The sovereign may decide, but how and when do sovereign infrastructures make decisions? This strategic research node at the Institute for Culture and Society investigates critical infrastructures and the conditions under which infrastructure becomes sovereign, if at all.

Infrastructures considered critical to the relative autonomy of the nation-state include industrial and government facilities associated with energy, agriculture, borders, defence, health, education, mining, outer space, communications, digital technology, transport, water, and financial services and markets.

Security, resilience, sustainability, scalability. Incantations such as these populate the many government declarations and industrial appeals for critical infrastructures aligned with the sovereign power of the state. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts on global supply chains precipitated a new urgency within many countries to rethink the logistics of industrial production and circuits of distribution. The prevalence of uncertainty across the organization of society and economy has further amplified the question of sovereignty as it manifests in and is exercised through infrastructural forms.

But how suitable is the historical concept of sovereignty as an aspirational desire and operative propensity in the context of critical infrastructure in its vastly different forms? Take, for instance, AI infrastructures. How might we begin to identify the many component parts of AI infrastructures and their vectors of supply, from data centres and servers to chip manufacturing, rare earth mining and processing, electricity generation and water resources, policy-making, and technical expertise? To what extent does a concept of sovereignty aligned with the authority of the state retain conceptual fidelity let alone empirical relevance when grafted onto the complexity of such infrastructural forms?

The question and critique of sovereign infrastructures is also therefore a question of sovereign capabilities. Are there other ways in which we might furnish the power of infrastructure beyond and aside from the sovereign? What environmental, infrastructural, cultural, technological, economic, legal, policy, and social conditions might comprise analytical coordinates in devising a concept of power coextensive with operative logics of the techno-infrastructural conjuncture, however we decide on the composition of forces, dynamics, and elements of the future-present?

What makes infrastructure such a diffuse object of study? What is the analytical purchase – let alone empirical-operational reality – of welding sovereignty to infrastructure within such asymmetrical relations? In a way the infrastructure question turns around a paradox: infrastructures are at once discrete objects yet when considered from the perspective of material production networks, they rapidly disassemble. What or where is the sovereign when the infrastructural object is comprised of many component parts, when provenance is distributed across global spaces of extraction and production, supply and instalment? The operational logic of so-called sovereign infrastructures is inseparable from material-historical conditions of possibility.

These framing questions orient our collective inquiry of critical infrastructures and questions of sovereign power, autonomy, and governance. Initiated in 2026 and informed by HASS and STEM perspectives, this program of research encompasses a range of activities at the Institute for Culture and Society, including conferences and workshops, national and international collaborations, publications and teaching in the years ahead.

Inquiries: Ned Rossiter n.rossiter@westernsydney.edu.au