NEUTRALITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE: ADAPTING SWISS GOVERNANCE MODELS TO SECURE PAKISTAN’S CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AGAINST GLOBAL CORPORATE HEGEMONY

Abstract

Pakistan legally owns its most consequential national assets yet does not operationally control them. The SCADA systems governing the Reko Diq mining complex and the national energy grid are managed by foreign entities under foreign jurisdictions, a condition this article terms Digital Suzerainty. Using a comparative case study, the article benchmarks Pakistan’s critical infrastructure governance against Switzerland’s National Cyber Strategy. Three findings emerge. First, Pakistan’s Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act lacks data residency mandates, sovereign key management and vendor liability frameworks. Second, both Reko Diq and the CPEC energy grid exhibit dependency configurations associated with state-sponsored operational freeze attacks. Third, the proposed Pakistan Sovereign Stack offers a phased, technically specific blueprint for Strategic Decoupling that is reproducible across resource-dependent Global South economies.
Keywords: Digital Sovereignty, Critical Infrastructure, Pakistan, Switzerland, CPEC, Pakistan Sovereign Stack.