The Volatile Floor: Undersea Infrastructure, Seabed Mining and the Liminal Ontologies of Marine Governance

ABSTRACT

Although critical social science scholarship has showcased the ‘social life’ of submarine cables, the ocean floor itself is routinely treated as a passive, reliable surface for undersea infrastructure installation. This paper counters that assumption by bringing the concept of liminality into critical marine geography, arguing that the seafloor's material hybridity reinforces industrial, institutional and geopolitical friction. Drawing on eight months of ethnography in Indonesia, we demonstrate how this subaqueous and subterranean space leads to spatial conflicts across three registers. First, the murky volume of the sea obscures linear telecommunication networks, causing physical collisions and legal standstills with seabed tin mining operations off the Bangka and Belitung Islands, Indonesia. Second, the seabed's shifting identity between solid earth and fluid water fractures domestic administration, triggering jurisdictional gridlock among competing ministries. Lastly, on an international scale, the framing of the Indonesian seabed as an international transit corridor under the freedom of navigation—exemplified by the trans‐oceanic Sun Cable project—stokes national security anxieties among domestic actors who perceive the Indonesian seafloor as sovereign territory. Ultimately, this paper reads the seafloor as an active infrastructural agent, demonstrating that the governance of global connectivity is inextricably bound to the volatile, three‐dimensional materialities of this deep space.