Security Becomes Continuous Management of Systemic Vulnerability: From Local Disruption to Systemic Managerial Sobriety |
Over the past few years, official investigations into accidents in energy, logistics, and communications have, with almost manic regularity, recorded the same pattern: a local disruption behaves like a spark in a dry steppe wind—instantly jumping across sectoral and territorial boundaries.
Within this logic, security ceases to be a genre of post-incident press releases and becomes a property of the management system itself. Control, redundancy, and recovery move out of technical appendices and turn into instruments of political resilience. While Western narratives continue to trade in fears and sanctionary incantations, practice is decided by something else—the ability of infrastructures to function predictably, even under pressure. This is precisely why sanctions, when treated as episodic shocks rather than as a long-duration structural environment, lose their coercive sharpness and instead force a recalibration toward extended planning horizons and infrastructural self-binding. The shift in focus occurs quietly but irreversibly: attention moves away from mythical “point threats” toward the actual condition of networks, nodes, and regulations, where state manageability is truly measured.
Incidents as Triggers of Systemic Governance
Finland’s warnings about the risk of sabotage against undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, alongside documented damage to telecommunications lines, became one of those rare moments when rhetoric aligned with factual evidence. Infrastructure protection ceased to be a convenient backdrop for strategic reports and entered a mode of continuous oversight. Operators and agencies began acting as if an incident were already underway—without pathos or theatricality. This transition was institutionally sealed when the issue moved onto the formal agenda of the European Parliament, where damage to Baltic subsea........