Critical Infrastructure Security Course

Course Overview

Critical infrastructure sits at the intersection of geopolitical power, technological change, and societal vulnerability. Pipelines, electricity grids, maritime corridors, telecommunications networks, subsea cables, satellites, water systems, and digital platforms are the material foundations upon which modern states and economies operate. They are also the terrain upon which great power competition, hybrid warfare, cyber conflict, and strategic coercion are increasingly waged. To understand international security in the twenty-first century is, in significant part, to understand how these systems are built, controlled, disrupted, and defended.

This course examines critical infrastructure security as a strategic and political issue rather than a purely technical one. It asks who controls the infrastructure that sustains global order, how states and non-state actors weaponise dependency, and what institutional and legal frameworks have emerged to govern a domain that escapes simple categorisation. The curriculum ranges across energy systems and electricity grids, maritime routes and port infrastructure, cyber and digital systems, supply chains and semiconductor networks, climate risks, and the emerging challenges posed by artificial intelligence and autonomous infrastructure.

Teaching is organised around major analytical questions rather than conventional thematic surveys. Each week, students investigate a central problem through case studies, policy documents, strategic assessments, and primary sources, building towards independent analytical and policy-oriented work. Teaching combines seminar discussion, scenario analysis, infrastructure mapping, and a structured simulation. Students are expected to engage seriously with international relations theory, strategic studies, and security studies as analytical tools, while developing the practical capacity to assess risk, evaluate governance arrangements, and construct evidence-based policy arguments.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain and critically evaluate major theoretical approaches to critical infrastructure security, including realist, liberal, institutionalist, and critical perspectives.
• Analyse how critical infrastructure shapes state power, strategic vulnerability, and patterns of international competition.
• Assess the nature and severity of threats to infrastructure systems, including cyber operations, hybrid warfare, armed conflict, non-state actors, and climate change.
• Evaluate the governance of critical infrastructure across state, corporate, and international institutional levels.
• Interpret strategic risk assessments, infrastructure maps, policy documents, and legal frameworks with critical precision.
• Compare national and international strategies for infrastructure protection and resilience across different political and regional contexts.
• Construct independent, evidence-based analytical arguments in written and oral forms, drawing on primary and secondary sources.
• Develop strategic risk assessments and policy recommendations under conditions of uncertainty.

Assessment

1. Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
2. Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
3. Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
4. Final Research Essay — 35%

Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
Students are assessed on the quality, consistency, and analytical depth of their contributions to seminar discussions throughout the semester.

Strong performance demonstrates:

• sustained engagement with weekly readings
• ability to apply theoretical and conceptual frameworks
• critical discussion of empirical cases and policy developments
• constructive engagement with the arguments of others

Students are encouraged to incorporate comparative perspectives, primary sources, and contemporary international developments into seminar discussions.

Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
This is a two-stage analytical assignment submitted in connected parts across the semester. Part II builds explicitly on Part I, and students may revise aspects of their earlier analysis in light of feedback received before incorporating it into the second submission.

Part I: Infrastructure Risk Analysis Memo (Week 5) — 1,000 words — 15%
Students select an infrastructure system or disruption event from a list provided by the lecturer and produce a focused risk analysis memo. The memo should:

• identify key vulnerabilities in the selected infrastructure system
• examine the political and technological dimensions of the risk
• assess the relevant threat actors and their capabilities
• articulate the strategic implications of the identified vulnerabilities for affected states or institutions

Part II: Strategic Policy Brief (Week 8) — 1,500 words — 20%
Building on the Part I risk analysis, students prepare a policy brief addressed to a specified decision-making audience, which may be a national security ministry, a regulatory body, or an international organisation. The brief should:

• summarise the risk landscape identified in Part I
• evaluate the available policy options and their respective trade-offs
• assess implementation risks and capacity constraints
• recommend a coherent strategic response

Students may revise aspects of their Part I analysis in light of feedback before developing the brief.

Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
Students participate in a multilateral infrastructure security simulation held across Weeks 10 and 11. Each student represents an assigned state or institutional actor responding to a structured scenario involving cross-border infrastructure risk. Assessment has three components:

• Position paper (500 words), submitted before the simulation — 5%
• Simulation participation and negotiation conduct — 5%
• Reflective commentary (750 words), submitted after the simulation — 5%

The reflective commentary should evaluate the student’s own strategic decision-making during the exercise, the negotiation dynamics that emerged between actors, and the relationship between the theoretical and policy frameworks studied in the course and the practical logic of the simulation. Role assignments and detailed instructions are distributed at the end of Week 7.

Final Research Essay — 35%
A research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words addressing a substantive question in critical infrastructure security. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course, provided they engage with relevant theoretical debates, draw on scholarly and policy sources, and advance an original analytical claim. A one-page essay proposal with a preliminary bibliography is submitted at the end of Week 7 for formative feedback. The final essay is due in Week 13.

Submission, Formatting Requirements and Academic Integrity

• All written work must be submitted as a PDF file, regardless of the word processor used.
• Use font at 12 points Times New Roman or Arial. Pages must be numbered. Include your name, student number, course name, assignment title, and word count on the first page; a separate cover page is not required.
• The word count stated in the assignment brief is a guide to scope and depth, not a rigid threshold. Work within 10 per cent of the stated count in either direction. The word count covers the main body of the text, including in-text citations, but excludes the reference list, any tables or figures, and any appendices.
• All written work must follow APA 7th edition throughout. In-text citations use the author-date format: (Yergin, 2020) or Yergin (2020) argues that… For direct quotations, include the page number: (Yergin, 2020, p. 47). The reference list appears at the end of the document, ordered alphabetically by surname. Do not use footnotes for references; footnotes may be used sparingly for substantive clarifications that would otherwise interrupt the argument.
• Formal policies on academic integrity and the use of AI tools vary by institution and will be communicated where applicable. The question beneath those policies does not change: is the goal to understand, or simply to appear to have understood? A qualification obtained without the knowledge it is meant to represent is a transaction, not an education, and it shortchanges the holder as much as anyone else. I invest genuine effort in connecting students to scholarship, practitioners, and professional networks that extend well beyond any syllabus. Whether that investment meets a reciprocal commitment is, in the end, a question of character rather than compliance.

Literature

• Baggett, R. K., & Simpkins, B. K. (2018). Homeland security and critical infrastructure protection (2nd ed.). Praeger.
• Dunn Cavelty, M. (2024). The politics of cyber-security. Routledge.
• Greenberg, A. (2019). Sandworm: A new era of cyberwar and the hunt for the Kremlin’s most dangerous hackers. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
• Kaplan, F. M. (2016). Dark territory: The secret history of cyber war. Simon & Schuster.
• Lindsay, J. R. (2025). Age of deception: Cybersecurity as secret statecraft. Cornell University Press.
• Maschmeyer, L. (2024). Subversion: From covert operations to cyber conflict. Oxford University Press.
• Radvanovsky, R., & McDougall, A. (2024). Critical infrastructure: Homeland security and emergency preparedness. Routledge.
• Smeets, M. (2022). No shortcuts: Why states struggle to develop a military cyber-force. Oxford University Press.
• Zetter, K. (2014). Countdown to zero day: Stuxnet and the launch of the world’s first digital weapon. Crown Publishers.

Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:

• Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis.
• Policy documents — from governments, international organisations, security agencies, and think tanks — provide the primary material through which infrastructure security is practised and debated.
• Strategic assessments and risk reports, produced by bodies such as NATO, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, and national critical infrastructure protection authorities, provide the operational context within which policy decisions are made.

Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.

Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.

Structure

Week 1 — Why does critical infrastructure matter in international security?

Critical infrastructure has moved from the margins of security studies to its centre. Pipelines and power grids, fibre optic cables and financial systems, ports and water networks are understood today as strategic assets whose disruption can incapacitate states, coerce governments, and destabilise societies at a distance. This week establishes the conceptual foundations of the course. Students examine how critical infrastructure is defined across different national and international frameworks, why it has become a primary site of strategic concern, and how its protection connects to fundamental questions of state power, societal resilience, and global interdependence. The week introduces the systems-thinking approach that underpins the course: understanding critical infrastructure as interconnected, interdependent systems in which failure in one sector can cascade rapidly across others.

Key Themes

• Defining critical infrastructure: national frameworks, sectoral categories, and international standards
• Infrastructure and state power: strategic assets and societal vulnerability
• Interconnection and cascading failure in complex systems
• Global interdependence and the securitisation of infrastructure

Case Studies

• The 2003 North American blackout and its cross-border cascading effects
• Infrastructure dependency in the digitised global economy

Seminar Exercise

• Systems mapping: students construct a dependency diagram for a specified national infrastructure sector, identifying nodes, interdependencies, and points of greatest vulnerability, then present their maps for collective critique.

Analytical Focus

• Conceptual precision in defining critical infrastructure; introducing systems thinking as an analytical method; situating infrastructure security within the broader study of international relations and strategic studies

Week 2 — Can infrastructure become a geopolitical weapon?

The relationship between infrastructure and political coercion is as old as statecraft itself, but the contemporary era has given it new instruments and new intensity. States invest in infrastructure abroad to build dependency; they threaten to disrupt infrastructure to extract political concessions; they shape the terms of global connectivity to advance strategic advantage. This week examines how critical infrastructure functions as an instrument of geoeconomic power, exploring the political economy of infrastructure investment, the logic of strategic dependency, and the conditions under which infrastructure leverage succeeds or fails. The Belt and Road Initiative, Russian energy pipeline statecraft, and American semiconductor export controls each offer analytically distinct windows into the weaponisation of infrastructure dependency.

Key Themes

• Geoeconomics and the weaponisation of interdependence
• Infrastructure investment as strategic statecraft
• Dependency, leverage, and coercion: theoretical frameworks
• Infrastructure diplomacy and the politics of connectivity

Case Studies

• China’s Belt and Road Initiative: infrastructure investment and geopolitical positioning
• Russian pipeline politics in Europe: dependency, leverage, and the limits of resource coercion
• American semiconductor export controls as an instrument of infrastructure statecraft

Seminar Exercise

• Dependency and leverage analysis: students map the infrastructure dependencies between two states or regions, assess the conditions under which the more powerful actor could exercise leverage, and identify the countermeasures available to the dependent party.

Analytical Focus

• Applying geoeconomic frameworks to infrastructure analysis; distinguishing economic interdependence from strategic vulnerability; evaluating the conditions and limits of infrastructure coercion

Week 3 — Who controls the arteries of the global economy?

Maritime infrastructure is the physical backbone of globalisation. Over eighty per cent of international trade by volume moves by sea, passing through a relatively small number of chokepoints, ports, and strategic sea lanes. The political geography of maritime infrastructure means that control over key corridors, terminals, and routing nodes translates directly into economic and geopolitical leverage. Recent episodes of maritime disruption, from Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping to the grounding of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal, have illustrated how fragile these arteries are and how rapidly their disruption reverberates across global supply chains. This week examines the strategic geography of maritime infrastructure, the political economy of port ownership and investment, and the governance challenges that arise when critical commercial routes become contested geopolitical terrain.

Key Themes

• Maritime chokepoints: strategic geography and geopolitical significance
• Port investment, ownership, and strategic dependency
• Global shipping routes and supply chain vulnerability
• Maritime security governance: actors, institutions, and limitations

Case Studies

• Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and the rerouting of global trade, 2023 onwards
• The Ever Given grounding and the fragility of the Suez Canal corridor
• Chinese port investment in the Indian Ocean region and its strategic implications

Seminar Exercise

• Maritime route analysis: students assess the strategic and economic consequences of a specified maritime disruption, identify the most vulnerable supply chains affected, and evaluate the policy options available to affected states and international bodies.

Analytical Focus

• Strategic geography; connecting maritime infrastructure to global political economy; evaluating the governance of contested maritime space

Week 4 — Why are electricity grids and physical infrastructure systems vulnerable?

Electricity is the hidden architecture of modern life. Grids, substations, transformers, and transmission lines constitute an interdependent system of extraordinary complexity whose failure cascades swiftly into transport, communications, healthcare, financial services, and virtually every other sector of society. The vulnerability of electricity grids has moved infrastructure security to the centre of national security planning. At the same time, railways, airports, bridges, and urban transport systems face their own patterns of vulnerability arising from ageing physical stock, increasing digital integration, and the combination of physical exposure and networked management. This week examines the structural vulnerabilities of physical infrastructure systems, the mechanisms through which failures propagate across interconnected sectors, and the political and institutional challenges of maintaining resilience in increasingly complex systems.

Key Themes

• Electricity grid interdependence and cascading failure mechanisms
• Physical infrastructure vulnerabilities: ageing systems and digital integration
• Deliberate sabotage of energy and transport infrastructure
• Resilience design: redundancy, modularity, and distributed systems

Case Studies

• The 2015 and 2016 Ukrainian power grid attacks: from physical disruption to strategic signal
• Infrastructure sabotage in contemporary conflict contexts: targeting, effects, and resilience outcomes
• Rail and aviation system disruptions and their economic and security consequences

Seminar Exercise

• Vulnerability assessment: students conduct a structured vulnerability analysis of a specified electricity or transport infrastructure system, identifying critical nodes, potential failure modes, and resilience gaps, producing a brief written assessment for seminar discussion.

Analytical Focus

• Infrastructure vulnerability assessment; systems analysis; connecting physical infrastructure design and governance to security outcomes

Week 5 — Are cyberattacks the defining threat to critical infrastructure?

The digitisation of critical infrastructure has opened an attack surface of unprecedented scale. Industrial control systems, supervisory control and data acquisition networks, and operational technology are now embedded in power plants, water treatment facilities, pipelines, hospitals, and financial systems, and many of these systems were designed before cybersecurity constituted a meaningful concern. The result is a landscape of structural vulnerability. State-sponsored cyber operations, ransomware campaigns, and hacktivist activity have demonstrated that digital weapons can produce physical effects of considerable consequence. Yet the framing of cyberattacks as the defining infrastructure threat also carries analytical risks: it can obscure the continued relevance of physical sabotage, the governance failures that enable vulnerability, and the structural conditions that make recovery uneven across different societies. This week examines offensive cyber operations against critical infrastructure, the strategic logic of state and non-state actors, and the question of how cyber threats should be situated within a broader infrastructure security framework.

Key Themes

• Offensive cyber operations and their effects on physical infrastructure
• Industrial control systems and operational technology vulnerabilities
• State-sponsored cyber campaigns: attribution, deterrence, and strategic logic
• Ransomware, criminal actors, and the commercialisation of infrastructure disruption

Case Studies

• Stuxnet and the Iranian nuclear programme: the first acknowledged cyber weapon deployed against physical infrastructure
• The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack: criminal actors, national security consequences, and regulatory failures
• Russian cyber operations against Ukrainian power infrastructure: Sandworm and the Industroyer malware

Seminar Exercise

• Cyber incident analysis: students analyse a specified cyber operation against critical infrastructure, mapping the attack pathway, assessing intended and actual effects, identifying attribution challenges, and evaluating the governmental and institutional response.

Analytical Focus

• Cyber threat analysis; connecting digital operations to physical and strategic effects; evaluating attribution, deterrence, and governance responses

Week 6 — Do hybrid warfare and non-state actors redefine the threat landscape?

The distinction between war and peace has eroded in the domain of infrastructure security. Hybrid warfare, combining conventional military pressure with cyber operations, information campaigns, economic coercion, and sabotage conducted below the threshold of formal armed conflict, has made critical infrastructure a persistent target even in ostensibly peacetime conditions. The Nord Stream pipeline destructions of 2022 and the severing of Baltic subsea cables illustrate how physical infrastructure can be attacked in ambiguous circumstances where attribution is contested and the appropriate response unclear. At the same time, non-state actors including terrorist organisations, insurgent movements, organised criminal networks, and maritime pirates continue to threaten infrastructure through direct attack, extortion, and sustained disruption. This week examines how hybrid and non-state threats to infrastructure challenge conventional security frameworks, attribution practices, and governance responses.

Key Themes

• Hybrid warfare: definition, instruments, and the infrastructure dimension
• The Nord Stream destructions and the politics of contested attribution
• Terrorism, insurgency, and the strategic targeting of infrastructure
• Organised crime, piracy, and infrastructure disruption

Case Studies

• Nord Stream pipeline sabotage: ambiguity, attribution, and geopolitical implications
• Baltic subsea cable incidents and the grey zone of hybrid operations
• Attacks on Nigerian oil infrastructure by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta

Seminar Exercise

• Hybrid threat simulation: students are assigned roles as state security analysts assessing a simulated hybrid infrastructure attack, tasked with analysing attribution, recommending a response within legal and political constraints, and presenting their assessment to a policy committee.

Analytical Focus

• Hybrid threat analysis; attribution methodology; evaluating the adequacy of existing security frameworks for sub-threshold infrastructure attacks

Week 7 — Can infrastructure survive armed conflict?

Armed conflict has always entailed the destruction of infrastructure, but the scale, targeting doctrine, and strategic logic of infrastructure warfare vary significantly across historical and contemporary cases. The deliberate targeting of electricity grids, water systems, hospitals, bridges, and communications networks raises profound legal and humanitarian questions. It also generates enduring security consequences: infrastructure destruction prolongs humanitarian crises, impedes post-conflict reconstruction, and creates conditions in which new cycles of instability emerge. The experience of recent conflicts, particularly in Ukraine, Syria, and Yemen, has placed infrastructure targeting at the centre of international humanitarian law debates while simultaneously revealing the limits of those frameworks in practice. This week examines the strategic logic of infrastructure targeting in armed conflict, its humanitarian consequences, and the legal frameworks that exist to constrain it.

Key Themes

• Strategic infrastructure targeting: military doctrine and political logic
• Electricity, water, and communications infrastructure in conflict zones
• International humanitarian law and the protection of civilian infrastructure
• Post-conflict infrastructure reconstruction and its political economy

Case Studies

• Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure: targeting strategy, civilian impact, and societal resilience
• Infrastructure destruction in Syria and Yemen: patterns, consequences, and accountability
• Post-conflict reconstruction in fragile states: political economy, dependency, and governance challenges

Seminar Exercise

• Infrastructure conflict mapping: students map the infrastructure targeting patterns in a specified conflict, assess the strategic objectives and humanitarian consequences, and evaluate the applicability and limitations of international legal frameworks.

Analytical Focus

• Conflict analysis; international humanitarian law as a governance instrument; connecting infrastructure destruction to political, humanitarian, and reconstruction outcomes

Week 8 — Is climate change becoming a structural infrastructure security crisis?

Climate change is a threat multiplier for critical infrastructure. Rising sea levels, extreme heat events, intensifying flooding, prolonged droughts, and increasing wildfire frequency place extraordinary stress on infrastructure systems designed for climatic conditions that are rapidly becoming historical. The interconnection of infrastructure systems means that climate disruption cascades across sectors: flooding damages transport networks, heatwaves constrain electricity generation, drought threatens water treatment and the cooling systems of data centres and power plants. The security implications extend beyond physical damage. Climate-driven infrastructure failures can destabilise governance, displace populations, intensify resource competition, and accelerate the erosion of state capacity in already fragile contexts. This week examines climate change as a structural infrastructure security challenge, exploring how different states and regions are developing adaptation strategies and why these efforts remain insufficient relative to the scale and pace of risk.

Key Themes

• Climate risks and infrastructure: mechanisms and cascading effects
• Extreme weather events and the stress-testing of infrastructure systems
• The water-energy-food nexus and its regional security implications
• Climate adaptation strategies: design, governance, and political economy

Case Studies

• European heatwaves and electricity infrastructure stress: 2003 and 2022
• Pakistan’s 2022 flooding: infrastructure collapse and governance failure
• The water-energy-food nexus in the Sahel and its security implications for regional stability

Seminar Exercise

• Climate risk analysis: students conduct a structured climate risk assessment for a specified country or region’s critical infrastructure, identifying the most significant vulnerabilities, evaluating current adaptation strategies, and recommending policy interventions with explicit attention to governance capacity.

Analytical Focus

• Climate risk assessment methodology; connecting environmental change to security outcomes; evaluating adaptation governance under conditions of limited state capacity

Week 9 — Are digital and space infrastructures the new strategic battlegrounds?

Subsea cables carry approximately ninety-five per cent of international data traffic. Satellites underpin communications, navigation, financial transactions, and military operations of every kind. Data centres concentrate the computational infrastructure of the digital economy into geographically specific, physically vulnerable locations. Semiconductor supply chains determine which states have access to the processing power upon which contemporary infrastructure, from smart grids to artificial intelligence systems, depends. These digital and space infrastructures are now recognised as critical strategic systems in their own right, but their governance, protection, and the attribution of attacks upon them remain significantly underdeveloped. This week examines the strategic significance of digital and space infrastructure, the emerging patterns of competition and disruption in this domain, and the governance gaps that leave these systems exposed.

Key Themes

• Subsea cables: strategic significance, physical vulnerability, and governance
• Satellite infrastructure: communications, navigation, and military dependency
• Data centres and the political geography of the digital economy
• Semiconductor supply chains: strategic competition and technological sovereignty

Case Studies

• Baltic and Mediterranean subsea cable incidents and their attribution challenges
• The Viasat cyberattack at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
• American and allied efforts to restrict Chinese access to advanced semiconductors

Seminar Exercise

• Technological risk mapping: students map the digital and space infrastructure dependencies of a specified state or region, identify the key vulnerabilities, and assess the governance and security options available to reduce exposure.

Analytical Focus

• Digital infrastructure analysis; connecting technological competition to geopolitical outcomes; evaluating the governance of emerging strategic systems

Week 10 — Who governs critical infrastructure: states, corporations, and institutions?

The ownership, operation, and protection of critical infrastructure is distributed across a complex and often poorly coordinated landscape of actors. In most liberal economies, the majority of critical infrastructure is privately owned, meaning that corporations bear primary operational responsibility for systems whose failure would constitute a national security emergency. International institutions provide frameworks for coordination but lack enforcement capacity. States regulate, but the pace of technological change consistently outstrips the capacity of regulatory systems to keep pace with new vulnerabilities. This week examines the governance of critical infrastructure as a multi-actor, multi-level problem, asking how public-private partnerships function in practice, what international institutions have achieved in this domain, and whether the corporate sector can be meaningfully integrated into national and international security frameworks without generating new dependencies and conflicts of interest.

Key Themes

• Public-private partnerships in critical infrastructure security: design, incentives, and limitations
• Corporate actors as security providers: capabilities, interests, and accountability
• International governance frameworks: NATO, the European Union, and sector-specific bodies
• Regulatory capacity and the challenge of technological change

Case Studies

• Microsoft, Amazon, and Google as security actors: cloud infrastructure and national security governance
• NATO’s baseline resilience requirements and their implementation across member states
• European Union infrastructure resilience directives: scope, implementation, and limitations in practice

Seminar Exercise

• Multilateral governance simulation (Part One): students represent assigned stakeholders, including government ministries, corporations, and international institutions, in a structured negotiation over an infrastructure security governance arrangement, advancing position papers and engaging with competing priorities.

Analytical Focus

• Multi-actor governance analysis; evaluating public-private partnership models; assessing the institutional capacity of international frameworks for infrastructure protection

Week 11 — Can international law and cooperation protect critical infrastructure?

International law was designed for a world of territorial states, kinetic weapons, and clearly attributable acts of aggression. Critical infrastructure attacks, particularly in the cyber domain, challenge each of these assumptions: they cross borders without physical force, their perpetrators are frequently obscured behind layers of technical obfuscation, and their effects accumulate below the threshold that would traditionally trigger an international legal response. The legal frameworks that do exist, including the laws of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, and emerging cyber norms processes, provide partial and contested guidance at best. This week examines the international legal and normative landscape governing infrastructure security, identifies where the most significant gaps lie, and evaluates the political and institutional conditions under which stronger international cooperation might become possible.

Key Themes

• International humanitarian law and the protection of civilian infrastructure in armed conflict
• Cyber operations and the attribution problem in international law
• Emerging norms for responsible state behaviour in cyberspace
• International security cooperation: bilateral, multilateral, and institutional forms

Case Studies

• The Tallinn Manual process: contributions, limitations, and political reception
• International responses to Russian cyber operations: attributions, sanctions, and their effects
• Five Eyes and allied intelligence-sharing frameworks applied to infrastructure security

Seminar Exercise

• Multilateral governance simulation (Part Two) and reflective presentation: students continue the simulation from Week 10, reaching or failing to reach negotiated outcomes, then deliver individual five-minute reflective presentations on their strategic experience and the lessons it offers for real-world governance.

Analytical Focus

• International law as a governance instrument; evaluating normative and legal frameworks for infrastructure protection; connecting legal analysis to strategic and political outcomes

Week 12 — What will infrastructure security look like in 2050?

Strategic forecasting is a discipline of structured uncertainty. It cannot predict the future, but it can identify the forces most likely to shape it, map the scenarios in which different combinations of those forces produce divergent outcomes, and clarify the policy choices that make some futures more or less probable. This week uses infrastructure security as the lens through which to examine the challenge of reasoning about the future of international security. Students consider the implications of artificial intelligence and autonomous infrastructure management, the security consequences of smart city proliferation, the long-term trajectories of climate adaptation, and the scenarios in which technological change either deepens existing vulnerabilities or enables genuinely new forms of resilience. The week synthesises the analytical frameworks developed across the course and asks students to apply them to problems that do not yet have settled solutions.

Key Themes

• Artificial intelligence, automation, and the transformation of infrastructure management
• Smart cities and the security implications of pervasive connectivity
• Climate adaptation trajectories and long-term infrastructure security
• Autonomous systems and the future of conflict over critical infrastructure

Case Studies

• AI-managed electricity grid scenarios and their vulnerability profiles
• Smart city infrastructure and the governance of digital dependency
• Scenarios for infrastructure conflict in a world of advanced autonomous systems

Seminar Exercise

• Strategic futures workshop: students work in teams to construct and present two contrasting scenarios for critical infrastructure security in 2050, specifying the key variables, driving forces, and strategic implications of each, then subject each other’s scenarios to critical scrutiny.

Analytical Focus

• Strategic forecasting; scenario construction methodology; synthesising the theoretical and analytical frameworks developed across the course and applying them under conditions of genuine uncertainty

*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.

Updated – May 2026