Who Is Digitally Sovereign? Authority, Oppositional Power Dynamism, and World (Dis)Ordering

Digital sovereignty is commonly understood as states’ attempts to reassert authority over digital infrastructures, data flows, and algorithmic systems beyond their exclusive reach. Yet contemporary orders of digitality exceed inherited meanings of state authority. They reshape the world in distinctive ways by enveloping, distributing, contesting, appropriating, and running it. Digitally released dispersal of power continues to dissolve sovereign authority’s enforceable control over knowledge claims, ethical values, and the provision of common goods. An entanglement of states, platforms, AI corporations, networked markets and publics, social influencers, and automated agents is now delineating what counts as personhood, good life, society, community, liberty, equality, legitimate jurisdiction, democracy, and the ordered world.
This panel investigates digital sovereignty as a single, dynamic process of simultaneous power dispersal and recentralization, operating unevenly throughout the global system. Securitization is employed to remove digital domains from public deliberation. Geopolitical competition is pursued to appropriate resources underwriting digital infrastructure. Both, at the expense of democratic legitimacy and peace, partly recentralize power without erasing its dispersal.
Scholars at all career stages are invited to submit papers exploring how digital sovereignty distributes and concentrates power across regions, regime types, institutional settings, and governance arrangements. Theoretical contributions from diverse approaches and empirical works from a variety of methodological traditions are welcome. Single-case and comparative studies are especially encouraged, particularly on the prospects for a negotiated democratic world order grounded in digitally enabled pluralism and shared responsibility. Some of the non-exhaustive topics are:
• Theorizing distributed digital authority.
• Entanglement ontologies of digital orders.
• Operationalizations and methods for researching oppositional dispersal and recentralization of power.
• Personhood, representation, recognition, and contestations in algorithmic governance webs.
• Democratic and civic participation in the construction of digital sovereignty.
• Global North–South digital sovereignty regimes, comparing the EU, China, the United States, middle powers, and small states.
• Global digital governance: institutionalization, negotiations, outcomes.
• Democratically regulating AI and governing data.
• Digital infrastructures, strategic autonomy, technonationalism.
• Emergence of new distributed centralizations of power.
• Securitization and geopolitics of recentralization (supply chains, resources, and planet appropriation).
• Unaccountable platform power, AI misinformation, erosion of trust, “liar’s dividend.”
• Anticipating a democratic world order.