The Subsurface Centre examines what lies beneath—literally and strategically. We look below the waterline at the cables, minerals, and seabed resources that underpin modern economies; and beneath the surface of geopolitics at the material dependencies others overlook.
We combine original research with professional education, training analysts and practitioners to see what others miss—and equipping them with the methods to act on what they find. Our CPD-accredited courses bring rigorous analytical tradecraft to domains that demand it.
We track the regulatory landscape as it evolves: from the EU Critical Raw Materials Act to submarine cable protection frameworks, we monitor the governance shifts that reshape risk. Our intelligence products and consultancy services translate complexity into actionable insight for governments, corporations, and international organisations.
Our annual conference convenes policymakers, industry leaders, and analysts to stress-test assumptions about the subsurface domains that matter most.
Our network of analysts brings decades of experience across government, industry, and research, with relationships built over careers rather than contracts. We operate lean, commission expertise as needed, and focus on the question that matters: so what?
The Subsurface Centre is pleased to be housed at the Hume Institute Lausanne for Postgraduate Study, offering a European institutional base at the heart of Switzerland's international policy landscape.
Great power competition is increasingly fought underground. The minerals that enable everything from semiconductors to defence systems are concentrated in a handful of locations, processed through chokepoints that few monitor and fewer understand. We track where control lies, how it shifts, and what it means—before scarcity becomes crisis.
We monitor extraction, processing, and trade flows across the strategic minerals that matter most: lithium, cobalt, rare earths, gallium, germanium, and the critical inputs to defence, energy, and technology supply chains.
Ninety-nine percent of intercontinental data crosses the ocean floor. Undersea cables, pipelines, and sensors form an invisible architecture that modern economies assume will function—until it doesn't. What was once a technical domain is now a theatre of strategic competition: grey-zone tactics, contested governance, and single points of failure that could sever economies from each other. We monitor, map, and make sense of it.
Infrastructure is where strategy becomes material. The domains we cover—minerals, cables, seabed resources—are not separate sectors but a single interconnected system, increasingly weaponised in competition between states. We work across these domains because the chokepoints that matter most sit at their intersection: where physical geography meets processing capacity meets governance vacuum. That integration is what we do.