Resilience in Law Enforcement Technology Design and Development: Analysing User Requirements for Current Approaches in European Border Security Research and Innovation

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the meaning of resilience for European digital infrastructures which safeguard vital societal functions, such as the activities of European law enforcement authorities. The pandemic has vividly illustrated that unreliable IT-systems and networks cripple also authorities’ business continuity and access to critical information when alternative processing methods remain scarce during times of transformed social interaction. The development of resilience thus demands research and innovation investments also in the future, as emerging risks, both physical and human-made, may produce long-lasting consequences to systems critical to European safety and security. In EU-funded security research, resilience has formed a well-established concept even before current events and prolonged crisis, however, not uniformly across all law enforcement domains. This article focuses on border security research in the H2020 programme and analyses how resilience is addressed within this field. The H2020 programme underlines practitioners’ decisive role in determining the requirements for future technological solutions. Therefore, we concentrate on the initial stages of the systems design and development process, in particular the user requirements elicitation phase. The article’s specific aims are to identify preliminary resilience perspectives, which users convey forward in the design and development process, and propose future research directions to strengthen resilience thinking also in the border security domain.