Description
As sea ice retreats, the Arctic Ocean is increasingly envisioned as a frontier of digital connectivity and a new arena of competition and cooperation in the context of competing digital orders. This paper examines Polar Connect, an emerging European-led project that aims to link Europe, Asia, and North America across the Central Arctic Ocean by 2030. It asks: How a project planned to connect three continents also produces disconnection? Who is wired in and who is left out? How does cooperation among some actors come at the cost of excluding others?
The paper develops two arguments. First, cable governance is shifting away from market-led and broadly universal arrangements toward security-driven rules set within narrower alliances. This competition plays out through four mundane gateways that can equally connect or exclude, namely financing, routing, landing rights, and supply chains. Second, cable installation and maintenance depend on bathymetric mapping and ice forecasting, and Indigenous knowledge of sea-ice conditions. This raises the question of whose expertise counts when infrastructure crosses Arctic homelands. Situated at the intersection of critical infrastructure, environmental change, and knowledge production, trans-Arctic cables will significantly shape the global digital future, widening connection and hardening new lines of exclusion.