Infrastructuring digital sovereignty: a research agenda for an infrastructure-based sociology of digital self-determination practices

ABSTRACT

Today, a number of high-profile initiatives across the globe are concrete implementations of the ‘digital sovereignty’ principle: i.e., the idea that states should ‘reaffirm’ their authority over the Internet and the broader digital ecosystem, to protect their citizens, institutions, and businesses from the multiple challenges to their nation’s self-determination in the digital sphere. According to this principle, sovereignty depends on more than supra-national alliances or international legal instruments, military might or trade: it depends on locally owned, controlled and operated innovation ecosystems, able to increase states’ technical and economic independence and autonomy. Presently, digital sovereignty is understood primarily as a legal concept and a set of political discourses. As a consequence, it is predominantly analyzed by political science, international relations and international law. However, the study of digital sovereignty as a set of infrastructures and socio-material practices has been comparatively neglected. This article explores how the concept of digital sovereignty can be studied via the infrastructure-embedded ‘situated practices’ of various political and economic projects which aim to establish autonomous digital infrastructures in a hyperconnected world. Although the article focuses primarily on outlining the agenda for a wider and comparative research program, I will place a specific focus on Russia, subject of an ongoing research project, as a pilot case.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital sovereignty
• digital infrastructures
• Internet infrastructures
• situated practices
• digital autonomy: digital self-determination
• infrastructuring

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.data-infrastructure.eu/GAIAX/Navigation/EN/Home/home.html.

2 https://blog.cryptshare.com/en/gaia-x-board-of-directors-gives-green-light-to-palantir.

3 Which is admittedly, to some extent, shorthand itself.

4 This section presents some elements of an ongoing research programme on infrastructure-based practices of digital sovereignty in Russia. Several publications derived from this fieldwork have been published in May 2021 (e.g. Daucé & Musiani, 2021; Ermoshina et al., 2022).

5 RKN is also the data protection regulator in the country; it is not an independent authority, but a governmental agency (federal service) established under the Ministry of ICTs and Media.

6 https://www.resistic.fr.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the French National Agency for Research (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR) in the frame of the project ResisTIC (Les résistants du net. Critique et évasion face à la coercition numérique en Russie, ANR-17-CE26-0020).

Notes on contributors

Francesca Musiani

Francesca Musiani Associate Research Professor, CNRS and Deputy Director, Centre for Internet and Society.