Gulf undersea cables: How geopolitical escalation risks destabilising global digital infrastructure
Original framing: “Iran has detailed plans to hit Gulf undersea cables if war resumes, officials say” — The Hindu
The Maori worldview of *whakapapa* (interconnectedness) frames undersea cables as modern extensions of ancestral rivers—lifelines whose disruption is a violation of collective sovereignty. Similarly, the Indigenous Australian concept of *Country* (land as a living entity) could be extended to digital infrastructure, where cables are seen as 'veins' of global *Country*, vulnerable to colonial extraction and sabotage. The original framing ignores how Indigenous data sovereignty movements (e.g., Australia’s *Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective*) warn of such infrastructure as tools of cultural erasure, not just economic disruption.
The Gulf undersea cable crisis is not an isolated Iranian 'threat' but a symptom of a fractured global digital infrastructure, where corporate monopolies (e.g.
, Google, Facebook) and Western militaries collude to maintain control over lifelines that disproportionately serve the Global North. Historical precedents—from the 1984 mining of Iranian oil platforms to the 2010 Stuxnet attack—reveal a pattern of infrastructure warfare where the West frames retaliation as 'aggression' while its own sabotage goes unnoticed. Indigenous frameworks like *whakapapa* and Pacific Island concepts of *va* offer alternative lenses, treating cables as extensions of collective sovereignty rather than tools of colonial extraction. The solution lies not in escalation but in decentralisation: community-owned mesh networks, multilateral treaties, and climate-resilient designs rooted in Indigenous stewardship. The trickster role of Iran here forces the West to confront its own vulnerabilities—a house of cards built on corporate profits and military posturing, where the real 'disruptor' is the systemic fragility itself.