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International Area Studies Review
[ Article ]
International Area Studies Review - Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.311-330
ISSN: 2233-8659 (Print)
Print publication date 30 Sep 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.69473/iasr.2026.29.3.311

Governing the Ungovernable: Strategic Infrastructure, Emerging Security, and the Middle Power Moment

Amy Paik*
Adjunct Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University SAIS

Correspondence to: *Email: paikminjung@naver.com

Abstract

Why are the infrastructures most essential to contemporary security--undersea communication cables foremost among them--governed by the weakest international arrangements, and which actors could close the gap? Regime theory can describe the cable domain’s hostile bargaining configuration but cannot explain why a domain of near-universal shared interest generates and reproduces it; weaponized interdependence shows how chokepoints become instruments of coercion but not whether they come to be regulated; platform-authority scholarship identifies firms as de facto rule-makers without connecting that authority to regime formation; and middle power scholarship tends to assume the neutrality its governance claims require. Integrating these literatures into a technology-power framework, this article locates the governance deficit in a structural mismatch between rapidly evolving, dual-use, largely privately owned infrastructure and slower-moving, state-centric institutions. Great power entanglement leaves middle powers as the only candidates for institutional architecture; the article converts that candidacy into a falsifiable conditional claim. A structured, focused comparison of four diverse cases--South Korea, Japan, France, and Norway--read against three constraint hypotheses, finds that middle power credibility is audience-relative and revocable, and that every initiative in the record examined has operated within, not across, bloc lines; middle-power-led regime-building is therefore a conditional possibility, not a prediction.

Keywords:

International cooperation theory, Undersea cable governance, Geopolitical competition, Middle power diplomacy, Critical infrastructure security

AI Acknowledgment

Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies were not used in any way to prepare, write, or complete essential authoring tasks in this manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest in this research.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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