendry et al. 2019), or as a ‘wait-and-see’ strategy (Roscoe et al. 2020). Hendry et al. (2019, p. 438) point out that ‘a significant stage in building supply chain resilience during constitutional change involves developing a deep understanding of potential disruption’. The positive role of information sharing with partners across the supply chain, including potential competition and joint efforts to inform and influence policymakers, has been underlined in both studies (Hendry et al. 2019; Roscoe et al. 2020). Information sharing and engagement with the government allow for lowering uncertainty. However, only a tolerable level of uncertainty leads to proactive or reactive strategies, where managers are comfortable making costly investment decisions (Hendry et al. 2019; Roscoe et al. 2020). Based on this, Roscoe et al. (2020), conclude that supply chain uncertainty is an antecedent of supply chain risk, while in the literature, these terms are often used interchangeably. This leads to a practical managerial implication that it might be better for managers facing geopolitical disruptions to consider a ‘wait-and-see’ strategy before making ‘costly and difficult to reverse tangible resource commitments’ (Roscoe et al. 2020).

The focus of the remaining articles with Brexit as a central theme is on manufacturing location decisions (Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021; Moradlou, Fratocchi, et al. 2021). Most analysed companies planned to relocate manufacturing facilities from the UK to the EU and distribution centres from the EU to the UK. This was caused by market-seeking advantages (closeness to centres of demand, ease of access to the markets) and efficiency seeking advantages (overcoming logistics related costs, tariff, and non-tariff barriers). The findings from this study revealed that location decisions differed depending on industry type, with automotive, pharmaceutical, food and healthcare as the most affected (Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021). Brexit instigated a re-evaluation of previous manufacturing location decisions – leading to back-shoring, reversing the trend of locating manufacturing in low-cost jurisdictions and focusing instead on ‘the value perceived by the customer’ derived from the domestic production (Moradlou, Fratocchi, et al. 2021). In fact, Brexit perhaps only magnified the existing tendencies coming from growing ‘offshoring failures’ due to underestimating the total cost of operating in a foreign jurisdiction and changing customers’ expectations. Interestingly all the articles included in the review looked at Brexit from the perspective of British companies or the EU’s companies operating in the UK. There is a lack of analysis on how companies based in mainland Europe prepared and responded to Brexit (Hendry et al. 2019).

Studies on BRI are scant in the supply chain management literature (Thürer et al. 2019) and in reviewed articles the discussion is limited to classification of risks that may impact supply chains part of BRI (Butt and Shah 2020; Nikjow et al. 2021; Ram and Zhang 2020). Ram and Zhang (2020) propose the division of risks into process risks (lack of risk and liability management, lack of availability of compatible skills and expertise), informational risks (inadequate project evaluation, lack of transparency) and environmental risks (unbalanced risk-sharing partnerships, incompatible corporate governance structures, lack of adequate cyber security). Butt and Shah (2020) add the challenge of maintenance for BRI infrastructure, that is both large in-scale and built in remote areas by Chinese construction companies. Political risk is highlighted as a factor contributing either to building or eroding supply chain resilience. It is argued that ‘BRI will give rise to political tensions among the partnering countries, which may further create instability and uncertainty among the status quo’.

Similarly, Nikjow et al. (2021) focus purely on infrastructure risks that may impact the logistics of supply chains, including design errors, lack of equipment and poor construction organisation as risk factors. Geopolitical risk is perceived as impacting the easiness and time of obtaining construction permits and changes to the status of contracts concluded by previous political parties in power (Nikjow et al. 2021). Interestingly, the BRI literature lacks papers based on empirical work (Butt and Shah 2020; Thürer et al. 2019) that could help to build a comprehensive understanding of the challenges in BRI supply chains (Ram and Zhang 2020). Finally, the analysis of BRI opens the area potentially ripe for new insights for the supply chain management literature, as Thürer et al. (2019) remark – BRI ‘diverts supply chain flows from standard routes to new routes that run through more remote and less accessible regions of the world about which far less is known’.

COVID-19 is the most analysed geopolitical event in the reviewed literature. The pandemic is categorised as a geopolitical event, because it led to protectionist measures by nation states including PPE hoarding and vaccine nationalism, which subsequently led to trade tensions. The pandemic and its repercussions allowed researchers to gather ample insights on systemic disruptions affecting not just one company but entire industries (Ramani, Ghosh, and Sodhi 2022). As Ramani, Ghosh, and Sodhi (2022) observe – ‘systemic disruption in supply networks is ripe for further research that would also have important implications for practice’. Epidemics represent a particular case of supply chain disruptions with distinctive characteristics such as long-term duration, unpredictable scaling and simultaneous disruptions in supply, demand, and logistics infrastructure (Ivanov 2020). At the same time, they are followed up by speedy economic recovery once the society reaches a point of ‘herd immunity’ (Panwar, Pinkse, and de Marchi 2022). Shen and Sun (2021) point out that empirical studies on supply chain resilience were conducted mainly by case studies and interviews, which are expensive in terms of time and energy. This study concurs with such a statement. There is an opportunity for more quantitative studies to establish the measurement for the levels of supply chain integration, collaboration and information sharing, which could turn into ‘practical resilience indicators’ assisting supply chain managers in decision-making (Shen and Sun 2021). Also, none of the reviewed papers developed a comparative analysis to determine how the effects of a pandemic on supply chains differed across sectors and countries, a proposition put forward in Kähkönen et al.’s (2021) article.

The pandemic highlighted the challenges with the distribution of critical PPE equipment and later vaccines. It led to the emergence of research on supply chains for goods with ‘critical’ applications. Finkenstadt and Handfield (2021) pointed out a lack of supply chain traceability, flexibility and responsiveness as the main weaknesses that have led to massive inefficiencies and performance disruptions across public and private supply networks for PPE—advocating ‘back to front design’ as a remedy; starting with demand assessment and working backwards towards supply planning and distribution planning.

These studies propose new strategies to prevent this situation from happening in the future. Supply chain alertness (SCAL) and resource orchestration (ROT) has been identified as central point to support resilience in highly disruptive contexts (Queiroz et al. 2022). In the resource orchestration theory interpretation, the level of firms and supply chain alertness directly results from managers’ ability to arrange and use resources. Falcone, Fugate, and Dobrzykowski (2021) see inter-organisational network characteristics as determinants of a firm’s potential to orchestrate resources from buyers, suppliers, and other third parties. First, supply chain networks are critical to companies’ resilience because firms are embedded, constrained, or supported by their supply chain partners. Secondly, Chief Executive Officer’s network also plays a vital role, as CEOs are often the ultimate leaders in critical crisis and disaster management decisions.

While there were proponents for dismantling global supply chains in the aftermath of the pandemic, Panwar, Pinkse, and de Marchi (2022) put forward the argument that it was precisely due to the global character of supply chains that the shortages of PPE could have been overcome in a relatively short timeframe. Thus, the lessons learned from the COVID-19 experience is to make global supply chains more resilient and more robust, so they remain functional during future disruptions and can restore any lost functionality shortly after. A high level of vertical integration has been proven to lead to better supply chain resilience for one of Chinese largest online merchandising platforms. In conventional retail supply chains, products move from factories to brand manufacturers to general agents, distributors to retailers, and finally to consumers (Shen and Sun 2021). Such supply chains do not possess information sharing abilities, as each stage is made of independent companies. When disruption takes place due to poor information flow, responses are delayed, and the bullwhip effect might further magnify the scale of the disruption.

The integrated character of online marketplaces such as JD.com, supported by a high level of digitisation and information sharing, is said to increase supply chain resilience during disruptive events (Shen and Sun 2021). The importance of information sharing in overcoming supply chain disruptions has been supported by Yang et al. (2020) findings, who state that information processing capabilities and information processing requirements are essential for firms to tackle unexpected supply chain disruptions effectively. The study by Ali and Govindan (2021) further confirmed that the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies substantially mitigates the impact of unforeseen disruptions based on an analysis of the sample of firms from the agri-food industry. While the beneficial character of fragmented operations in face of disruptions concurs with Panwar, Pinkse, and de Marchi (2022) findings, who expect increased investments in the development of micro supply chains that are characterised by decentralised and agile mini operating models.

Not all geopolitical disruptions since 2016 have been objects of scholarly interest; the literature mainly analyses the events that made broadsheet headlines. Roscoe et al. (2022) propose, for instance, to look at how supply chain designs are changing due to calls by political leaders to re-shore critical industries. However, other historically significant developments, such as the Japan-South Korea trade dispute from 2019 that resulted in the disruption of chemical supplies for displays and semiconductors, or the ongoing problem of China’s weaponisation of rare earth supply, have been missing from the scholarly discourse, despite their potential to provide novel insights into the topic. Most astoundingly, current research on geopolitical disruptions omits the role of geopolitical rivalry in creating independent, regionalised high-technology supply chains. Meanwhile, the US and China rivalry for technological primacy intensifies (Whalen and Alcantara 2021). This is not surprising, considering the direct military and economic implications for gaining or maintaining a super-power status. Nation states without aspirations for the world’s hegemony join this race trying to secure financial and military benefits (Shead 2021), either in the role of regional political powers or as emerging markets that try to leapfrog stages of economic development by focusing on the most novel technologies (Yayboke and Carter 2020). Increasingly these smaller players are forced to choose between allegiances to the Chinese or American camp – which provides access to cutting-edge technologies, now and in the future. This state-sponsored technological rivalry, a geopolitical event in itself, largely lacks analysis in the supply chain literature.

4.2.2. Theme 2 – supply chain design

Articles under this theme focus on overcoming geopolitical disruptions by redesigning supply chains to minimise significant impacts on supply continuity and demand responsiveness. as COVID-19 proved, ad-hoc approaches implemented after the disruption strikes, are futile even in the most developed economies (Sodhi, Tang, and Willenson 2021). Supply chain design or reconfiguration involves broad decisions regarding organisational structure, sourcing, the opening or closing of facilities, labour staffing, automation, transportation, storage, and accessibility (Blessley and Mudambi 2022). The configuration of a supply chain significantly impacts the performance of MNCs and how resilient they are in the face of disruptions (Huq, Pawar, and Rogers 2016). Further, the increasing complexity of the supply chains characterised by a high level of interconnectedness and tight coupling of nodes in the network makes them more exposed to disruptions risks (Wagner, Mizgier, and Arnez 2014).

Suggested solutions centre around the regionalisation of supply chains based on the relocation of manufacturing and storage facilities closer to end markets (Handfield, Graham, and Burns 2020; Huq, Pawar, and Subramanian 2020; Scholten and Bosman 2016; Shih 2020; Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021; Moradlou, Fratocchi, et al. 2021). Most articles focused on back-shoring provide insights into labour costs, transportation costs, and market proximity. Choudhary et al. (2022) look at the problem of back-shoring based on the dynamics emanating from a firm’s supply network. They point to structural changes in the network of suppliers and customers, with the potential to influence supply chain resilience negatively. The back-shoring discussion also arose in Theme 1 concerning Brexit-centred papers within this review.

Thus, backshoring as a supply chain strategy comes up in the discussion of the two themes but is analysed from different angles. In Theme 1, backshoring is the most common supply chain strategy adopted in response to Brexit as an event. In this theme, supply chain design is treated as a proactive strategy adopted by market players to optimise the flow of goods and make supply chains more resilient for future and unforeseen shocks.

Another proposed solution is to move away from just-in-time, lean supply chain management models in favour of higher levels of stock maintained at different supply chain stages (Croson et al. 2013; Scholten and Bosman 2016; Urciuoli et al. 2014). However, authors of reviewed papers rarely acknowledge the costs of such initiatives and the time frame needed for their application, nor do they consider the difficulties involved in moving embedded, multi-tier and specialised supply chains where OEM manufacturers depend on the network of specialised suppliers clustered within one geographical area (Yildiz et al. 2015). Sodhi, Tang, and Willenson (2021) propose that the costs of stockpiling for strategic supply chains might be taken on by the government, suggesting more research into the implications of ‘strategic national stockpiling’. Although strategic national stockpiles could complement private companies’ inventories, more research is needed to determine the optimal levels and scope of such stocks and what domestic manufacturing capacities and capabilities would be needed to implement them.

Reorientation of supply chains towards disruption may also bring unexpected positives. In the view of Stekelorum et al. (2022), disruption orientation is necessary to enhance the firms’ environmental and economic performances. Businesses that learn from the disruption and reconfigure their supply chains may reach new opportunities and improve their performances.

Not all reviewed papers, however, propose costly and permanent solutions. Raj et al. (2022) look at the problem through dynamic capability theory, emphasising the role of firms’ capabilities in sensing opportunities and threats, seising potential opportunities, managing threats, and reconfiguring resources and capabilities to gain sustained competitive advantage. They identified inconsistency of supply as the biggest challenge, associated with the uncertainty of supply from upstream vendors, irregular and indefinite lead times and price volatility. They propose the creation of a business continuity plan, aimed towards recruiting alternate suppliers closer to the organisation’s manufacturing facility to avert inconsistency in supply of raw material and critical components. In this model, the known quantity of the demand is sourced from global supply chains to leverage the economics of scale and keep the costs low. At the same time, the local supplier with better responsiveness and shorter lead times is secured in advance as a backup. The same approach with two categories of sourcing channels has been proposed by Sodhi, Tang, and Willenson (2021). The other paper in the review, relying on dynamic capability theory as a framework, describes significant supply chain disruptions as a force driving companies to develop new capabilities to survive (Kähkönen et al. 2021). The results illustrate a positive relationship between sensing, seising and supply chain reconfiguring capabilities. Interestingly, it seems that the upstream disruptions pushed companies to react to threats and opportunities in the supply market, while downstream disruptions triggered reconfiguring capabilities.

Roscoe et al. (2022) analysed the factors impacting managers’ supply chain redesign decisions, discerning the perceived intensity of institutional pressures, the relative mobility of suppliers and supply chain assets, and the perceived severity of the potential disruption risk. Supply chain managers met with internal pressure from superiors or other departments to react to changing geopolitical environment in the face of COVID-19 or the US-China trade war by acting – even if acting at any given moment might not have been the best-suited strategy. External pressures included government demanding excessive stock levels or customers pushing for continuity of supplies. Interviewed companies tended to adapt to these pressures by using trade associations and lobbyists as intermediaries to put pressure on policy makers to minimise political uncertainty. Future studies on the role of trade associations and lobbyists as intermediaries between government and industry in the context of geopolitical disruption represents a promising area of research.

The perception of political risk and its impact on supply chain design decisions has been analysed in earlier studies; a foreign subsidiaries search for political legitimacy to minimise the impact of geopolitical disruptions serves as a particularly interesting example (Charpin, Powell, and Roth 2020). Both Charpin, Powell, and Roth (2020) and Roscoe et al. (2022) argue that even if the level of geopolitical risk cannot be objectively measured, its perceived level differs among managers, resulting in different approaches. One way to adapt is to apply different cooperation models with the local suppliers to increase the level of foreign entity legitimacy in the eyes of their host government (Charpin, Powell, and Roth 2020).

In the view of Ivanov and Dolgui (2020b, 2910), redesigned supply chains, adapted to face higher levels of future disruptions, may need a different metric of ‘viability’ than resilience ‘to correctly understand the impacts of disruptions and the ripple effects on the viability in the presence of extraordinary events. While the call for new terminology due to the complex character of modern supply chains and the long-lasting impact of the geopolitical disruptions may seem intriguing, it seems unwarranted considering the breadth of existing literature on resilience.

Autonomisation is a less explored idea for making supply chains more resilient to geopolitical shocks. Industries are populated by companies run from the top down. While this model proves efficient in normal circumstances, it slows down the adaptation process in times of severe disruptions (Yu and Greeven, 2020). Qingdao-based Haier, one of the world’s biggest home appliance manufacturers, has organised itself as a swarm of self-managing business units that prove extraordinarily efficient in times of crisis. Haier group transformed from a few organisationally rigid businesses into some 4000 microenterprises, most comprising just 10–15 employees, leading to high levels of managerial autonomy. With managers of these microenterprises able to decide about hiring staff and supply and distribution channels, functions typically reserved to higher echelons of management. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Haier adjusted its supply chains according to specialised knowledge and up-to-date information from microenterprise managers, which proved extraordinarily effective.

Scholars who discuss the effects of geopolitical disruptions in supply chains often suggest the regionalisation (decoupling) of global supply chains as a viable solution to protect them from the side effects of political clashes on a diplomatic stage. However, these studies do not assess such solutions’ viability and costs. Independent regional supply chains for strategic industries (i.e. high-technology industries, medicines and PPE products) offer clear advantages in terms of the safety of supplies, shorter lead times and increased R&D capabilities. But the question still remains if these advantages outweigh the costs measured in the necessary investments and time needed to implement this idea. In addition, the viability of moving complex multi-tier supply chains, reliant on a network of highly specialised suppliers situated in one geographical area, must also be addressed.

Finally, the discussion of supply chain design is centred around manufacturing and warehousing management. At the same time, transportation has an enormous impact on disruption risks and the decision-making of supply chain managers (Xu et al. 2020). Unfortunately, none of the reviewed articles explored the problem of transportation disruptions. In contrast, the recent events on the global markets, such as the cobalt price spike, crucial material for electric vehicle (EV) batteries occurred due to transportation bottlenecks (Hill 2022).

To conclude the discussion on supply chain re-design, Linton (2018) poses some crucial questions such as: how does one measure risk associated with changing or not changing its business model to face the disruptions or, even more importantly, how does one measure risk associated with changing/not changing the whole supply chain structure? Although Linton (2018) asked this question in his article published back in 2018, in 2023, after all the disruptions we faced, the research community still need to learn the answers to these questions.

4.2.3. Theme 3 – technology

The existing literature highlights a positive influence of geopolitical disruptions as a driver of innovation. Disintegration resulting from significant policy or regulatory changes, economic sanctions and trade wars is found to be transformative force, leading to a realignment of supply chains with the use of the newest technologies that enhance customer value (Linton 2018). The ability to process massive volumes of data from data sources across the different stages of supply chains is said to help minimise or avoid supply chain bottlenecks or bullwhip effects caused by geopolitical disruptions (Koot, Mes, and Iacob 2021; Talwar et al. 2021). The modularity of the production process and 3D printing support the regionalisation of supply chains, allowing for highly customised products with short lead times near demand centres (Öberg 2021; Xu et al. 2020). Fragmented ‘micro supply chains’ help to reduce supply chain complexities with flexible supplier contracts and relationships and to manufacture closer to the point of purchase (Panwar, Pinkse, and de Marchi 2022).

The use of blockchain technology (also known as the distributed ledger) has seen a lot of interest worldwide and across industries (Chang, Iakovou, and Shi 2019; Dubey et al. 2020). In the humanitarian sector, early blockchain adoption demonstrated potential for improvement of the transparency and traceability of supply chains (Dubey et al. 2020). Similar to large companies facing geopolitical disruptions, humanitarian NGOs need to process large amounts of data and make quick decisions based on obtained insights (Dubey et al. 2020). To reduce the distortion of information and create transparency in the entire humanitarian supply chain, organisations need technology to exchange information without distortion among all the key partners – blockchain serves this purpose well, and its use can be extrapolated beyond humanitarian disaster relief situations. Many pilot efforts have been developed to explore the potential of blockchain in global supply chains and set standards for different industries (Chang, Iakovou, and Shi 2019). However, it remains unclear what specific challenges and applications this technology brings for each party in the supply chain and how the parties should collaborate to promote blockchain development, especially in cross-border transactions, where customs processing plays a significant role. Interestingly, in China, blockchain has been deployed to perform what Chang, Iakovou, and Shi (2019) describe as a traceability function. In this context, blockchain and its associated tracking capabilities can provide verifiable, transparent, and immutable records in the form of digital certificates to products’ pedigrees. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese market has been flooded with counterfeit masks with lower effectiveness in preventing infections. Shen et al. (2021) studied how blockchain adoption could help combat counterfeit masks. Widespread blockchain adoption may lead low-quality sellers to either sell genuine low-quality masks or bring up the quality of their products.

Asokan et al. (2022), similar to articles discussed in Theme 2 (Butt and Shah 2020), point out that the COVID-19 pandemic provides decision-makers with an opportunity to redesign the supply chains, but unlike in previous studies, the ‘socially responsible operations performance’, not resilience, becomes a primary goal for this transformation – with technology being a main factor driving this change. Seven technologies are identified as transformational: Big Data analytics, digital twins, augmented reality, blockchain, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things. In the authors’ view, organisational agendas for Industry 4.0 and social responsibility are complementary.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology with the potential to improve supply chain resilience, features in many sampled papers (Asokan et al. 2022; Ivanov 2020; Koot, Mes, and Iacob 2021; Öberg 2021; Talwar et al. 2021), however, these studies lack more detailed discussion on specific use cases in supply chain management. Hasija and Esper (2022) article stands out in its attempt to understand the role of organisational factors in reconciling the differences between potential AI benefits and its actual acceptance and use. Interestingly, the study points out ‘trustworthiness’, not the complexity of the technology in question, as a primary barrier to broader adoption. Supply chain managers are concerned about being ‘replaced’ by algorithms and do not trust and second guess AI-generated feedback. Communicating AI trustworthiness throughout the organisation can act as guiding force in motivating employees to accept and use the technology.

The impact of geopolitical disruptions was particularly severe on supply chains for high-technology industries. Huawei was on a trajectory to overtake incumbent market leaders in 5 G infrastructure equipment, such as Samsung and Apple. The US government started an information campaign on alleged security loopholes in Huawei’s 5 G kits, including diplomatic pressure to encourage its allies to seek alternative providers (The Economist 2020). Allegations of Huawei’s links to the Chinese army and defence programs led to sanctions forbidding leading semiconductor manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung to supply cutting-edge chips to Huawei (Ting-Fang and Li 2021). In response, China intensified its efforts to build an independent, domestic semiconductor supply chain (Lewis 2019). Government-imposed lockdowns in the face of the pandemic led to interruptions in semiconductor production. China’s semiconductor strategy, as well as a chip shortage on the market (Wu, Lee, and Ngui 2021), prompted South Korea, Japan and the US to invest more in the semiconductor supply chain and devise their national chip strategies to maintain a competitive advantage over China and address shortages (Shead 2021).

The race between China and the US for primacy in high-technology supply chains is entirely missing from the reviewed articles. Only one article was found to analyse semiconductors supply chains in the context of geopolitical disruptions (Ramani, Ghosh, and Sodhi 2022), but this was based on secondary research (thematic analysis of 209 newspaper articles), and the scope was limited to understanding disruptions propagation. Existing studies also entirely omit the rare earth industry, crucial raw materials for the high-technology sector, as a subject of interest. At the same time, China’s position as a dominant supplier of rare earths provides the government with a powerful weapon, which it has weaponised during tensions with Japan around disputed islands, as well as during the peak of the US-China trade war (Li 2019). This has resulted in new state-advocated initiatives around the world that are trying to lessen dependency on China’s rare earth supplies (Wilson 2017). The impact of geopolitical risks on rare earth supply chains is yet to be investigated in AJG-listed journal articles.

Technological solutions to improve supply chain resilience in the face of geopolitical shocks are often futuristic, lacking empirically informed case studies that show real-life current applications and how these applications improve the functioning of supply chains in the period of distress. Part of the reviewed literature suggests technology as a panacea that could alleviate and shorten the negative impacts of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains. The application of sensors in logistics and manufacturing, Big Data analytics, Internet of Things are often mentioned in this context. Koot, Mes, and Iacob (2021) highlight the potential for equipping physical objects along the supply chains with sensing, communication, and processing capacities, resulting in the integration of data analytics techniques to detect or predict deviations from operational planning. However, studies which empirically determine whether proposed solutions meet contemporary business needs and really solve disruptive problems are rare. Some scarce examples of business adoptions include Walmart’s use of Big Data analytics to estimate the demand for hand sanitisers and GE’s implementation of machine learning to predict inventory shortages and delivery delays during the pandemic. These examples relate to what Talwar et al. (2021) defined as the demand forecasting functions of digital technologies.

5. Research gaps and research avenues

Recent events only underlie the urgency and relevance of the research area covered in this structured literature review in 2022, COVID-19-related lockdowns still impacted China’s most prominent commercial hub, Shanghai, including its port, which ranks as the largest in the world in terms of cargo throughput (World Shipping Council 2022); disrupting supply chains on a global scale. China-US tech rivalry continues, despite the change in White House staff. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) forewarns that science and technology would be the main battleground for China-US rivalry during the Biden administration (Lei and Chen 2022), with the focus shifting from trade issues to technology issues, exemplified in further crackdowns on Chinese tech companies with alleged links to military or working on dual-use technologies. In this case, dual-use constitutes a broad area, including computer chips and telecommunication equipment. This section discusses current research gaps that were identified in the earlier analysis and calls on researchers to address these gaps in their future studies.

5.1. The 2022 Russian invasion of the Ukraine

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine started at the end of February 2022 and continues with no end in sight, impacting supplies of some of the world’s most essential commodities, including oil, gas, grains and fertilisers (Tollefson 2022). The war has caused wide-ranging negative impacts on the manufacturing, transportation and food industries and increased inflationary pressure on the price of final goods and services. It has also led to the reconfiguration of procurement and logistics based on shortages, sanctions or public opinion pressure. In this context, agricultural and food supply chains seem particularly vulnerable. Compared to other industries, agriculture face distinct challenges related to seasonality, the perishable nature of goods and long lead times (Ali and Govindan 2021). Future research on how companies located in Russia or Ukraine, or companies with supply chains that criss-cross this region, can contribute to developing frameworks and roadmaps for managers to better address the effect of armed conflict on supply chain design and continuity, currently an underdeveloped area of study.

5.2. Geopolitical rivalry in the context of high-technology supply chains

Many geopolitical disruptions with significant impacts on the supply chains have been missing from the reviewed literature. The researchers acknowledge the unique properties of different disruptions, and their unique context, calling for more research (Hendry et al. 2019; Kähkönen et al. 2021; Roscoe et al. 2020, 2022; Thürer et al. 2019). One of the least covered areas in the research reviewed is the geopolitical rivalry in the context of high-technology supply chains. While several papers look at geopolitical events that represent US-China or even US-Western economic rivalry, they do so in the context of a US-China trade war (Handfield, Graham, and Burns 2020; Moosa et al. 2020; Ossa 2014), or in the context of BRI (Butt and Shah 2020; Nikjow et al. 2021; Ram and Zhang 2020). In the reviewed papers, technology is limited to the role of a tool that could be applied to improve the resilience and transparency of supply chains (Koot, Mes, and Iacob 2021; Talwar et al. 2021), but it has not been described and analysed as an area of rivalry between nation states. The leadership in hardware-intensive industries such as batteries, semiconductors, advanced materials and space has the potential to dictate countries’ economic and political standing in the 21st century, therefore, bestowing a strategic geopolitical character on manufacturing and distribution infrastructure for these technologies. In addition, semiconductors, batteries and advanced materials are the key building blocks for consumer facing products and services, as well as cutting edge weapons.

Based on their importance as building blocks, global powers compete to own and control their supply chains. From a managerial perspective, it is essential to understand how this geopolitical element interferes with high-technology supply chain design and operation. The following research question is therefore proposed: How will the ongoing technological rivalry between the US and China impact high-technology supply chains? Supply chains for high technologies include manufacturing facilities and logistic networks spanning beyond Chinese and US territories. To produce the batteries for EVs, cobalt might be mined in DR Congo, chemically processed in China into a chemical (cobalt sulphate), shipped to South Korea to be incorporated into cathode material, shipped again as a part of cathode material to Japan to be used in the production of the cell, and then again inside the cell transported to the US to produce the battery pack. The supply chain for semiconductors is equally globally dispersed and fragmented, with specific countries often specialising in crucial production steps. For instance, Japan specialises in the supply of specialty chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, Malaysia in chip testing and packaging, while Taiwan and South Korea are regarded as having the most advanced semiconductor foundries, operating at the highest levels of miniaturisation. Therefore, to create a final high-tech component for consumer products such as an EV or iPhone, several companies with facilities in different countries need to work closely together.

As capacities for producing these components are constrained, concentrated in specific countries and facing strong demand, the possibilities for alternative sourcing channels are heavily limited. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how the relationships of these countries on a political level with China and the US impact the design and operations of supply chains in these countries. This leads to the following sub-question: Does the technological rivalry between the US and China impact the supply chain flow and design of companies operating in tertiary countries?

Findings from these studies are expected to help supply chain managers to: better manage uncertainty caused by US-China technological rivalry, adjust sourcing strategies for critical components and raw materials, assess investment decisions in underlying supply chain infrastructure, decide on capacity expansions, and learn which strategies applied by their peers work best in mitigating disruptions. For US policy-makers, such research would represent a chance to understand the impact on firm level (micro) and industry level (macro) policies to prevent China from achieving competitive advantage in strategic technologies. A qualitative case study research design is recommended here, as it pays attention to the importance of context, highlighting that within a case study, the boundaries between the object of the study and its context are typically blurred (Yin 2003). Case study as a research strategy also serves very well in generating answers to research questions that start with ‘how’ and that follow a format of exploratory study (Saunders, Lewis, and Thornhill 2007).

Researchers are encouraged to conduct empirical studies based on company surveys in geopolitically strategic high-technology industries (i.e. semiconductors, rare earths, space) to determine how geopolitical rivalry impacts companies’ day-to-day operations and long-term strategy. On a more granular level, researchers could examine the challenges of firms whose business has been affected by economic sanctions and industrial policies to establish how related challenges and opportunities shaped their supply chain operations and planning.

5.3. Technology – impact of industry 4.0 on creating more resilient supply chains

While existing studies acknowledge the role of cutting-edge technologies in supply chains facing geopolitical disruptions such as Big Data analytics supported by Machine Learning (ML) and ubiquitous connected sensors (Koot, Mes, and Iacob 2021; Talwar et al. 2021) or the modular production technologies based on 3D printing (Öberg 2021; Xu et al. 2020), the current literature lacks recommendations on how to use these technologies to mitigate the impact of geopolitical disruptions on the supply chains. The concept of design and implementation of digital twins when managing geopolitical disruption risks could prove particularly useful due to its real-time monitoring abilities, and machine learning enhanced forecasting that could support decisions making (Ivanov and Dolgui 2020a). However, there are no studies on the level of deployment of such technologies or the extent of their awareness among supply chain managers facing geopolitical risks. In the body of reviewed literature, geopolitical disruptions have been perceived as a force leading to technological transformation (Linton 2018). These transformations were said to take place mostly in data-oriented technologies (Koot, Mes, and Iacob 2021; Talwar et al. 2021) and in smart manufacturing (Zhang et al. 2020).

Technology adoption in this context relates to how geopolitical disruptions incentivise change and technological advancement. However, there is no research exploring how technology can improve supply chain resilience in the face of geopolitical disruptions. Nevertheless, the potential for the application of such technologies is there, as data can be collected across the supply chain from manufacturing conveyor belt to the port’s warehouse. Information can be shared, aggregated and analysed in real-time, providing early warnings on supply chain shocks, potentially helping to address the negative impacts of more complex phenomena such as the bullwhip effect or perhaps even eliminating it altogether (Choudhary et al. 2022; Ivanov 2020; Talwar et al. 2021).

The Internet of Things is a critical element of this approach, allowing for a vast network of sensors collecting data points to communicate with each other and with data storing and processing devices. Currently, the body of literature lacks studies on how this and other technologies can achieve these objectives (Koot, Mes, and Iacob 2021; Xu et al. 2020). Future research could answer questions on what technologies could be used to foresee and manage the impacts of geopolitical disruptions on the supply chains and how this technology could be applied specifically. It is also worth investigating the attitude of supply chain managers towards adopting and using these technologies and the current state-of-the-art regarding their applications across industries. Among the reviewed articles, only Hasija and Esper (2022) looked at this problem, but the research was narrowed down to AI technology. Triangulation methods are encouraged for this task. Research efforts should involve close-ended information collection and assessment (quantitative methods) and open-ended information (qualitative methods) to investigate the same problem from different perspectives. Studies based on triangulation methods can integrate different data sources and methods to help more carefully examine the usage of technology to mitigate the impacts of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains. As more empirical and less conceptual research into supply chain resilience has been called for several times during the last two decades, this area provides an ample opportunity to move from research on a disruption-oriented response into the proactive reduction of risks for disruptions in the future (Grötsch, Blome, and Schleper 2013; van Hoek 2020). Based on these considerations, the following research question is proposed: How can emerging technologies help supply chain managers foresee and reduce the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains?

5.4. Decoupling – disentangling of complex and globalised supply chains

The discussion on technological decoupling and its repercussions for supply chains was missing in the reviewed literature. The topic has emerged in an IMF working paper (Peiris et al. 2021) where, under the researchers’ scenario, decoupling can lead to losses in the order of 5% of GDP for many economies. However, the concept has not been investigated from the perspective of operations, production and supply chain management research. Such contribution could provide management practitioners with an unbiased, non-partisan understanding of this phenomenon and its consequences.

The reviewed literature lacks even the definition of ‘decoupling’ in supply chain design. Roscoe et al. (2022) summarise the definitions of supply chain regionalisation and localisation, where regionalisation takes place when companies locate production facilities in lower-wage economies, close to major centres of demand, while localisation takes place when companies relocate production and supply to home markets to offer a quick response to customer requests while reducing the risks of supply chain disruptions. While many articles consider how tensions between nation states influence the configuration of supply chains (Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021; Moradlou, Fratocchi, et al. 2021; Neilson, Pritchard, and Yeung 2014; Roscoe et al. 2020), the focus is primarily on the relocation of storage and manufacturing facilities through regionalisation, localisation or back-shoring to eliminate or minimise the impact of geopolitical disruptions. However, the proposed solutions do not investigate the costs and viability of such strategies. The research gaps include the viability of relocating elements of or fully embedded supply chains based on the cluster of specialised suppliers concentrated in one geographic area. This question is particularly relevant for high-tech industries such as batteries, space or semiconductors that rely on networks of highly specialised suppliers of advanced materials, specialised components and specialty chemicals, often operating manufacturing facilities in geographically proximate areas near centres of demand.

The reviewed body of literature also lacks studies on the trade-offs between the relocation of supply chains versus the costs involved. Studies that would help to understand to what extent supply chain managers are able to compromise on lower profit margins or lower internal rate of returns to guarantee the higher level of resilience to geopolitical disruptions could be highly relevant for industry practitioners. The current discourse also entirely misses the efforts on the part of governments and corporations to develop independent supply chains based on greenfield investments. The best are represented by the US and EU initiatives to build independent battery supply chains for EVs from mines to battery plants, to substantially reduce reliance on China due to geopolitical risks. Meanwhile, due to the US sanctions on its 5G equipment maker and major cell phone manufacturer, Huawei based on its alleged links with Chinese military, China is trying to build an advanced independent semiconductor industry to shed reliance on Western semiconductors that constitute one of China’s biggest imports by value. These examples provide, so far missed, opportunities for empirically rich studies in the area of the impact of geopolitical disruptions on the design of supply chains.

On the conceptual level, it would be worthwhile to understand how the decoupling phenomenon relates to the concepts of localisation and regionalisation in supply chain design. Another question is what role costs, security of supply, and external institutional factors such as politics play within the supply chain decoupling decision.

The concept of decoupling is often used in conjunction with efforts to build independent supply chains. These efforts are represented in wider industry discourse through presentations at industry conferences, industry associations, media articles, and new legislation. If the battery supply chain and Europe is taken into consideration as an example of this phenomenon, the mission of the EU’s co-founded European Battery Alliance is ‘to ensure an unbroken value chain in Europe that can supply the market with all the batteries it needs – with the smallest environmental footprint possible’ (Value Chain 2019). Clearly, self-sufficiency and environmental considerations are major arguments propelling this ambition. They are also closely related, as highly integrated supply chains situated in one geographical area allow the cutting of the emissions related to transportation and make life cycle assessment (LCA) easier. It could be beneficial to look at how geopolitical disruptions impact the development of supply chains crucial for energy transition, as there is clearly a relationship between these two areas. Due to the timeline, the war in Ukraine is missing from the reviewed literature but could also provide a further context for this question, with immediacy of turning away from Russia’s supplied fossil fuels and impact of this on ongoing energy transition. The key question to answer here would be whether war in Ukraine and related energy crises accelerates or slows down the development of supply chains for energy transition (including renewables, electric grids, batteries, EVs, etc.).

5.5. Regionalisation of supply chains – aiming at self-sufficiency in strategic technologies and industries

It is also interesting to observe that the reviewed body of literature does not analyse the phenomenon of independent supply chains. While the initiatives towards achieving supply chain independence for strategic technologies are clearly there, e.g. the EU’s efforts to develop an independent battery supply chain from a mine to the battery plant and China’s effort to develop an independent semiconductor supply chain. Nevertheless, despite its importance to global security and the economy, as well as far-reaching practical implications for supply chain managers, this phenomenon has been ignored in the supply chain management literature. Its analysis could generate new theoretical insights and a range of practical recommendations for managers and policymakers.

New research could include a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the viability and cost of building independent regionalised supply chains. This research could include whether the advantages of building independent regional supply chains for strategic industries (high-technology industries, medicines and PPE products) in terms of safety of supplies, shorter lead times, and increased R&D capabilities outweigh the costs expressed in the number of necessary investments and lead time needed to build them. Future studies could model how independent regionalised supply chains, with manufacturing facilities and distribution centres concentrated in one geographical region/country, can mitigate the negative impacts of geopolitical events such as pandemic-induced lockdowns, trade wars, military conflicts and sanctions.

The EU’s and China’s ambitions for semiconductors and battery self-sufficiency could serve as revealing case studies in this area. In terms of methodology, the institutional theory could be used as a theoretical lens in this endeavour. Chinese and EU governments, industry associations and other actors beyond the companies from the battery or semiconductor industries could be recognised as institutional actors who serve as their architects and builders (Wu and Jia 2018). Furthermore, the institutional theory framework could provide researchers with the basic language to explain the processes that enable the design of independent supply chains.

5.6. Further research avenues

Based on an analysis of papers included in this structured literature review, several future research directions have been identified; these may inspire scholars to establish their research agenda in this field.

More research is needed into geopolitical disruptions impacting supply chains for service industries; in the extant literature, the focus is much more on manufacturing (Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021; Moradlou, Fratocchi, et al. 2021; Talwar et al. 2021). It would also be worthwhile to examine the geopolitical events discussed in the reviewed papers again after the disruption ends to focus on lessons learned, with higher clarity on different actions costs, advantages and decisions making processes (Kähkönen et al. 2021; Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021). It could also be beneficial to perform more research on systemic disruptions where more than one industry is affected (Ramani, Ghosh, and Sodhi 2022). Both COVID-19 and Brexit were systemic events, but in the reviewed articles, the assumed research approach was not aimed at their systemic character. Several authors called for more analysis on how supply chain disruptions impact the downstream segment of supply chains or even the market for a given product/service or the demand (Ivanov 2020; Ivanov and Dolgui 2020a; Talwar et al. 2021; Xu et al. 2022). Surprisingly all reviewed papers are more supply centred. There is also not much understanding of how disruptions in supply chains propagate and how to make them more resilient to the ‘ripple effect’ (Choudhary et al. 2022; Falcone, Fugate, and Dobrzykowski 2021; Ivanov 2020; Ivanov and Dolgui 2020b; Xu et al. 2020). Further, as Iftikhar, Purvis, et al. (2022) argued, increasing the structural complexity of supply chains (expressed by the higher number of nodes) makes them more susceptible to disruptions. This is inevitable as supply chain complexity tends to increase with product variety, adoption of new technologies, and extension of supplier base (Ateş and Memiş 2021). Future studies could consider the relationship between supply chain complexity and the effect of geopolitical disruptions on the design of complex supply network configurations.

While many studies exist exploring the impact of supply chain sustainability on firms’ performance (Govindan et al. 2020), only a few articles look at the sustainability in the context of disruption (Choudhary et al. 2022; Grzybowska and Stachowiak 2022; Sauer, Silva, and Schleper 2022).

5.7. Geopolitical disruptions and supply chains – filling the blanks

While the last decade has been ripe with geopolitical disruptions, not all have been an object of research, although we might assume that all of them impacted the operations and design of supply chains to some degree. For example, geopolitical events such as rare earths-related disputes between China and Japan and China and Myanmar, the Japan-South Korea dispute over Second World War reparations impacting the semiconductor industry, and US semiconductor trade policy targeting China, including sanctions with the US exterritorial scope, are only some of the events that could provide ample empirical data for further research in this field. So far, the examined events included Brexit (Hendry et al. 2019; Moradlou, Reefke, et al. 2021; Moradlou, Fratocchi, et al. 2021; Roscoe et al. 2020), the US-China trade war (Handfield, Graham, and Burns 2020; Moosa et al. 2020; Ossa 2014), the COVID-19 pandemic (Chowdhury et al. 2021; Handfield, Graham, and Burns 2020; Sodhi, Tang, and Willenson 2021; van Hoek 2020; van Hoek and Dobrzykowski 2021), and China’s BRI (Butt and Shah 2020; Nikjow et al. 2021; Ram and Zhang 2020). The lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit on supply chains deserves further investigation from a posterior perspective. Further, the US, G7 and the EU’s answers to China’s BRI, such as ‘Build Back Better World’ and ‘Global Gateway’, require more attention from researchers. The same can be said about China’s BRI itself, first publicly proposed in 2013. Despite its nine-year history and numerous infrastructure projects around the world at different stages of completion, it was only analysed from a risks perspective in three papers identified in this review (Butt and Shah 2020; Nikjow et al. 2021; Ram and Zhang 2020), while it is often perceived as one of Xi Jinping’s key legacy projects.

6. Limitations and conclusions

Despite the highly structured literature review approach, this study has several limitations. The findings are based on the relevant literature from the field of management studies published over the past 26 years that were available in Web of Science and Scopus. The articles selected in the review process were limited to ABS-ranked journal articles, and therefore the review was far from exhaustive. Inclusion of ABS-ranked journal articles only, guaranteed the highest quality of publications and provided the reviewer with valuable insight into the number and topics of articles relevant to the research question and published in top management journals. As a drawback, a wealth of insights coming from other peer-reviewed journals, conference papers and books has been excluded from this review.

Despite these limitations, the value of this study lies in its novelty and the synthesis of the body of knowledge on the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains, which is not apparent from reading the individual articles in isolation (Denyer and Tranfield 2009). Consequently, the findings from the analysis and synthesis of articles in this review have identified a number of research gaps to further advance this topic.

Despite its timeliness and practical managerial implications, the literature on the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains has yet to be clearly demarcated as a sub-discipline of study. This study is the first attempt to examine the current state of the literature on the impact of geopolitical disruptions on global supply chains and to set up a future research agenda for this pressing topic.

To answer the review question of How do geopolitical disruptions affect the configuration, flow, and management of global supply chains? a systematic literature review was conducted on 50 articles from ABS-ranked academic journals in the fields of operations and production management, supply chain management, logistics, transportation, and public policy from 1995 to 2022.

Through analysis and synthesis of the literature, the review revealed that the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains constitute a new subfield of research with three main themes centred on supply chain design, tensions between nation states and technology. The findings indicate that the impact of geopolitical disruptions on supply chains can be mitigated by the re-design of existing supply chains and the use of high technologies. Supply chain design solutions centre around regionalisation and moving away from just-in-time delivery models, while the use of high technology should increase supply chain transparency, therefore reducing bottlenecks and magnitude of the bullwhip effect. Modularised, smart manufacturing supports the supply chain regionalisation efforts by providing the opportunity to produce more customised goods, closer to the end consumers.

By identifying research gaps, this study laid out the foundation for future research to investigate the costs and benefits of supply chain regionalisation and practical applications of high technologies in alleviating the negative effects of geopolitical disruptions.

Further, this study could be used as a guideline for practitioners on how to insulate their supply chains from the impacts of geopolitical shocks and how to (re)design supply chains to become more resilient in terms of geopolitical disruptions by synthesising and summarising a wealth of knowledge on this topic. This study points to the tensions between nation states and their types as sources of risks for supply chains in the globalised economy. Tensions between nation states can be defined as the state of strained or uneasy relations between two or more countries, which may arise due to ideological differences, political disagreements, economic competition, territorial disputes, or cultural and religious differences. They can manifest in various ways, including diplomatic conflicts, economic sanctions, military threats, and even armed conflicts. The study provides managers with the advantages and disadvantages of numerous mitigation strategies, mostly related to technology adoption and supply chain design solutions. Moreover, it sets the agenda for further studies on this topic by underlining existing gaps in its understanding. These blank sports present a set of unknowns and thus risks for businesses that could be formulated into research questions, evaluated and hopefully answered in close partnership with academia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lukasz Bednarski

Lukasz Bednarski is a PhD student at University of Sussex, Business School. His research interests include supply chain management with a focus on high-technology and commodities industries. He is an author of the book ‘Lithium: The Global Race for Battery Dominance and the New Energy Revolution’ published by Hurst in 2021 and translated to South Korean, Polish, Spanish and Chinese. He worked in a variety of roles across the commodity industry including research, consulting, training and trading. He lectured at Warsaw University of Technology and taught professional courses on commodities trading through the private course provider ‘Commodities Academy’.

Samuel Roscoe

Samuel Roscoe is a Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. He has published on the topics of geopolitical disruptions and supply chain redesign in the International Journal of Operations Management and Production Planning and Control. He has also written on the role of additive manufacturing in reshaping global supply chains in the Journal of Product Innovation Management and Journal of Operations Management. Samuel has provided supply chain capability training to over 200 civil servants and policy makers in the UK Cabinet Office, Department for Business and Trade, and Department for Transport.

Constantin Blome

Constantin Blome is Academic Dean/Rektor of Lancaster University Leipzig since September 2022. He is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Operations & Production Management. Constantin’s research interests include supply chain management, procurement and operations management with a strong focus on sustainability, innovation and risk issues. In 2020 and 2021, he received the highly cited research award from Clarivate in the category ‘cross field’, highlighting the top 0,1% cited scholars. Constantin is regular keynote speaker at academic and practitioner conferences. His research won several prestigious awards. Constantin is also co-owner and board member of two companies (n-side, Belgium, and Procurence, Poland).

In earlier years, Constantin was Associate Dean of Research, Head of the Management Group and Professor of Operations Management at the University of Sussex Business School where he was also responsible for the REF position. Before, Constantin was the GlaxoSmithKline Chaired Professor in Strategic Sourcing and Procurement at UCLouvain, Belgium and affiliated with the Centre of Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE). Today, he still works part-time as Kronos Group Endowed Chair at UCLouvain/CORE. In his earlier career, he was supply chain consultant in Switzerland, assistant professor at EBS Business School, Germany, visiting scholar at IIM Bangalore, India. During his career he lectured and pursued research at institutions in the US, Canada, India, China, France, Belgium, Thailand etc.

Martin C. Schleper

Martin C. Schleper is Professor of Supply Chain Management and Sustainability at the NEOMA Business School in Reims, France (Information Systems, Supply Chain Management & Decision Support Department). He obtained his Ph.D at the EBS University of Business and Law in Wiesbaden, Germany in 2014. Before joining NEOMA, Martin has worked at the University of Sussex Business School and Nottingham University Business School in the UK. His research investigates sustainability, ethical issues, risks, and responsibilities in supply chains. Martin published in International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of Business Ethics, among others. He acts as an Editorial Assistant and Associate Editor for the International Journal of Operations and Production Management and serves on the Editorial Review Boards of Journal of Supply Chain Management, Journal of Business Logistics, and Journal of Business Ethics, among others.

Appendix A.

Overview of literature reviews on supply chain disruptions

 

Table

Authors	Title	Journal	Summary
Agrawal and Jain (2021)	Insights from systematic literature review of supply chain resilience and disruption	Benchmarking: An International Journal	A systematic literature review of supply chain resilience and disruption, proposing a framework of supply chain resilience strategies to reduce the adverse effects of supply chain disruptions.
Alkhudary et al. (2022)	Mitigating the risk of specific supply chain disruptions through blockchain technology	Supply Chain Forum: An International Journal	A systematic literature review that investigates which supply chain disruptions can be mitigated through blockchain technology.
Altay and Pal (2022)	Coping in supply chains: a conceptual framework for disruption management	The International Journal of Logistics Management	Proposes a conceptual framework adapted from coping theory in psychology to explain supply chain disruption management and how organisations can become more effective in managing disruptions.
Barbieri et al. (2020)	What can we learn about reshoring after COVID-19?	Operations Management Research	Examines the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on reshoring, and how research should address this issue in the future.
Bier, Lange, and Glock (2019)	Methods for mitigating disruptions in complex supply chain structures: a systematic literature review	International Journal of Production Research	Systematic literature review and content analysis to provide an overview of the methods used for mitigating disruptions in complex supply chain structures.
Charpin (2022)	The resurgence of nationalism and its implications for supply chain risk management	International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management	Examines how nationalism can lead to supply chain disruptions for foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) and provides suggestions to measure nationalist sentiment, economic nationalism and national animosity to guide future research on this topic.
Chowdhury et al. (2021)	COVID-19 pandemic related supply chain studies: A systematic review	Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review	Systematic literature review of research on the COVID-19 pandemic in supply chain disciplines, providing research questions and directions for further investigation.
Datta (2017)	Supply network resilience: a systematic literature review and future research	The International Journal of Logistics Management	Systematic literature review of supply chain resilience
Duong and Chong (2020)	Supply chain collaboration in the presence of disruptions: a literature review	International Journal of Production Research	Investigates the role of collaboration in the presence of disruptions to build supply chain resilience.
Duong and Chong (2020)	Supply chain collaboration in the presence of disruptions: a literature review	International Journal of Production Research	Investigates the role of collaboration in the presence of disruptions to build supply chain resilience.
Etemadi et al. (2021)	Supply chain disruption risk management with blockchain: A dynamic literature review	Information	A literature review on the use of blockchain technology to manage cyber and disruption risks in the supply chain.
Grzybowska and Stachowiak (2022)	Global changes and disruptions in supply chains—preliminary research to sustainable resilience of supply chains	Energies	Discusses the characteristics of disruptions in supply chains and how global changes, such as development of technology, the COVID-19 pandemic, and changes in consumer behaviour, have contributed to making supply chains unpredictable and volatile.
Hohenstein et al. (2015)	Research on the phenomenon of supply chain resilience	International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics	A systematic review of the literature on supply chain resilience.
Iftikhar, Ali, et al. (2022)	Digital innovation, data analytics, and supply chain resiliency: A bibliometric-based systematic literature review	Annals of Operations Research	A systematic literature review analysing the intersection of digital innovation, data analytics, and supply chain resilience.
Ivanov et al. (2017)	Literature review on disruption recovery in the supply chain	International Journal of Production Research	Review of research on disruption risks.
Katsaliaki, Galetsi, and Kumar (2022)	Supply chain disruptions and resilience: a major review and future research agenda	Annals of Operations Research	Review on supply chain disruptions and resilience, with an emphasis on the latest developments in the field.
Llaguno, Mula, and Campuzano-Bolarin (2021)	State of the art, conceptual framework and simulation analysis of the ripple effect on supply chains	International Journal of Production Research	A systematic review of the existing literature that covers the ripple effect in the supply chain context.
Montoya-Torres, Muñoz-Villamizar, and Mejia-Argueta (2021)	Mapping research in logistics and supply chain management during COVID-19 pandemic	International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications	COVID-19 impact on supply chains.
Mustapha et al. (2022)	The role of collaborative resource sharing in supply chain recovery during disruptions: A systematic literature review	IEEE Access	A systematic literature review of the role of collaborative resource sharing in supply chain recovery during disruptions.
Perdana et al. (2022)	Food supply chain management in disaster events: A systematic literature review	International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction	A systematic literature review on research into food supply chain management in disaster situations.
Pujawan and Bah (2021)	Supply chains under COVID-19 disruptions: literature review and research agenda	Supply Chain Forum: An International Journal	Supply chain disruptions in the context of COVID-19 impact.
Qrunfleh et al. (2022)	Mitigation themes in supply chain research during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic literature review	Benchmarking: An International Journal	A systematic literature review of supply chain mitigation literature since the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the themes and direction of supply chain mitigation and resilience.
Shekarian and Mellat Parast (2020)	An Integrative approach to supply chain disruption risk and resilience management: a literature review	International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications	A systematic literature review of the impact of supply chain resilience enhancers (flexibility, agility, collaboration, and redundancy) on mitigating each type of supply chain disruption.
Shen and Li (2016)	Market disruptions in supply chains: a review of operational models	International Transactions in Operational Research	Review of supply chain disruption literature.
Shi et al. (2021)	Present and future trends of supply chain management in the presence of COVID-19: a structured literature review	International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications	A systematic literature review of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on research in the field of Operations Management and Supply Chain Management
Spieske and Birkel (2021)	Improving supply chain resilience through industry 4.0: A systematic literature review under the impressions of the COVID-19 pandemic	Computers & Industrial Engineering	A systematic literature review of the link between industry 4.0 and supply chain resilience.

Appendix B.

Reviewed articles

 

Table

Authors	Title	Journal	Main theme	Sub-theme	Event/concept	Methodology	AJG 2021 rank
Ali and Govindan (2021)	Extenuating operational risks through digital transformation of agri-food supply chains	Production Planning and Control	Technology	NA	Industry 4.0	Survey	3
Asokan et al. (2022)	Socially responsible operations in the Industry 4.0 era: post-COVID-19 technology adoption and perspectives on future research	International Journal of Operations & Production Management	Technology	Tensions between nation states	Industry 4.0	Literature review	4
Blessley and Mudambi (2022)	A trade war and a pandemic: Disruption and resilience in the food bank supply chain	Industrial Marketing Management	Tensions between nation states	N/A	Trade War, Covid-19	Mixed methods	3
Butt and Shah (2020)	Exploring potential implications of Belt and Road Initiative for supply chain resilience: a comparative study of five South Asian countries	Benchmarking - An International Journal	Tensions between nation states	N/A	BRI, resilience	Case study	1
Chang et al. (2019)	Blockchain in global supply chains and cross border trade: a critical synthesis of the state-of-the-art, challenges and opportunities	International Journal of Production Research	Technology	N/A	Blockchain	Mixed methods	3
Charpin et al. (2020)	The influence of perceived host country political risk on foreign subunits’ supplier development strategies	Journal of Operations Management	Supply chain design	N/A	Political risks	Simulation/ modelling	4
Choudhary et al. (2022)	Does reshoring affect the resilience and sustainability of supply chain networks? The cases of Apple and Jaguar Land Rover	British Journal of Management	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	Brexit, SCN, backshoring	Case study	4
Croson et al. (2013)	Order stability in supply chains: Coordination risk and the role of coordination stock	Production and Operations Management	Supply chain design	N/A	Stocks, coordination	Simulation/ modelling	4
Dubey et al. (2020)	Blockchain technology for enhancing swift-trust, collaboration and resilience within a humanitarian supply chain setting	International Journal of Production Research	Technology	N/A	Blockchain	Simulation/ modelling	3
Falcone, Fugate, and Dobrzykowski (2021)	Supply chain plasticity during a global disruption: Effects of CEO and supply chain networks on operational repurposing	Journal of Business Logistics	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	Supply chain network	Secondary data	3
Handfield et al. (2020)	Corona virus, tariffs, trade wars and supply chain evolutionary design	International Journal of Operations & Production Management	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	COVID-19, Trade wars	Case study	4
Hasija and Esper (2022)	In artificial intelligence (AI) we trust: A qualitative investigation of AI technology acceptance	Journal of Business Logistics	Technology	N/A	AI	Secondary data	3
Hendry et al. (2019)	Local food supply chain resilience to constitutional change: the Brexit effect	International Journal of Operations & Production Management	Tensions between nation states	N/A	Brexit, resilience	Case study	4
Huq et al. (2016)	Supply chain configuration conundrum: how does the pharmaceutical industry mitigate disturbance factors?	Production Planning and Control	Supply chain design	N/A	Risk mitigation	Case study	3
Huq et al. (2020)	Disturbances to the supply chains of high-value manufacturing firms: comparison of the perceptions of product managers and supply chain managers	International Journal of Production Research	Supply chain design	N/A	Manufacturing	Case study	3
Iftikhar, Ali, et al. (2022)	The impact of supply chain complexities on supply chain resilience: the mediating effect of big data analytics	Production Planning and Control	Technology	NA	Big Data	Survey	3
Ivanov (2020)	Predicting the impacts of epidemic outbreaks on global supply chains: A simulation-based analysis on the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2) case	Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review	Tensions between nation states	N/A	COVID-19	Simulation/ modelling	3
Ivanov and Dolgui (2020a)	A digital supply chain twin for managing the disruption risks and resilience in the era of Industry 4.0	Production Planning and Control	Technology	NA	Industry 4.0	Simulation/ modelling	3
Ivanov and Dolgui (2020b)	Viability of intertwined supply networks: extending the supply chain resilience angles towards survivability. A position paper motivated by COVID-19 outbreak	International Journal of Production Research	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	COVID-19, Supply chain network	Simulation/ modelling	3
Kähkönen et al. (2021)	COVID-19 as a trigger for dynamic capability development and supply chain resilience improvement	International Journal of Production Research	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	COVID-19, dynamic capability	Survey	3
Koot et al. (2021)	A systematic literature review of supply chain decision making supported by the Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics.	Computers and Industrial Engineering	Technology	N/A	Big Data, IoT	Literature review	2
Linton (2018)	Open innovation/integration versus disintermediation/ disintegration	Technovation	Technology	N/A	Disintegration	Theoretical/ conceptual	3
Moosa et al. (2020)	The origin of the US-China trade war	Applied Economics	Tensions between nation states	NA	Trade wars	Simulation/ modelling	2
Moradlou et al. (2021a)	Geopolitical disruptions and the manufacturing location decision in multinational company supply chains: a Delphi study on Brexit	International Journal of Operations & Production Management	Tensions between nation states	Supply chain design	Brexit, backshoring	Survey	4
Moradlou et al. (2021b)	Post-Brexit back-shoring strategies: what UK manufacturing companies could learn from the past?	Production Planning and Control	Tensions between nation states	Supply chain design	Brexit, backshoring	Case study	3
Nikjow et al. (2021)	Risk analysis of belt and road infrastructure projects using integrated ISM-MICMAC approach	Journal of Modelling and Management	Tensions between nation states	N/A	BRI, SCRM	Mixed methods	1
Öberg (2021)	Episodic supply chains at times of disruption	Supply Chain Management: An International Journal	Technology	Tensions between nation states	Supply chain design	Mixed methods	3
Ossa (2014)	Trade wars and trade talks with data	American Economic Review	Tensions between nation states	N/A	Trade wars	Secondary data	4
Panwar, Pinkse, and de Marchi (2022)	The future of global supply chains in a post-COVID-19 world	California Management Review	Tensions between nation states	Supply chain design	COVID-19	Literature review	3
Raj et al. (2022)	Supply chain management during and post-COVID-19 pandemic: Mitigation strategies and practical lessons learned	Journal of Business Research	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	COVID-19, mitigation	Mixed methods	3
Ram and Zhang (2020)	Belt and road initiative (BRI) supply chain risks: propositions and model development	International Journal of Logistics Management	Tensions between nation states	N/A	BRI, SCRM	Mixed methods	1
Ramani et al. (2022)	Understanding systemic disruption from the COVID-19-induced semiconductor shortage for the auto industry	Omega	Tensions between nation states	N/A	COVID-19	Literature review	3
Roscoe et al. (2020)	Managing supply chain uncertainty arising from geopolitical disruptions: evidence from the pharmaceutical industry and Brexit	International Journal of Operations & Production Management	Tensions between nation states	Supply chain design	Brexit, backshoring	Case study	4
Roscoe et al. (2022)	Redesigning global supply chains during compounding geopolitical disruptions: the role of supply chain logics	International Journal of Operations & Production Management	Supply chain design	N/A	Supply chain design	Theoretical/ conceptual	4
Scholten and Bosman (2016)	The geopolitics of renewables; exploring the political implications of renewable energy systems.	Technological Forecasting and Social Change	Supply chain design	N/A	Supply chain design	Theoretical/ conceptual	3
Shen and Sun (2021)	Strengthening supply chain resilience during COVID-19: A case study of JD.com	Journal of Operations Management	Tensions between nation states	Technology	COVID-19, Big Data	Mixed methods	4
Shen et al. (2021)	Battling counterfeit masks during the COVID-19 outbreak: quality inspection vs. blockchain adoption	International Journal of Production Research	Technology	Tensions between nation states	Blockchain, COVID-19	Simulation/ modelling	3
Shih (2020)	Is it time to rethink lobalized supply chains?	MIT Sloan Management Review	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	COVID-19	Theoretical/ conceptual	3
Sodhi et al. (2021)	Research opportunities in preparing supply chains of essential goods for future pandemics	International Journal of Production Research	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	COVID-19	Secondary data	3
Stekelorum et al. (2022)	Pouring cement down one of your oil wells: Relationship between the supply chain disruption orientation and performance	Production and Operations Management	Supply chain design	N/A	Supply chain design	Survey	4
Talwar et al. (2021)	Big Data in operations and supply chain management: a systematic literature review and future research agenda	International Journal of Production Research	Technology	N/A	Big Data	Literature review	3
Thürer et al. (2019)	A systematic review of China’s belt and road initiative: implications for global supply chain management	International Journal of Production Research	Tensions between nation states	N/ A	BRI	Literature review	3
Urciuoli et al. (2014)	The resilience of energy supply chains: a multiple case study approach on oil and gas supply chains to Europe	Supply Chain Management: An International Journal	Supply chain design	N/A	Resilience	Case study	3
Wagner, Mizgier, and Arnez (2014)	Disruptions in tightly coupled supply chain networks: the case of the US offshore oil industry	Production Planning and Control	Supply chain design	N/A	Supply chain design	Secondary data	3
Xu et al. (2020)	Disruption risks in supply chain management: a literature review based on bibliometric analysis	International Journal of Production Research	Technology	NA	SCRM	Literature review	3
Xu et al. (2022)	Reforming global supply chain management under pandemics: The GREAT-3Rs framework	Production and Operations Management	Technology	N/A	COVID-19	Theoretical/ conceptual	4
Yang et al. (2020)	Antecedents and consequences of supply chain risk management capabilities: an investigation in the post-coronavirus crisis	International Journal of Production Research	Tensions between nation states	Supply chain design	COVID-19, SCRM	Survey	3
Yildiz et al. (2015)	Reliable supply chain network design	Decision Sciences	Supply chain design	N/A	Supply chain network	Simulation/ modelling	3
Yu and Greeven (2020)	How autonomy creates resilience in the face of crisis	MIT Sloan Management Review	Supply chain design	Tensions between nation states	Resilience	Theoretical/ conceptual	3
Zhang et al. (2020)	Evolution of operations management research: from managing flows to building capabilities	Production and Operations Management	Technology	N/A	Dynamic capabilities	Literature review	4

AI: Artificial Intelligence; BRI: Belt and Road Initiative; IoT: Internet of Things; SCRM: Supply chain risk ma.