  Combining social network analysis with personal interviews, the paper
examines how the social structure and internal composition of three
Africa-focused international research networks contributes to their resilience.
It shows that research networks are structured around a small number of highly
influential coordinators. This structure facilitates information exchange and
trust between countries and across fields. The study also suggests that the
surveyed teams tend to exchange information or trust each other irrespective of
their social and professional attributes, indicating that diversity is key to
understanding their responses to major shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In
a second part, the paper analyzes how the spatial constraints imposed by
distance and borders affect their ability to function internationally. It shows
that the probability of exchanging information, trusting each other, and
co-publishing decreases considerably with distance and that research
communities are more likely formed inside the same country than
internationally. Interviews reveal that teams responded to travel bans and
border closure by emphasizing what they already did best, suggesting that
resilience should be considered as an evolutionary attribute of a system.
