NATO’s 2025 Science and Technology Organization Highlights report offers a snapshot of an Alliance pushing technological boundaries while struggling to align the systems behind them. Across data fusion, autonomy, and multidomain operations, innovation is accelerating faster than integration. These seams now shape the contours of NATO’s modernization challenge.
Critical minerals are growing crucial to NATO’s defence-industrial capacity, but the governance of their extraction has largely omitted gender sensitive considerations. This article argues that as NATO intensifies efforts to secure defence-critical mineral supply chains, leveraging its Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda can help develop a gender-responsive governing framework. Drawing on Canada’s emerging critical minerals framework, this article discusses the legal safeguards and inclusive governance that can strengthen supply chain resilience while embedding gender considerations. This way, NATO members can enhance both strategic mineral security and its commitments to sustainable peace and security in tandem with gender equality.
Supply chain dominance is an easy path to economic coercion. As critical minerals become more vital than ever in a world of increasing tensions, securing network resilience is necessary to security. When the question of “friend or foe” can be a blurred one, allies band together to mitigate risk through policy and cooperation.
What future is there for the ‘middle powers’ in a global order increasingly defined by unilateralism and revisionism? In this article, Joel Sawyer examines Canada’s role in building a new ‘counter-power’ network to define a new model of international cooperation