Private infrastructure in geopolitical conflicts: the case of Starlink and the war in Ukraine
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661241260653 |
| Author | Joscha Abels |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
E
JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661241260653
European Journal of
International Relations
2024, Vol. 30(4) 842 –866
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661241260653
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Private infrastructure in
geopolitical conflicts: the case
of Starlink and the war in
Ukraine
Joscha Abels
University of Tübingen, Germany
Abstract
Privately owned infrastructures play a central role in the unfolding of geopolitical
conflicts. While academic contributions generally support this argument, businesses
are mostly treated as enablers or spoilers of state action rather than actors in their
own right. This article develops a theoretical framework around the relationship of
state and transnational corporations in times of intense global competition, combining
it with a political–economic perspective on how private ownership of transnational
infrastructures shifts this relationship. It argues that private businesses develop and
operate infrastructures for profit-seeking purposes, but that this logic can be amended
by preferences for political outcomes. The article undertakes an analysis of the role of
Starlink, the world’s largest satellite constellation owned by US-based company SpaceX,
in the events following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It reconstructs SpaceX’s initial
decision to enable Starlink in Ukraine and its ensuing strategic readjustment that limited
Ukraine’s abilities to retake Russian-occupied areas. The findings support the relevance
of both profit-seeking and political motives for explaining businesses’ decision-making,
with substantial implications for contemporary state–business relations. SpaceX viewed
the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to secure capital and contracts, largely from the
United States; at the same time, it sought to appease other states on which it depends,
most centrally China. The findings furthermore demonstrate that states will seek to
reestablish independence from private infrastructure where other forms of hedging fail.
While China and the European Union opted to build their own satellite constellations,
the United States relied on its economic pull to ensure SpaceX’s cooperation.
Corresponding author:
Joscha Abels, Institute of Political Science, University of Tübingen, Melanchthonstraße 36, 72074 Tübingen,
Germany.
Email: joscha.abels@uni-tuebingen.de
1260653EJT0010.1177/13540661241260653European Journal of International RelationsAbels
research-article2024
Original Article
Abels 843
Keywords
Geopolitics, infrastructure, non-state actors, outer space, privatization, transnational
corporations
Introduction
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, states have provided Ukraine
with humanitarian, financial, and military aid worth over €100 billion (Trebesch et al.,
2023). In addition to public sector commitments, private companies also contributed
significantly. Their support mostly concerned Ukrainian infrastructure. US-based tech
companies like Microsoft offered cyber security and cloud computing services to the
Ukrainian government free of charge (Beaty, 2023). These and comparable efforts have
greatly reduced the efficiency of Russian cyberattacks. A decisive contribution that
received much publicity came from spacecraft, communications, and defense company
SpaceX. Funded, partially owned, and headed by business magnate Elon Musk, the
US-based company operates Starlink, the world’s largest satellite mega-constellation
that provides Internet coverage to remote areas. Following a Russian cyberattack that
had successfully disabled most Ukrainian military communication, Musk (2022a)
announced that Starlink would be made available over Ukraine. In the following months,
over 20,000 Starlink terminals were supplied to Ukraine. Starlink became indispensable
as a communications infrastructure for Ukraine’s military. However, starting in summer
2022, SpaceX shifted its strategic orientation. Following Musk’s proposal of a “peace
plan,” which showed many similarities with Kremlin demands, SpaceX demanded the
US government cover its expenses for services to Ukraine. In parallel, Ukraine’s military
began experiencing outages of Starlink-based communications along the frontlines. In
February 2023, SpaceX announced that it would no longer make its satellite services
available for offensive action of the Ukrainian military, hampering efforts to retake
Russian occupied areas. This adjustment led observers to speculate how the shift had
come about and what strategic interests were driving SpaceX’s actions.
As in the case of Starlink, private infrastructures influence contemporary geopolitical
conflicts, and their control underlies a self-willed logic. International Relations (IR) as a
discipline is catching on to an “infrastructural turn” that has taken place in other fields
already, calling for a greater weighting of the socio-materiality of infrastructures when
studying transnational processes (Harvey et al., 2016). Recently, in light of a renaissance
of geoeconomic thought (Babić et al., 2022), scholars found that (inter)dependencies
between states, previously theorized to induce cooperation, were exploited for political
control and self-assertion (Farrell and Newman, 2019; Gertz and Evers, 2020). These
works filled a glaring gap in the IR literature but remained largely tied to state-centric
paradigms. As a consequence, private businesses were limited to a role of enablers or
spoilers of state measures and the impact of privatization and commercialization pro-
cesses concerning essential infrastructures has not been properly integrated in these dis-
courses (Abels and Bieling, 2024; Gjesvik, 2023). This omission keeps IR theorists from
accounting for dynamics of infrastructure development and control in their conceptual-
ization of state–business relations. It also stands in stark contrast to seminal works that
stressed the role of private corporations in the making and unmaking of global and
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