Shaping Digital Sovereignty in Russia: Actors and Debates

ABSTRACT

The paper examines the construction of digital sovereignty ideas in authoritarian regimes, with a focus on Russia. Text mining and content analysis reveal that authoritarian regimes, in the face of new technologies, cannot simply impose a concept in a top-down manner. Instead, a diverse range of actors, including non-state entities, contribute to its formation, with their significance and participation fluctuating over time. In the context of Russia, digital sovereignty is not just a concept, but a tool used in international politics, economic development, and more, often sidelining the actual issues of technology development and their role in Russian politics.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. INTEGRUM is the largest archive of mass media sources from Russia and the former Soviet Union. It has a range of analytical tools that help to draw the digital portrait of Russia and ex-USSR countries. The archive contains Moscow and Russian regional newspapers and magazines; online TV and radio sources; and media sources from the CIS and some other countries, with the archive of some of them going back to the late 1980s to early 1990s. Today, the archive contains 120,000 sources,” including more than 500 news agencies (http://www.integrumworld.com/int_profi.html). TSU had access to Integrum in the 2021.

2. We call them “federal media” later in the text. We chose this wording to stress that despite the fact that all actors are published in officially approved media, they still express their particular opinions.

3. Website of the Russian National Library, URL: https://nlr.ru/res/inv/ukazat55/record_full.php?record_ID=220002.

4. The term “from abroad” (зарубежный) is used to stress that something is from another country; whereas, “foreign” (иностранный) is used to emphasize that something is not Russian.

5. Total is the proportion of articles per year to the maximum number published per year (the maximum number of articles published in 2021).

6. For example, the “Strategy for institutional development and information and public activities in the field of protection of the rights of personal data subjects for the period until 2020” was released to ensure the uninterrupted functioning of the internet and secure personal data or the “Doctrine of Information Security” released in 2016 and discussed as part of the security of critical infrastructure.

7. Protests were initiated by Navalniy and his organization. The main requests of the protesting people were to ensure alternation of power and stop governmental corruption.

8. Protest map of Russia “How many people took to the streets on March 26 and what happened to them: research by Meduza and OVD-Info” Archived copy of February 28, 2021, on the Wayback Machine–Meduza, June 7, 2017. URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20210228033516/https://meduza.io/feature/2017/06/07/protestnaya-karta-rossii (accessed 01.11.2023)

9. Association “Alliance in the Sphere of AI”—a nonprofit organization created in 2019 in the form of an association (union). The founders of the alliance at the time of its creation were Sberbank of Russia, Gazprom Neft, Yandex LLC, Mail.ru Group LLC (currently VK LLC), and the Russian Direct Investment Fund. URL: (URL: https://www.rusprofile.ru/id/1207700257643).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, project No FSWM-2024-0008.