Mae is a Researcher at the Centre on Asia and Globalization (CAG) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She is also the Editor for ASEAN Bulletin and Counterpoint Southeast Asia, as well as the producer for ASEAN in Practice podcast series. Her research interests include US-China geopolitical rivalry, multilateral security cooperation, technology, and geopolitics in Asia Pacific. Mae received her B.A with a double major in Psychology and International Politics from the University of Melbourne. She had also completed her Master’s degree from the LKYSPP in International Affairs with a specialization in International Security.

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Debates about a “digital state of nature” often treat cyberspace as a distinct domain where anarchy patterns are read mainly from cyber operations. This paper challenges that view by turning to the physical backbone of cyberspace: submarine cables that carry most intercontinental data but sit in maritime, commercial, and developmental orders. Recent incidents, from disruptions to Vietnam’s data flow to damage in the Baltic and off the African coast, look similar yet produced different institutional responses. We argue these divergences stem from regionally specific threat configurations: the mix of maritime, commercial, and developmental concerns that cables bind together. These configurations shape whether incidents are framed as cybersecurity threats, commercial risks, sovereignty disputes, or development bottlenecks and thus which venues and alliance logics appear feasible. Building on regime complexity and boundary politics, we develop a typology of threat configurations and show how framing routes similar incidents into distinct institutional constellations. In the Baltic, an infrastructure‑to‑security frame ties damage to collective defense and prompts a NATO–EU response. In the South China Sea, a sovereignty‑to‑commercial frame keeps issues in permit and regulatory channels. Along the African coast, a development‑to‑dependency frame routes them through financing relationships, making infrastructure partnerships central to alignment. The paper reconceptualizes “digital anarchy” as regionally variegated and materially grounded rather than uniform or purely virtual.

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