Overview

In the Arctic, geography does not fade in the age of the cloud. It hardens. The seabed is dark, cold, and difficult to observe, yet across it run fibre-optic lines that quietly sustain government services, markets, research networks, and everyday communication. When those lines fail, the cause can be mundane, the consequences can be national, and the time needed to fix them can be dictated less by technology than by ice, distance, and permission. Undersea Cables at the Top of the World reveals how the High North turns connectivity into a form of leverage: concentrated at a handful of routes, landings, and repair pathways. Saoirse Kelleghan maps Arctic cable security as an institutional problem as much as an engineering one. Routing decisions and choke-point analysis show where risk concentrates; landing-station governance explains who controls shore access and information; consortium ownership reveals how private incentives shape public vulnerability; and the practical limits of cable-repair logistics determine whether resilience is real or rhetorical. Across case-based chapters, the book clarifies what can be monitored, what cannot, how attribution falters under uncertainty, and why repair seasons matter for crisis stability as much as for restoration. Written for students, general readers, and analysts of security and political economy, the book offers a disciplined framework for evaluating critical infrastructure without sensationalism. Readers finish with a clearer understanding of who can cut or protect connectivity, how outages become political events, and which governance models can lower escalation risk when facts are slow and stakes are high.

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9789377946104

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Saoirse Kelleghan writes about the meeting point between infrastructure and power: the places where technical systems quietly set the boundaries of political choice. Her work is driven by a conviction that modern geopolitics is as much about contracts, standards, maintenance schedules, and physical access as it is about speeches and summits. She approaches security questions with a civil, research-led temperament, attentive to ambiguity and resistant to easy certainty, especially where evidence is partial and incentives are misaligned.Kelleghan is particularly interested in the High North because it exposes how geography still governs globalisation. In Arctic waters, distance and weather turn abstract dependencies into practical dilemmas: who can reach a fault, who can authorise a repair, who bears the cost of delay, and how quickly suspicion can fill the space where facts are slow to arrive. That mix of remoteness and consequence offers a clear vantage point on institutional strength and fragility.Her nonfiction style is analytical but human-scaled, favouring clear definitions, careful distinctions, and the lived realities of operators and coastal communities who must make systems work. A recurring thread in her writing is the North Atlantic as a historical corridor of exchange and contest, where commerce, communication, and security have long overlapped. She aims to equip readers not with alarm, but with durable ways of seeing: how infrastructure decisions travel forward into crisis, and how better governance can reduce unnecessary escalation.

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