Debating Digital Sovereignty

Can states meaningfully exercise sovereignty over technologies that depend upon globally distributed infrastructures? While conceptually fluid, "digital sovereignty" has become the latest "it" word for governments seeking to exercise greater control over data, digital infrastructure, cloud services, semiconductor supply chains, platforms, cybersecurity, and technological standards.
This panel invites papers that interrogate the evolution of sovereignty in the context of data and digital technologies.
Rather than treating technological dependence as simply the absence of sovereignty, papers might investigate how states attempt to manage, diversify, weaponize, or strategically negotiate dependencies and forms of resilience.
Contributions might examine the relationship between sovereignty and dependence in areas including, but not limited to:
- artificial intelligence and compute;
- cloud infrastructure and data centers;
- data governance and localization;
- telecommunications and undersea cables;
- cybersecurity;
- digital public infrastructure;
- technical standards