Call for Chapters: Legal and Strategic Dimensions of Adaptive Supply Chains: Agility in a Disrupted Global Economy

Editors

Alieu Kafoe, Marymount University, United States
Bernadette Foh, Marymount University, United States

Call for Chapters

Proposals Submission Deadline: May 24, 2026
 Full Chapters Due: August 16, 2026
 Submission Date: August 16, 2026

Introduction

Global supply chains have ceased to function purely as logistical systems and now operate as strategic, legal, and geopolitical infrastructures shaped by war, sanctions, maritime disruption, export controls, and the concentration of critical resources (Bednarski et al., 2025; López et al., 2025). The premise animating this volume is that disruption is no longer episodic. It is a structural condition requiring governance, not merely a deviation requiring recovery. Four compounding crises, each structurally distinct yet analytically connected, render this argument empirically undeniable. First, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the systemic fragility of lean-optimized, globally integrated supply chains with an empirical force that no prior theoretical framework had fully anticipated. Ivanov (2020) documented that pandemic-induced production and logistics disruptions propagated through upstream and downstream supply network tiers in ways that exceeded the recovery capacity of conventional resilience models, revealing single-source dependency and near-zero inventory strategies as systemic liabilities rather than competitive assets. Guan et al. (2020) quantified the global supply-chain effects of COVID-19 containment measures and found that output losses in major manufacturing economies translated into cascading shortfalls across international production and trade networks, with the most severely affected supply chains being precisely those that had been most aggressively optimized for efficiency at the expense of redundancy. Second, the 2026 Strait of Hormuz standstill in which shipping traffic through the world's most critical energy chokepoint fell by more than 95% following the U.S.–Israeli military campaign against Iran, disrupted approximately 20 million barrels per day of oil, nearly one-fifth of global LNG trade, and roughly one-third of global seaborne fertilizer volumes, prompting the International Energy Agency (IEA, 2026) to characterize the event as the largest supply disruption in the history of global oil markets (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2026; UN Conference on Trade and Development [UNCTAD], 2026). Third, the Russia-Ukraine war has measurably reduced food production and agricultural exports with disparate geographic impact worldwide, destabilized global fertilizer and energy prices, and driven the structural reconfiguration of grain and commodity trade networks across more than 130 countries (Jia et al., 2024; Zhao et al., 2023). Fourth, Taiwan’s concentration of over 90% of the world’s leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing capacity within a single geopolitically exposed jurisdiction represents what the U.S. International Trade Administration (ITA, 2025) confirms is an unparalleled systemic vulnerability for technology-dependent industries globally. These disruptions share a common implication that existing scholarship has yet to fully address that supply chain adaptation is inseparable from legal obligation, regulatory intelligence, and governance accountability. Organizations confronting geopolitical disruption must simultaneously activate force majeure provisions, navigate sanctions exposure, manage ESG disclosure liabilities, respond to cybersecurity mandates, and make defensible board-level decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Conventional resilience frameworks, which focus on operational redundancy and network optimization, provide insufficient guidance for these legally and institutionally complex challenges (Ul Akram et al., 2024). This volume addresses that gap directly.

Objective

The book pursues four interrelated objectives. First, it synthesizes fragmented literatures: supply chain resilience, trade law, geopolitical risk, ESG governance, cybersecurity, and industrial policy into an integrative interdisciplinary framework that treats legal defensibility and operational agility as mutually constitutive rather than separate concerns. Second, it advances theory by moving beyond generalized resilience discourse toward a more analytically precise account of adaptive capacity under conditions of coercion, fragmentation, and concentration, engaging the concepts of supply chain viability, strategic optionality, and governance-aware redesign (López et al., 2025). Third, it translates scholarly insight into actionable decision architectures for executives, legal counsel, policymakers, and compliance professionals navigating sourcing restructuring, sanctions screening, contractual risk allocation, and regulatory compliance simultaneously. Fourth, it advances a fundamental reframing of agility itself: in contemporary supply chains, agility must encompass not only operational speed and market responsiveness but also legal adaptability, regulatory intelligence, evidentiary traceability, and the institutional capacity to reconfigure supply networks under contested sovereignty and maritime disruption, capacities that prior agility frameworks do not address (Bednarski et al., 2025).

Target Audience

• Doctoral candidates and advanced graduate students in supply chain management, operations management, international business, trade law, logistics, and public policy, who require an interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis connecting operational resilience with legal and geopolitical analysis. • Academic faculty and supply chain researchers working in supply chain viability, organizational ambidexterity, ESG governance, digital resilience, and geopolitical risk, who will find in this volume a foundation for future empirical and theoretical work • Supply chain executives, procurement and operations leaders, and enterprise risk managers in organizations exposed to energy volatility, semiconductor dependency, critical mineral concentration, sanctioned jurisdictions, or maritime chokepoints, who need frameworks that integrate operational redesign with contractual, regulatory, and board-level governance • Legal professionals, corporate counsel, compliance officers, and trade law specialists advising multinational corporations on sanctions exposure, force majeure litigation, marine insurance, ESG disclosure liability, and cross-border due diligence obligations • Policymakers, government officials, and international trade institution staff at entities including the WTO, IEA, FAO, UNCTAD, and regional development banks who require cross-sector scholarly analysis informing industrial policy, strategic reserve governance, export control frameworks, and supply chain security mandates

Recommended Topics

Geopolitics, Maritime Disruption, and the New Logic of Adaptive Supply Chains • Reframing agility: from operational responsiveness to legal-strategic adaptability under conditions of sanctions, coercion, and contested sovereignty • Maritime chokepoints and supply chain vulnerability: legal frameworks governing passage rights, state liability, and commercial disruption • The 2026 Strait of Hormuz standstill: energy, LNG, fertilizer, and agrifood-security spillovers • The Russia-Ukraine war: grain, fertilizer, and energy trade restructuring and its governance implications • Semiconductor concentration and Taiwan risk: strategic technology dependency and governance responses • Critical raw materials, resource nationalism, and industrial policy as determinants of adaptive supply chain architecture Trade Law, Sanctions, and the Legal Architecture of Supply Chain Adaptation • Trade tariffs, export controls, and sanctions as supply chain design variables • Nearshoring, reshoring, and friend-shoring: WTO compliance, rules of origin, and labor law implications • Contract design, force majeure, hardship, and frustration doctrines under geopolitical disruption • Insurance, marine risk, political risk products, and financial exposure in disrupted logistics corridors • Comparative national approaches to supply chain security and economic sovereignty ESG Governance, Human Rights Due Diligence, and Sustainable Sourcing Law • Human rights due diligence mandates: EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and analogous frameworks • Carbon border adjustment mechanisms, ISO 14067 compliance, and ESG disclosure obligations • Circular economy principles and sustainable sourcing governance Digital Transformation, Cybersecurity, and Technology-Enabled Supply Chain Adaptation • Cybersecurity risk, regulatory obligations, and legal liability in connected supply chains • AI, predictive analytics, and digital twins in disruption response governance • Blockchain and smart contracts as instruments of traceability and evidentiary accountability • Ethical and legal dimensions of automation, algorithmic procurement, and workforce adaptation Organizational Strategy, Governance Architecture, and Contractual Risk Management • Board oversight, director obligations, and enterprise risk integration for geopolitical supply chain risk • Dynamic capabilities, supply chain ambidexterity, and governance-aware organizational design • Contractual governance, liability allocation, and supplier risk management • Strategic reserves, inventory buffers, and redundancy versus efficiency trade-offs • Crisis communication, disclosure obligations, and stakeholder transparency during disruption Sector-Specific Applications and Case Studies • Healthcare and pharmaceutical supply chains: regulatory compliance, stockpiling obligations, and drug shortage governance • Semiconductor supply chains: CHIPS Act industrial policy, export controls, and multi-tier supplier governance • Food and agricultural supply chains: fertilizer governance, traceability mandates, and food security law • Energy supply chains: LNG contracting, strategic reserve management, and critical mineral governance • Government and public sector: emergency procurement law, critical infrastructure resilience, and defense supply chain governance Theoretical Foundations and Future Directions • Theoretical foundations: resilience, viability, dynamic capabilities, institutional theory, and governance frameworks under persistent disruption • Risk assessment frameworks and scenario planning for legally complex geopolitical disruptions • Public-private coordination, information sharing, and antitrust-aware resilience partnerships • Industrial and trade policy as supply chain governance instruments: CHIPS Act, EU Critical Raw Materials Act, and European Green Deal • Future directions in adaptive supply chain law, strategy, and research design

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before May 24, 2026, a chapter proposal of 1,000 to 2,000 words clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors will be notified by June 7, 2026 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines.Full chapters of a minimum of 10,000 words (word count includes references and related readings) are expected to be submitted by August 16, 2026, and all interested authors must consult the guidelines for manuscript submissions at https://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/ prior to submission. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-anonymized review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Note: There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book publication, Legal and Strategic Dimensions of Adaptive Supply Chains: Agility in a Disrupted Global Economy. All manuscripts are accepted based on a double-anonymized peer review editorial process.

All proposals should be submitted through the eEditorial Discovery® online submission manager.

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global Scientific Publishing, an international academic publisher of the "Information Science Reference", "Medical Information Science Reference", "Business Science Reference", and "Engineering Science Reference" imprints. IGI Global Scientific Publishing specializes in publishing reference books, scholarly journals, and electronic databases featuring academic research on a variety of innovative topic areas including, but not limited to, education, social science, medicine and healthcare, business and management, information science and technology, engineering, public administration, library and information science, media and communication studies, and environmental science. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit https://www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2027.

Indexing Information for Prospective Authors

IGI Global Scientific Publishing meets the criteria for inclusion in major indexing services such as Scopus; however, it is important to note that all indexing decisions are made independently by these services. IGI Global Scientific Publishing books are selectively indexed by the indexing organization after publication. Indexing cannot be guaranteed for any book prior to publication, and the indexing organization has complete control over the final selection and timeline.

Important Dates

May 24, 2026: Proposal Submission Deadline
June 7, 2026: Notification of Acceptance
August 16, 2026: Full Chapter Submission
September 27, 2026: Review Results Returned
October 25, 2026: Final Acceptance Notification
November 1, 2026: Final Chapter Submission

Inquiries

Alieu Kafoe
Marymount University
stephenkafoe@yahoo.com

Bernadette Foh
Marymount University
berniefoh816@gmail.com
Back to Call for Papers List