Framework
What is Platform Sovereignty?
Platform sovereignty describes the condition in which a private platform acquires practical governing power over an essential function because exit becomes difficult, slow, or institutionally costly.
Tag
sovereignty
23 items across the journal, including 20 research pages and 3 cases.
Research
Framework
Finality Choke Point Index (FCPI): Measuring Platform Power and Strategic Dependency
A comparative method for identifying when control over a platform, infrastructure layer, or service becomes control over completion — the point at which dependency becomes leverage.
Framework
The Indispensability Threshold
The indispensability threshold is crossed when replacing or bypassing a system ceases to be a normal procurement choice and becomes a strategic disruption.
Paper
Trust Architecture Lives at the Counter: Electronic Identification in Ukraine, 2021
Electronic identification is usually judged by the reliability of its digital credentials. A field experiment in Ukraine shows that a system's real reliability — and the sovereignty built on it — depends on how the prescribed procedure is actually performed by people on the ground.
Paper
When the Whitelist Became the Attack Surface: Ukraine’s Starlink Access-Control Crisis, February–July 2026
Ukraine’s Starlink whitelist was designed to exclude unauthorised Russian terminals from the network; within six months, the central security problem had shifted towards controlling how hostile terminals entered the approved list itself.
Paper
One Technology, Four Governance Regimes
AI markets are fragmenting — not because models differ, but because governance does. A framework for understanding how export platforms, full-stack sovereignty, regulated dependence and market-conditioned access are reshaping AI procurement.
Paper
Institutionalised Maritime Coercion: The Base++ Scenario
Scenario analysis of maritime coercion as a grey-zone strategy — how cheap, ambiguous attacks on commercial shipping, crews, insurers, and ports can produce disproportionate strategic effects without triggering conventional military responses.
Paper
From Drone Armies to Systems States: Research Update — June 2026
Ukrainian practitioner evidence from an April 2026 defence-industry panel reveals that adaptation speed is a vector across five sequential clocks, not a single national rate — and identifies institutional absorption capacity as a missing dimension of adaptive system quality.
Paper
From Drone Armies to Systems States: The Political Consequences of Adaptive Coercive Warfare
A systems-engineering analysis of modern drone warfare arguing that durable coercive advantage is determined not by platform possession but by adaptive system quality — the capacity to close the observe-to-fielding loop faster than an adversary.
Paper
Europe's Spectrum and Cloud Moves Are Indispensability Theory in Action
The EU's satellite-spectrum reservations and cloud procurement restrictions are not mere protectionism — they are the structural response our indispensable systems theory predicted.
Paper
Starlink and Starshield: Research Update — June 2026
New evidence from Pentagon contracts, U.S. Space Systems Command clarifications, and Ukraine's 2026 Starlink whitelist refines the original thesis: institutional separation does not require physical separation.
Paper
Parasites on Trust: Cross-Border Industrial Coercion and the Misallocation of Liability in British Banking
British bank phone scams are misclassified as a consumer protection problem. This paper argues they constitute cross-border industrial coercion — and that the £173 million annual reimbursement figure is the price of that misclassification.
Framework
Jurisdictional Cover and Epistemic Cover
Two mechanisms that stabilise coercive infrastructure by making it physically unreachable and analytically invisible — and what the FCPI framework reveals about both.
Paper
Platform Neutrality Is a Temporary Illusion
A platform can look neutral while it is still optional. Once dependence deepens, neutrality gives way to governance.
Paper
Why Civil Control of Dual-Use Connectivity Will Fail in UK Waters
This paper examines why civil registration and whitelisting regimes cannot contain adversarial use of commercial LEO connectivity once that connectivity becomes indispensable for unmanned maritime operations — and why the UK is approaching the same threshold seen in Ukraine.
Paper
When Consumer Connectivity Becomes a Maritime Weapon
Civil governance models still treat satellite connectivity as a consumer product. Ukraine's experience shows why that fails — and why the UK is on the same trajectory.
Paper
Unmanned Maritime Systems and LEO Connectivity: A Timeline to the UK Threshold
A chronological case study tracing how expendable unmanned craft, commercial LEO connectivity and governance responses evolved from early innovation to the point at which the United Kingdom must decide whether to act.
Paper
Starlink in Ukraine: From Emergency Connectivity to Governance Crisis
A chronological case study tracing how Starlink crossed the indispensability threshold in Ukraine — from emergency activation in February 2022 to governance fragmentation and institutional separation by 2025.
Paper
Starlink vs Starshield: Platform Sovereignty and the Collapse of Neutral Infrastructure
Analysis of how Starlink became mission-critical infrastructure in Ukraine, why neutrality collapses under coercive dependency, and how Starshield represents institutional separation.
Paper
When Neutral Platforms Become War Infrastructure
Most commentary on Starlink in Ukraine treats the story as a drama about personality or corporate politics. The deeper issue is structural: a privately governed platform became indispensable inside a coercive system but was still governed as a platform. Once that happened, neutrality stopped being stable.
Case Library
Case · high
AI Models as Choke Points: OpenAI, Google, and the FCPI Analysis of Model Power
Analysis of foundation model providers as high-FCPI infrastructure layers, and how AI model dependency creates sovereignty, continuity, and control risks.
Case · high
Cloud Providers as Sovereignty Choke Points: AWS, Azure, and the FCPI Model
Analysis of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud as high-FCPI infrastructure layers, and how cloud dependency creates sovereignty and control risks.
Case · high
SWIFT as a Financial Choke Point: Payments, Sanctions, and the FCPI Analysis
Analysis of SWIFT as a high-FCPI financial infrastructure, showing how payment messaging systems create global dependency and geopolitical leverage.