Institutional, technological, and financial drivers of national cyber resilience under armed conflict and post-conflict recovery

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstract Military and economic turbulence transform the relationships between factors shaping national cyber resilience. This study aims to analyze the impact of technological, institutional, and financial determinants on cyber resilience under armed conflict and post-conflict recovery. The empirical analysis covers neighboring European non-EU countries within the European security space that are exposed to armed conflict or post-conflict instability (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Serbia) from 2010 to 2024, using panel data from the World Bank, IMF, and ENISA. Cyber resilience is measured by the Global Cybersecurity Index. Institutional, technological, and financial factors are proxied by standard governance, digitalization, and the financial sector and estimated using a fixed-effects model with Driscoll-Kraay robust standard errors. The results reveal pronounced regime-dependent effects. Institutional capacity plays a decisive role during armed conflict: government effectiveness shows a strong positive association with cyber resilience (β ≈ 1.04) but becomes statistically insignificant in post-conflict and stable environments. Technological factors exhibit context-sensitive effects: digital government development is positively associated with cyber resilience during armed conflict (β ≈ 0.95) and relative stability (β ≈ 1.78), while its impact weakens in post-conflict recovery. Macroeconomic conditions exert systematic influences across regimes: higher unemployment reduces cyber resilience (β ≈ −0.027), whereas inflation shows a positive association (β ≈ 0.008). Financial indicators display mixed and predominantly negative effects under relative stability. Accordingly, cybersecurity policy should be explicitly regime-sensitive: institutional and digital interventions should dominate during armed conflict, while governance and risk-management mechanisms should prevail in post-conflict and stable environments.AcknowledgmentThe authors acknowledge with gratitude the financial support provided by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine for the research project “Modeling mechanisms for countering organized and transnational cybercrime in wartime and post-war times” (state registration number 0124U000550).