Research in science and technology is key to the UK’s long-term economic prospects, military strength, national resilience and geopolitical influence. As an open research ecosystem, the UK must balance the benefits of international collaboration with the need to protect strategically important intellectual assets from exploitation.
Advances in emerging science and technology (S&T) fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technologies and engineering biology hold profound transformative potential. These and other disruptive technologies are expected to revolutionize scientific discovery, medicine and a wide range of sectors in the modern economy, from manufacturing and energy to public service delivery. However, today, innovations developed for benign civilian purposes are often inherently dual-use, meaning that they can also be deployed for military and intelligence ends. When exploited by malign actors, such capabilities can pose significant threats to national security and erode the foundations of peace and prosperity.
States that lead in frontier technologies are better positioned to establish technical standards, shape global norms and project influence through the capabilities on which others depend. As a result, a nation’s capacity to secure technological advantage has become a foundational determinant of military capability, national resilience and geopolitical influence.
As technological leadership increasingly determines each nation’s position within the international order, S&T has become a predominant arena of global competition, most notably between the US and China. For so-called ‘middle powers’ such as the UK, this environment presents both opportunities and challenges. While the UK lacks the industrial scale and fiscal capacity of the US or China, it retains significant strengths, including world-class universities, a productive research base and established eminence across several technology sectors. Recognizing the growing importance of S&T to national power, successive UK governments have identified the pursuit of ‘strategic advantage through science and technology’ as a priority, emphasizing the need to develop sovereign capabilities and reduce dependencies in frontier technologies.
However, the UK’s strengths are embedded in an open research ecosystem centred on universities. International collaboration, researcher mobility and global knowledge exchange are essential to scientific excellence, but also create exploitable opportunities for foreign state actors to acquire knowledge, intellectual property (IP) and expertise in S&T fields through unauthorized means.
Concerns regarding national security risks affecting the UK research sector have intensified. In April 2024, MI5 director general Ken McCallum briefed the vice-chancellors of 24 leading UK universities on the security service’s concerns about unprecedented foreign state threats to the sector. This followed a rare joint warning by the Five Eyes intelligence chiefs regarding what was described as China’s ‘sustained, scaled, and sophisticated’ efforts to acquire sensitive research, expertise and IP through malign means.
It is within this context that ‘research security’ has emerged as a central policy concern. Broadly defined in this paper, research security refers to the suite of policies, institutional practices and legal mechanisms intended to protect sensitive IP, knowledge and expertise in the research sector from espionage, theft and unauthorized transfer by foreign state actors or their proxies. (In the UK policy context, the term ‘trusted research’ is also used in official documents and guidance to refer to the framework of principles, practices and safeguards intended to support the integrity and security of international research collaboration.)
Research security presents policymakers with a fundamental dilemma: how to strike the appropriate balance between preserving the openness essential to a thriving research ecosystem and imposing the controls necessary to protect national security.
Research security presents policymakers with a fundamental dilemma: how to strike the appropriate balance between preserving the openness essential to a thriving research ecosystem and imposing the controls necessary to protect national security. Excessively restrictive approaches risk weakening the very research ecosystem they would seek to protect, as such controls could reduce collaboration and knowledge transfer, discourage global talent mobility and stifle innovation. Yet insufficient safeguards may expose strategically significant knowledge and capabilities to transfer, exploitation or misuse, ultimately to the detriment of UK and allied interests.
These challenges are compounded in the UK by the structural misalignment between the financial incentives of universities and the national security concerns of government. The higher education sector, facing fiscal constraints, increasingly relies on foreign student fee income, international talent and international collaboration to sustain research activity; at the same time, policymakers are ever more focused on preventing the transfer of sensitive S&T capabilities to foreign state actors.
Effective governance is further complicated by the imperative of keeping pace with rapidly evolving technological change, and by the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between civilian and military applications of research. Reconciling these competing objectives cannot be achieved through technical regulation alone; it requires sustained political leadership, a willingness to make strategic trade-offs in an environment of fiscal constraint, and the capacity to maintain a consistent policy direction over many years.
This paper examines how the UK can meet these challenges. Specifically, it explores how policymakers might strike an appropriate balance between scientific openness and security while ensuring that policy remains effective and adaptable to a future likely to be characterized by greater uncertainty, geopolitical friction and technological rivalry. The author argues that safeguarding the UK’s long-term S&T advantages will require successive governments to treat research security as an enduring priority, and to avoid the reactive approaches seen to date. This will demand sustained political commitment from one administration to the next. It will also require a clear-eyed assessment of the national security risks posed by S&T collaboration with states – notably China – whose strategic objectives are likely to continue to conflict with those of the UK. Without such resolve, the UK’s ambition to foster and sustain strategic advantage through S&T will become increasingly difficult to realize.
Methodology and scope
The paper draws on evidence gathered through four complementary research activities:
- Desk research and literature review. The author reviewed academic and grey literature on research security, the geopolitics of S&T competition, and UK government policy and legislation. The author also reviewed English translations of Chinese official documents.
- Semi-structured interviews. The author conducted 35 research interviews. The interviewees consisted of a range of academics, business development personnel and professional research security staff – including personnel in due diligence, regulatory compliance, research governance and policy roles – across the UK university sector, as well as government representatives and experts from industry bodies. The interviews explored perceptions of the current threat environment, the effectiveness of existing research security mechanisms, implementation challenges, and areas for policy and operational improvement.
- Futures forecasting workshop. The UK in the World Programme at Chatham House brought together subject matter experts on UK S&T policy to conduct a futures forecasting workshop, using structured analytical techniques to assess the UK’s potential position within the global S&T landscape over the next five years. The exercise examined the implications of different future trajectories of the global S&T environment for the UK’s national security, economic competitiveness and geostrategic influence, and for S&T policy settings.
- Comparative policy analysis. The author undertook comparative analysis of research security approaches in other relevant jurisdictions. This work involved desk-based research and interviews with subject matter experts on the policy experiences of Australia, Japan and Canada, including asking interviewees about their country’s responses to state-based threats targeting national research ecosystems.
The scope of this paper is limited to the following themes:
- Research security is defined in this paper as the protection of sensitive IP, knowledge and expertise in emerging S&T fields from espionage, theft and unauthorized transfer by foreign state actors or their proxies. While foreign interference and transnational repression in the higher education sector –including efforts to monitor or suppress criticism of foreign states within UK universities, or to influence research agendas in line with foreign state objectives – are recognized as related security issues, they fall outside the scope of this study.
- The paper focuses on the university sector. Although research security risks and mitigation measures also apply to university spin-outs and the wider S&T commercial ecosystem, universities are the primary subject of this study due to the distinctive and acute challenges they face.
- The study examines state threats to research in fields identified as critical technologies within the UK government’s Science and Technology Framework. These fields include AI, engineering biology, quantum technologies, advanced connectivity technologies (previously referred to in government policy documents as ‘future telecommunications’) and semiconductors.
- This research primarily focuses on non-cyber threat vectors that rely on what can be termed ‘non-traditional collection’: that is, the acquisition of sensitive S&T knowledge and IP through human actors and mechanisms that often operate within the bounds of legitimate academic or commercial activity. Such activities can involve individuals who are not formal intelligence operatives, but who may nonetheless be directed, incentivized or leveraged – wittingly or unwittingly – by foreign states or their proxies to obtain strategically significant knowledge and expertise. The theft and transfer of research through cyber means by malign actors is relevant and briefly explored, but that threat is outside the detailed scope of this paper.
