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Short abstract:

This paper explores how the “digital transformation” is enacted as digitalpolitical statecraft, how the paradigm of 'digital sovereignty' leads to an explicit infrastructuralization of state politics and how a Public Innovation Lab enacts the infrastructural state as situated, relational practice.

Long abstract:

Following the current formation of digitally sovereign transformation, one will come across new professionals: "public innovators", "public service designers" and “creative bureaucrats”. According to these new professionals, “deep change" does not necessarily come from “disruptive technologies”, but is also achieved through digital transformation practices - in other words: situated, sociomaterial, infrastructural interventions.

This contribution explores the statist or governmental turn of digitalization, through which the state is reconfigured as infrastructural subject and object of transformation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork of a governmental Public Innovation Lab in Berlin, I will demonstrate that sovereign digital politics acts as significant arena to enact ‘digital sovereignty’. Moreover, I argue that different modes of digital political practices foster multiple formations in which the state and digitalization / the sovereign and the digital are differently related. Following the actualizations of what I call 'digitalpolitical statecraft' by the Public Innovation Lab, I show how their digital political practices reframe “the state” as an infrastructural power, as infrastructural practice or as infrastructural experiment.

For capturing the sociomaterial, digital political intervention practices involved, I propose the concept ‘intrastatecraft’ as heuristic to foreground first, the administrational dimension in infrastructural statecraft and second, the component of ‘craft’ to attend to the use of instruments, materials and sociometarial tactics in which the nonhuman is explicitly introduced to sovereign politics.

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Short abstract:

This article aims to analyze the effectiveness of the implementation of sanctions instated by the European Union in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and we seek to understand its impacts on human rights and consequences for the European Union's digital sovereignty.

Long abstract:

This article aims to analyze the effectiveness of the implementation of sanctions instated by the European Union in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and we seek to understand its impacts and consequences. The analysis is based on a unique technical analysis of network interference and website blocking at the EU level, complemented with desk research on recent EU restrictive measures and their implementation. For our analysis, we engaged in wide-ranging network measurements in different networks in several EU countries to understand the means and methods of the implementation of the sanctions. To accompany, frame, and contextualise the measurements, we have done extensive policy analysis of EU digital sovereignty documents, as well as the policies and processes that have accompanied the sanction development and implementation. We found that sanctions against Russian entities are inconsistently implemented across the EU. The findings underline the disconnect between the EU political approach and the complexity of the technical measures needed to enforce those sanctions. Where the blocks are implemented, users are generally not informed about the reasons - nor offered the opportunity for due process - indicating a lack of human rights due diligence.

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Short abstract:

The STS concepts of "discourse" and "controversy" are used to frame data localization as a complex and hybrid black box of social and technical elements. We analyze 17 in-depth interviews with Swiss users to show the relevance of STS in analyzing the agencies at stake in digital governance.

Long abstract:

The construction and effects on national boundaries have become central topics in public and academic debates on digital sovereignty. Both state and non-state actors increasingly consider jurisdictions and traditional governing structures as means to capture and regulate digital data flows. This article delves into the intricate phenomenon of “data localization”, conceptualizing it as a socio-technical assemblage reflecting the evolving expectations surrounding Internet architecture and national boundaries. Interviewing the users of Threema – a Swiss secure messaging app – this study unravels data localization practices as a hybrid black box, intertwining technical changes, political discourses, socio-technical imaginaries, and shifting social norms. Drawing on the Science and Technology Studies field, we mobilize the analytical tools of controversy and discourse to highlight data localization as a locus of political contestation in Switzerland, where imaginaries of national boundaries are often mobilized to symbolize security and reliability. The article provides three key contributions to the discourse on digital sovereignty, fragmentation, and governance. Firstly, it argues for the usefulness of Science and Technology Studies in understanding Internet governance, emphasizing the need for analyses grounded in specific socio-technical contexts. Secondly, it advocates for a social perspective on digital sovereignty, emphasizing user agency, social movements, and collective action as crucial factors shaping the governance of data flows. Lastly, the article sheds light on users resorting to state jurisdictions as a means to reinforce control over data flows, exploring the discursive mobilization of national boundaries in the digital public sphere.

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Short abstract:

The digitization of policies can make actors in a sector vulnerable to the point where the Sovereignty of the State is threatened. We examine how alternatives may preserve the State’s competencies without jeopardising its sovereignty.

Long abstract:

Swiss agriculture is a strongly regulated sector. Policy definition and implementation comes within the realm of the Confederation and of the Cantons who subsidiarily share Sovereignty according to the Swiss Federal Constitution. Federal and local administrations set up programs and measures in order to achieve constitutional and legal policy objectives. They monitor farmers' compliance by using a collection of digital information systems whose data is supplied by farmers. Personal data, data on land and crops, on animals, on programs farmers have signed on to, on quantity, quality, and controls, on modes and means of production, etc. are stored in public IT infrastructures and linked to a unique identifier for each farmer, providing a fingerprint associated to every action of every farmer.

This data trove generated envy. In 2015 a private initiative claimed the right to collect and to manage this data “already paid for by the People” in the name of an alleged need to simplify farmers’ administrative work. It proposed to centralise all farm data in a single database, that other actors (public or private) could access via APIs. A group of farmers' associations opposed the move and launched a counter-project.

In this paper, we examine how the digitization of agricultural policy made the actors in the sector vulnerable to the point where the Sovereignty of the States was threatened. We discuss how digital alternatives, anchored in the Constitution and in the Law, may preserve the States’ competencies without jeopardising their sovereignty.

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Long abstract:

Digital contact tracing was introduced as part of digital COVID-19 pandemic preparedness, in which preparedness merged with digital innovation, regulation and issues of infrastructural sovereignty. The contact-tracing approach to digitally track and trace, triggered public controversies over the specter of encompassing surveillance. The resolution of the controversy came to turn predominantly (but not only) on matters pertaining to privacy, especially so-called ‘privacy-by-design’, through which more privacy-friendly solutions become built into smart phones operating systems and digital infrastructures. These solutions however also facilitated a shift away from state-based initiatives to the private sector (Google & Apple), thus extending their hold on the informational infrastructures underlying public health provision. We will discuss these developments in the light of recent turns towards design- and engineering-based approaches to governance and argue three main points: first, that there is a need to pay closer scrutiny to what actually happens as governance issues become subject to design and engineering. Second, we argue that issues relating to ongoing digital preparedness also raise questions of a political nature, i.e., discussions over digital infrastructural sovereignty. Finally, we argue for the need to pay closer attention to the material and technological reconfigurations that increasingly come to mediate these political matters.

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Long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed at the forefront of public debate the capacity of states to manage the spread of the virus in a coordinated and effective way across borders. Among the tools used to combat the pandemic, contact tracing applications have been developed in many countries to loosen total national lockdowns. While most European countries developed their own digital contact tracing solutions, only a few managed to ensure some kind of interoperability among their tracing infrastructures. Such infrastructural interoperability was particularly important for those large life basins that sprawl across borders, such as the Rhône-Alpes and the Lake Geneva life basin between France and Switzerland. This paper presents the results of a study retracing the innovation journeys of the French and Swiss solutions in this context. It demonstrates how conflicting visions about the roles of the state, Google, and Apple, and their implications for digital sovereignty and privacy, led to the creation of two entirely incompatible digital infrastructures for citizen epidemic self-monitoring. Cross-border movements in this life basin were overlooked. Addressing them would have required not only overcoming interoperability issues arising from incompatible algorithms, architectures, and institutional configurations but also those related to the app’s integration within a broader pandemic crisis management, namely the testing, tracing, isolating strategy, and associated rights and obligations. The discrepancies between the two national solutions ultimately underscore that contact tracing apps are only effective within the national frameworks for which they were created, revealing multilayered vulnerabilities in European cross-border situations.

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Long abstract:

Without really underlining the hardware aspect, the actuality shows the use of cloud services as a geopolitical mean in warfare. Microchips are everywhere, those are central for phones, computers and of course servers, but also for mundane objects. US chips are also known to contain backdoors for espionage purposes. Basically, electronic requires chips. EU ‘s “Chip regulation” (2023/1781) attempts to address this issue by developing a real infrastructuring digital sovereignty to claim European independence from foreign monopolies coupled with political misuses. Even if this strategic choice can only be hailed, this path toward an hardware sovereignty ony creates new capitalistic actors with a limited ecosystem and limited liabilities. The present proposition examines the CHIPS regulation to determine its effects prior to propose solutions involving European civil society and developing countries through open sources solutions. Such path may avoid this notion to evolve as a sole capitalistic concept but to be linked with its real aim: entrusting citizens to have power on their national infrastructure.

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Long abstract:

This talk puts “data sovereignty” in conversation with the operationalization of “sovereignty” in grassroots autonomous health movements (Braine, 2020). Health data sovereignty often focuses on bodily and data autonomy at the level of the individual. However, this focus on individuals limits views of critical justice issues that surface when data is considered in context of community (Treré, 2022). Suggestions to address collective data controls, referred to here as data sovereignty (Hummel et al., 2018), range from large-scale data refusal or repurposing (Milan and Velden, 2016) to mechanisms like data stewardship and cooperatives (Mills, 2019). However, aside from the robust, culturally informed practices of indigenous data sovereignty (Claw et.al., 2018), there is still little agreement on how data sovereignty gets defined and practiced at a community level (Hummel et al., 2021). As a result, existing initiatives remain disconnected from the praxis required in spaces such as grassroots health justice movements. I argue that data sovereignty praxis must engage with the question of who forms a collective (and how) to assess which routes are available to promote collective sovereignty over health data. To make this case, I review case studies of collective organizing for health autonomy, like the Black Panthers’ free clinics (Nelson, 2013), and then present an analysis of websites from current autonomy-promoting health justice groups in Philadelphia. I demonstrate what can be learned about the forms of data sovereignty that are important to health activists and how researchers concerned with digital sovereignty can learn from small-scale health autonomy movements.