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

Digital authoritarianism has reconfigured the operative modalities through which regimes exercise authority, yet prevailing regime typologies, particularly within autocratisation scholarship, remain anchored in pre-digital conceptualisations of repression, coercion and legitimacy. Indeed, it is oft the case that they insufficiently theorise the constitutive role of digital infrastructure in structuring and mediating state power. This paper addresses this lacuna by introducing a topological framework for the internet, explicitly oriented towards understanding variation in digital infrastructures across regime types, and how this can be used to predict repressive behaviours. To theoretically support this, the paper establishes the significance of understanding the internet as a hierarchical, node-dependent system organised around critical control points, including exchange nodes, backbone infrastructure, and international gateway connections. Given the routing dependencies inherent to packet-switched networks, these sites function as obligatory passage points through which data flows are channelled. Differing levels of control over such nodes produce pronounced asymmetries in infrastructural power, potentially enabling both granular and systemic interventions in information flows, encompassing selective filtration, throttling, and network disruption. Such an understanding allows the paper to theorise and demonstrate that variation in state capacity for digital control, as a function of ownership configurations and positionality within the network topology, has implications for repressive behaviours.