AMKResearch
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Insights

Editorial commentary and guest essays.

Notes from the office and contributed essays on geopolitics, the long future, and the institutions that organise them.

16 articles
Arctic Corridors and the Re-mapping of Northern Sovereignty
AMK Insight·March 2026

Arctic Corridors and the Re-mapping of Northern Sovereignty

How thawing maritime routes are quietly reordering jurisdictional claims among Nordic states and observer powers.

The opening of seasonal passages across the Arctic is no longer a forecast. It is a logistics fact that shipping registries, naval planners, and northern ministries are quietly building around. Insurance underwriters in London and Oslo now price polar transits as a recurring line of business rather than an experimental case.

What the public debate has missed is the legal undertow. Coastal states are filing extended continental shelf claims at a pace last seen in the 1970s, and the observer powers admitted to the Arctic Council are pressing for procedural standing far beyond what the founding text envisaged. The result is a slow, technical contest over jurisdiction that will outlast any single government.

By AMK Editorial
The Sahel Realignment and Its Continental Echoes
December 2025Guest

The Sahel Realignment and Its Continental Echoes

Field correspondence from a researcher tracing political shifts across the West African interior.

Six weeks of travel across four capitals confirms what the cable traffic has only hinted at. The realignment underway in the Sahel is not a single pivot from one external partner to another. It is a more diffuse repositioning in which security cooperation, currency arrangements, and educational ties are being unbundled and renegotiated separately, often with different counterparts.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)
Futures of Multilateralism: Three Plausible Trajectories
January 2026AMK Insight

Futures of Multilateralism: Three Plausible Trajectories

A scenario study examining institutional erosion, regional consolidation, and the case for procedural reform.

Multilateral institutions are not failing in the dramatic sense their critics describe. They are being routed around. Voting weights and standing committees remain formally intact while the substantive negotiations migrate to smaller, opt-in formats convened by capable middle powers.

AMK Editorial
Semiconductor Asymmetry After the Taipei Accords
February 2026Guest

Semiconductor Asymmetry After the Taipei Accords

An independent reading of fabrication capacity, downstream dependence, and the political economy of restraint.

The Taipei Accords were sold to domestic audiences on both sides of the Pacific as a stabilising arrangement. In practice they have codified an asymmetry that was already structural: advanced node fabrication remains concentrated in a small handful of facilities, while downstream demand has continued to globalise.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)
Energy Transition as Statecraft
November 2025AMK Insight

Energy Transition as Statecraft

Why the next decade of decarbonisation will be settled in ministries of trade rather than ministries of climate.

The instruments now shaping the energy transition are tariff schedules, content requirements, and concessional finance terms. The climate ministries that dominated the previous decade of policy debate are increasingly downstream of trade officials and export credit agencies.

AMK Editorial
The Demographic Undertow in East Asian Strategy
October 2025Guest

The Demographic Undertow in East Asian Strategy

A long view on how population structure constrains the choices available to ageing regional powers.

Demography is the slowest of the structural variables and, for that reason, the easiest to underweight in strategic analysis. The populations of the region's three largest economies have now crossed thresholds that constrain the size of standing forces, the trajectory of social spending, and the political feasibility of sustained external commitments.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)
Critical Minerals and the New Latin American Bargaining Position
September 2025AMK Insight

Critical Minerals and the New Latin American Bargaining Position

Producer states are quietly rewriting the contract architecture for lithium, copper, and rare earths, and consuming economies have not yet adjusted.

The conversation about critical minerals has, for most of the past decade, been conducted in the capitals of consuming economies. Brussels, Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul produced strategy papers, financed extraction abroad, and built domestic processing capacity through subsidy regimes that read as much like trade policy as industrial planning. The implicit assumption was that the producing states of Latin America would absorb investment, supply ore, and remain in a familiar role of upstream provider. That assumption is no longer safe. The governments of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, and Mexico have spent the past four years quietly rebuilding the legal, fiscal, and contractual perimeter around lithium, copper, rare earths, and graphite. The result is not a return to mid-century resource nationalism. It is something more disciplined: a coordinated, technocratic reassertion of bargaining position that is reshaping the price, the contract terms, and the destination of refined output.

AMK Editorial
Beneath the Surface: Subsea Cables as Strategic Infrastructure
August 2025Guest

Beneath the Surface: Subsea Cables as Strategic Infrastructure

The ninety-eight percent of intercontinental data that travels on the seabed is governed by a private-law regime that public institutions are only now beginning to understand.

Most of what is said in public about digital sovereignty concerns the cloud, the application layer, and the regulation of the firms that sit at the top of the stack. Very little is said about the physical layer on which the entire structure depends. The intercontinental data that moves between Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia travels almost entirely on a network of fibre-optic cables resting on the ocean floor. The figure most commonly cited is ninety-eight percent, and while the exact share fluctuates with the activation of new satellite capacity, the order of magnitude has been stable for two decades. The governance of this network is not what most ministries of digital affairs imagine it to be. It is a private-law regime, mediated by a small group of cable-laying firms, a smaller group of consortium members, and the maritime authorities of the coastal states whose territorial seas the cables transit.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)
Central Bank Digital Currencies and the Quiet Repricing of Monetary Sovereignty
July 2025AMK Insight

Central Bank Digital Currencies and the Quiet Repricing of Monetary Sovereignty

The interoperability decisions taken by the early CBDC issuers will define the international monetary architecture for a generation.

The public debate on central bank digital currencies has been dominated by domestic questions: privacy, financial inclusion, the disintermediation of commercial banks, and the technical architecture of retail wallets. These questions are real, and the answers will shape the daily experience of citizens in the issuing jurisdictions. They are not, however, the questions on which the international consequences of CBDCs will turn. The consequential decisions are being taken in the wholesale and cross-border layers, in technical committees of central banks and bank-for-international-settlements working groups, and in the interoperability arrangements being negotiated between issuing jurisdictions. These decisions are being taken now, with little public attention, and they will define the architecture of international payments for at least a generation.

AMK Editorial
Orbital Crowding and the Coming Reform of Space Debris Governance
June 2025Guest

Orbital Crowding and the Coming Reform of Space Debris Governance

Low Earth orbit has crossed thresholds that the existing voluntary regime was not designed to manage.

The governance of orbital debris was, for the first six decades of the space age, an exercise in voluntary restraint. A small number of spacefaring states agreed on a set of mitigation guidelines, codified in the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee and incorporated by reference into the licensing regimes of the major launch jurisdictions. These guidelines worked, in the loose sense that the cataloguable debris population grew predictably and could be tracked by ground-based sensors with sufficient accuracy to support conjunction warnings to active operators. They have stopped working, and the institutional response has not yet caught up.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)
The Mekong Compact: Hydrological Politics Along a Contested River
May 2025AMK Insight

The Mekong Compact: Hydrological Politics Along a Contested River

Upstream dam operations have reshaped the political economy of the lower basin, and the institutional response has not kept pace.

The Mekong basin presents one of the clearest examples of a transboundary natural system whose governance architecture has been outpaced by the physical changes it was meant to manage. The river drains six countries and supports the livelihoods of more than sixty million people whose economies are organised around the seasonal pulse of the flood and the productivity of the inland fishery. The construction of large hydropower installations on the upper basin and on its principal tributaries has, over the past two decades, materially altered the hydrology of the lower basin, and the institutional arrangements that exist to mediate the consequences have been unable to absorb the scale of change.

AMK Editorial
Synthetic Biology, Dual Use, and the Limits of Export Control
April 2025Guest

Synthetic Biology, Dual Use, and the Limits of Export Control

The instruments designed to manage biological dual-use risks were built for an earlier industrial structure and are losing traction in the synthetic biology era.

The regulatory architecture for biological dual-use risk has its origins in the verification arrangements of the late twentieth century, when the principal concern was the diversion of pathogens and equipment from state-run programmes whose general parameters were known to intelligence services and whose technical capacities were concentrated in a small number of identifiable facilities. The Australia Group, the Biological Weapons Convention's confidence-building measures, and the national export control regimes that implement them were calibrated for that operational reality. They are losing traction in an environment in which the relevant capacity is distributed across a wide and growing number of commercial and academic facilities, the technical entry barriers have fallen sharply, and the materials of interest can in principle be ordered through electronic channels from suppliers in multiple jurisdictions.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)
Maritime Militias and the Grey Zone in the South China Sea
March 2025AMK Insight

Maritime Militias and the Grey Zone in the South China Sea

The persistent presence of non-naval vessels in disputed waters has produced a fait accompli that traditional maritime law was not designed to address.

The strategic literature on the South China Sea has, until recently, been organised around the categories of conventional maritime power: surface combatants, submarine operations, air defence identification zones, and the legal arguments associated with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. These categories remain analytically important, but they do not capture the principal mechanism through which the disputed features and waters of the sea have been operationally altered over the past decade. That mechanism is the sustained presence of non-naval vessels, including fishing fleets, coast guard cutters, and maritime militia units, in waters whose status is contested or whose effective administration has shifted in consequence of the presence. The strategic literature is catching up, but the operational and legal architecture for responding has not.

AMK Editorial
The African Continental Free Trade Area Five Years In
February 2025Guest

The African Continental Free Trade Area Five Years In

Implementation has been slower than the founding ambition and faster than the sceptics anticipated. The interesting work is in the second-order arrangements.

The African Continental Free Trade Area entered its operational phase with a founding ambition that was substantial in scope and uncertain in implementation. The agreement covered tariff liberalisation, services trade, investment, competition policy, intellectual property, and digital trade across a membership that includes nearly every state on the continent. The ambition was met, predictably, with implementation difficulties at every stage, and the public commentary on the agreement has oscillated between premature celebration and premature dismissal in ways that reflect the difficulty of assessing an integration project of this scale on a timescale shorter than the project itself requires.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)
Religious Diplomacy and the Soft Architecture of Gulf Statecraft
January 2025AMK Insight

Religious Diplomacy and the Soft Architecture of Gulf Statecraft

The religious portfolios of Gulf states have moved from background to foreground as instruments of regional positioning.

The statecraft of the Gulf states has long incorporated a religious dimension that the analytical literature, with some honourable exceptions, has tended to treat as background rather than as instrument. The religious portfolios of the major Gulf states, including the administration of holy sites, the financing of religious education, the appointment of clerical leadership, and the broader pattern of religious diplomacy with Muslim communities across the world, have always carried strategic weight. What has changed over the past decade is the deliberation with which these portfolios are now being managed, and the explicit way in which religious instruments are being integrated into the broader statecraft of the region's governments.

AMK Editorial
Compute as Statecraft: AI Infrastructure and the Geography of Capability
December 2024Guest

Compute as Statecraft: AI Infrastructure and the Geography of Capability

The location and ownership of large-scale AI compute is becoming a strategic variable on the order of refining capacity or fabrication.

The strategic conversation about artificial intelligence has, for the past several years, been dominated by questions of model capability, regulatory architecture, and the social consequences of deployment. These questions are important and will remain so. They have, however, distracted attention from a more material question whose strategic significance is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: the location, ownership, and political control of the large-scale computational infrastructure on which advanced model training depends. This infrastructure has become a strategic variable on the order of refining capacity, fabrication capacity, or any of the other physical assets whose geographic distribution defines the structural balance of capability in critical industries.

Guest Contributor (credentials available on request)