Conference Agenda

Great-power competition in the European High North has intensified, but coercion now operates through infrastructure disruption rather than military force. Along the corridor from Svalbard to Finnmark, a small number of dual-use systems, among them subsea cables, satellite ground stations, and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-dependent aviation, sustain telemedicine, air ambulance dispatch, and emergency communications for remote populations while carrying the positioning and data signals on which allied military operations depend. This convergence within a narrow geographic band creates an interdependency nexus: cables and satellites serve as mutual backups yet share a dependency on functioning GNSS for maintenance and operations, so that disruption in any one domain tightens the margin of safety in the others.

This paper examines how adversarial actors exploit the intersection of infrastructure dependencies, overlapping legal ambiguities, and environmental constraints along the Svalbard–Finnmark corridor. The attacker's goal is to exert coercive pressure that degrades both community safety and allied posture while remaining below the threshold of an armed attack. For this purpose, this project also uses a comparative case study of three documented disruption events: subsea cable damage, including the January 2022 severing of Svalbard's fibre optic connection to mainland Norway; GNSS jamming over eastern Finnmark, which escalated during the period from 2019 to 2024; and the February 2022 Viasat cyber attack, which disabled tens of thousands of broadband terminals across Europe. A recent cross-sector threat assessment confirms this compounding pattern, documenting that subsea cable disruptions co-occur with GNSS interference and that adversarial actors deliberately exploit cable-satellite dependencies as a gray-zone tactic.

The legal regimes governing the corridor, the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) collective defence framework, each imposes obligations that presuppose the ability to recognise and respond to compound disruption. The 1920 Svalbard Treaty establishes non-discrimination provisions for the archipelago, but their application to the Exclusive Economic Zone remains unresolved, leaving states unable to determine on equal terms who may operate, maintain, or protect shared systems. UNCLOS requires criminalisation of submarine cable damage, but the flag-state jurisdictional framework exposed in the Eagle S proceedings limits enforcement precisely when compound attribution is most needed. NATO recognises that cumulative malicious cyber activity may reach the collective defence threshold, but classifies incidents by domain, preventing the aggregation that its own cumulative-effects doctrine requires.

Single disruptions are not the region's main vulnerability. The problem is that enforcing accountability for compound disruptions requires crossing treaty boundaries, from the Svalbard Treaty to UNCLOS to obligations within NATO alliance, yet each regime's jurisdictional logic resists aggregation. Without the capacity to recognise a sequenced campaign as a single compound event, pattern recognition fails, coordination between jurisdictions is foreclosed, and vulnerabilities remain in place. The consequence is practical, not only legal, states have accepted obligations to protect cable infrastructure, ensure non-discriminatory access, and respond collectively to cumulative threats, but they cannot fulfil those obligations when disruptions compound.

This paper proposes extending the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction to close this gap. The Sendai Framework's 2025 Hazard Information Profiles (HIPs) already classify cyber, infrastructure-failure, and conflict hazards within a unified multi-hazard taxonomy, and they already model cascading interactions among natural hazards. Extending this multi-hazard architecture to adversarial operations would enable the Sendai Framework Monitor to register sequenced disruptions as compound events rather than sorting them into separate hazard categories. No other international instrument combines classification across the relevant domains, compound-interaction modelling, and a state-reporting mechanism covering 193 UN member states. The Svalbard–Finnmark corridor is the immediate locus of this deficit, but the legal regimes that produce it govern Arctic infrastructure broadly.

Drawing on security studies, international law, the Sendai Framework literature, and critical infrastructure policy, this paper proposes a concrete solution to the attribution challenge and unsolved harms resulting from increased geopolitical tension in the European High North. By doing so, this paper contributes to a debate of growing urgency within NATO and the international community. Until the aggregation gap is closed, adversarial actors retain a guaranteed operating space below the collective response threshold and the communities and alliances that depend on Arctic infrastructure remain exposed.