Government Resilience in the Digital Age
A Framework for 21st Century Survival
Hello, I’m Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project. In this edition of our newsletter, Andres Raieste, Senior Vice President, Global Public Sector at Nortal joins SCSP’s Joe Wang and Lauren Naniche to discuss Estonia’s digital transformation and the future of digital resilience in this era of global technology competition.
SCSP’s Digital Freedom Playbook started looking at how nations facing external aggression and digital repression could prepare to defend their digital ecosystems and preserve the core digital elements of democratic life. A new report Government Resilience in the Digital Age by Estonia’s digital transformation company Nortal, jointly with the University of Oxford and the Government of Estonia, builds on the themes from the Digital Freedom Playbook, and offers key insights and recommendations for the future of digital resilience.
A New Digital Era of Nation-State Sovereignty
The traditional model of a nation-state and national governance, anchored in control over its physical territory and infrastructure, faces unprecedented challenges in today's interconnected world. Multiple overlapping crises—from pandemics to climate disasters to cyber warfare—have exposed critical vulnerabilities in how nations operate, while simultaneously revealing the distinct advantages of those that are digitally advanced. To guarantee national resilience in the physical domain, democracies must now ensure they can operate effectively in the digital domain as well.
COVID-19 served as an unexpected but definitive testing ground. Nearly 30% of European governments postponed elections between 2020-2022, effectively disrupting their democratic processes. Many nations failed to transition effectively to remote education, while others struggled to maintain basic government services. These failures stemmed not from the pandemic itself, but from an outdated approach to government operations that remained fundamentally tied to physical infrastructure and presence.
Estonia's experience offers crucial insights into alternative approaches. Following its independence in 1991, Estonia recognized technology as essential not just for efficiency but for state sovereignty and security following decades of Soviet oppression. Rather than looking at private sector technology as a potential threat to state control, Estonia embraced collaboration with industry partners as essential allies in digital transformation.
The current global landscape presents multiple, simultaneous challenges to national security and stability, from natural disasters to external invasion. More recently, we have witnessed military conflicts increasingly targeting digital infrastructure, such as Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s data centers with both malware and cruise missiles. Nations must now operate seamlessly across both physical and digital domains or risk failure in both.
Seven Pillars of Government Resilience in the Digital Age
SCSP’s Digital Freedom Playbook, published in December 2022, offered several initial lessons learned from Ukraine’s early efforts on how nations can preserve digital democracy against external aggression, such as ensuring the nation has redundant and alternative connectivity infrastructure, transferring public services online, strengthening multi-stakeholder collaboration on cybersecurity capabilities to protect essential information flows, and implementing measures to combat disinformation.
Nortal’s report reinforces and expands on these steps with seven pillars that form the foundation of truly resilient digital nations, in the face of new challenges:
Nations must adopt digital-first approaches to critical services and registries. Paper-based systems and physical-dependent processes create unnecessary vulnerabilities. Digital registries, properly secured and redundantly stored, offer greater resilience during crises.
Public sector workforces must transition to remote-first or remote-enabled operations. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated how quickly government facilities can become inaccessible. But this first “networked war” has also shown how digital operations enable a state’s workforce to maintain essential functions regardless of physical circumstances.
Cybersecurity and infrastructure security remain paramount. The 2007 cyber attacks on Estonia—the first ever against a nation—highlighted how digital warfare can paralyze traditionally-structured governments. Nations today face daily cyber attacks, requiring constant vigilance and evolution of cyber defense capabilities and policies.
Internet connectivity must be treated as critical infrastructure, with built-in redundancy. During crises, loss of connectivity effectively severs citizens from essential state services. Multiple backup systems, including satellite communications, become essential for national and government resilience.
Digital infrastructure requires geographic redundancy, potentially beyond territorial borders. Estonia’s Data Embassy concept, as well as Ukraine’s rapid relocation of its public sector data to friendly territories, demonstrate how nations can maintain digital government operations even if its physical territory is compromised.
States must carefully manage third-party risk while preserving access to technological innovation. Most governments cannot independently develop or maintain required digital infrastructure. Relationships with trusted private sector partners require careful balance between security and capability.
Institutional capacity for digital resilience demands coordinated, whole-of-government approaches. Individual government agency efforts are insufficient; nations and governments need centralized oversight of digital resilience strategies.
Beyond Physical Borders: The Emergence of Digital Nations
As peoples, governments, and nations build out the digital world and implement these digital resilience principles, we will need to develop new frameworks to manage the digital relations between nations. The foundational principles of international law and governance that are rooted in physical territory and sovereignty do not hold in the digital world. How does a digital nation engage in international relations online? What constitutes diplomatic recognition and the respect for sovereignty in a digital context? Perhaps a “Vienna Convention” on Digital Relations can support a digital Westphalian system of nations.
Cross-border digital cooperation takes on new significance in this context. Digital services that operate across multiple territories are already challenging traditional concepts of jurisdiction and authority. A key example is the case of differing data privacy regulations between the United States and the EU, and the resulting impact on the digital operations of private sector entities subject to their jurisdiction. While the EU itself is a unique regional integration organization, its digital initiatives point toward a potential model for groups of otherwise sovereign nations to create shared governance frameworks that integrate digital infrastructure and services that cross national borders in a relatively seamless manner. As mentioned earlier, Ukraine also offers an interesting lesson: a week before Russia’s invasion, the Verkhovna Rada passed a law to allow public sector data to be stored on servers outside of the country, reversing a prior law that prohibited this. This move proved critical to the digital continuity of the Ukrainian government, which was then able to partner with U.S. companies to back up its public sector data into the cloud. While these servers were outside the sovereign control of Ukraine, the trust in the effectiveness and integrity of U.S. technology and the longstanding ties between our nations allowed this historic example of cross-border digital cooperation to occur.
The rise of digital nations will also impact global power dynamics. We will need to consider carefully the implications of digital threats to traditional security arrangements. How do collective defense obligations apply to digital infrastructure? When does a cyber attack constitute an act of war?
Nations with advanced digital infrastructure and capabilities may gain new forms of influence and innovation power, while those without risk becoming marginalized. We already see the People’s Republic of China (PRC) stepping up its global tech and digital engagement around the world, such as through its Digital Silk Road. Without greater focus to compete more vigorously in this space, the United States and its allies and partners will cede our leadership of the global tech and digital order to the PRC. This could reshape international alliances and economic relationships, creating new patterns of dependency and cooperation that will be antithetical to U.S. interests.
And as this digital era evolves to the next era of AI transformation, these issues challenging the foundations of international relations will only accelerate. Success in this transformation requires more than technical solutions. Nations must develop new legal frameworks, international agreements, and operational models that account for both physical and digital dimensions of governance. The future belongs to those nations that can effectively operate across both domains to protect and promote their national security, economic prosperity, and societal cohesion.
The choice facing nations today is not whether to embrace digital transformation, but how quickly they can adapt to this new reality. Those that cling to traditional models of nation state governance risk finding themselves irrelevant in an age where digital resilience determines national survival.
AI+Expo for National Competitiveness
On June 2-4, 2025, SCSP will host its second AI+ Expo at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in DC. The AI+ Expo is the place to convene and build relationships around AI, technology, and U.S. and allied competitiveness.
Interested in joining us? We are seeking additional exhibitors and sponsors that are eager to share and discover new breakthroughs with us this summer. Find out more at expo.scsp.ai.