Dr Liling Xu is a lecturer at the School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University. She completed her PhD from the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests include Arctic geopolitics, feminist geopolitics, and ocean governance. She has published in Tourism Geographies, Area, Pacific Journal, China Social Sciences Internal Manuscript, and China Oceans Law Review. Her article, “The ‘awkward’ geopolitics of tourism in China’s ‘Arctic’ village”, was awarded the 2025 “Early Career Researcher Award” by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Recreation, Tourism, and Sport (RTS) Specialty Group. She has also contributed book chapters in collaboration with international Arctic scholars, including in Security and Technology in Arctic Governance, Critical Studies of the Arctic, and Sea Ice (4th Edition).

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As Arctic ice melts and new shipping routes emerge, the cold depths and shifting ice flows of the Arctic Ocean present both opportunities and vulnerabilities for subsea cable development. The laying of cables is transforming the Arctic into a strategic node of digital connectivity and a new frontier for cybersecurity and governance. Geopolitical rivalry and great power competition increasingly shape this transformation. Early efforts such as the “ROTACS” project in the 2000s sought to establish trans-Arctic connectivity through international collaboration, yet its collapse underscored the geopolitical fragility of cooperative ventures. The more recent Russia’s state-funded “Polar Express” and the Nordic- and EU-backed “Polar Connect” initiative exemplify a shift toward regional autonomy, digital sovereignty, and strategic control over data flows. More broadly, NATO, the EU, and the United States have advanced legislative, military, and normative measures to secure subsea infrastructures, reflecting wider attempts at re-regulation, securitisation, and norm-building in global cyberspace. Taken together, these developments position the Arctic as a pivotal site in the reordering of cyberspace.

The article draws on the “volumetric turn” and “wet ontologies” in political geography to foreground how the three-dimensional materialities of Arctic ice, water, and seabed shape the installation, security, and governance of subsea cables. Based on case studies of subsea cable projects across time and space in the Arctic, I argue that the future ordering of cyberspace should move beyond state-centric and techno-strategic approaches to account for the entanglement of geophysical environments, volumetric materialities, and Indigenous peoples’ knowledge. The extreme depths, drifting ice, and unstable seafloor of the Arctic Ocean are not passive backdrops but active forces structuring the security architecture of cyberspace. At the same time, this reordering cannot be understood without engaging with the rights and knowledge of Arctic Indigenous peoples, whose perspectives unsettle conventional approaches to cyber governance. The paper provides a twofold contribution. Empirically, it extends the spatial scope of subsea cable geopolitics beyond the Baltic and Indo-Pacific to the Arctic, which is increasingly imagined as a future hub of digital connectivity and a site for the reordering of cybersecurity. Theoretically, it advances critical infrastructure studies by highlighting the entanglement of materiality, volume, and cybersecurity.