Infrastructures of repression: Exploring regime variations in the architecture of digital connectivity

Digital authoritarianism has reshaped the mechanisms through which non-democratic regimes govern. However, dominant regime typologies from contemporary autocratisation studies remain rooted in pre-digital assumptions about coercion, legitimacy, and participation. Indeed, existing classifications struggle to accurately reflect the central role digital infrastructures now play in mediating power, enabling new pathways of coercive control, and fostering regulated political engagement. This paper, therefore, argues for incorporating a topological understanding of the interconnected legal, infrastructural, and institutional arrangements that underpin a state's digital capabilities into modern regime typologies. It demonstrates the need for this through a comparative analysis of three Southeast Asian states (Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam) selected for their different regime types while sharing high internet penetration rates and stable governance over the last 30-40 years, allowing for clearer attribution of differences in digital infrastructure and capacity to the continuous political context rather than extraneous factors such as instability or limited connectivity. The study examines how regime characteristics shapes the design and deployment of countries digital infrastructure, highlighting the power structured into the very architecture of connectivity and its significance for the regimes ability to enact digital repression-, coercion- and legitimation behaviours. This leads the paper to argue that contemporary regime typologies should not treat the digital arena as an add-on to traditional understandings of regime power, but rather as a central and fundamental component that shapes and binds other regime characteristics to itself.