Full Description
This comprehensive Companion explores the rise of digital sovereignty as a guiding principle of digital policy in different regions of the world. It analyses digital transformation within larger geopolitical and geoeconomic processes and provides a historically and geographically context-sensitive overview of research in this field of growing importance.Expert authors combine approaches from digital geography, with its sensitivity to the socio-technical shaping of socio-spatial relations, and political geography, with its focus on questions of the spatial organisation of the (political) world with research from political sciences, law, computer sciences and economics. With comparative analysis through an international range of case studies, chapters shed light on the concept of digital sovereignty through a multi-stakeholder lens which includes states, private actors and civil society.
Laying the foundations for a political geography of the digital age, this book is an essential reference for researchers and students in political and digital geography, geopolitics, internet studies and digital social science more broadly.
Contents
Contents
1 Political geographies of digital sovereignty: an introduction to the book 1
PART I GEOPOLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
2 Intermediation platforms and geopolitical asymmetries: lessons from a pandemic 13
3 'Almighty giants?' Assessing the rise of GAFAM as geopolitical actors 29
4 Digital sovereignty in business: encodings, demarcations and the attribution of meaning 39
5 Digital transformation and authoritarian power in the Gulf monarchies 51
6 Socio-technical factors influencing the digital sovereignty of the individual 65
7 Digital sovereignties in a blockchain age 77
PART II CONCEPTIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON '(DIGITAL) SOVEREIGNTY'
8 Contested spatialities of the digital: conceptual contributions from geography 93
9 Situating digital sovereignty in the material geographies of internet infrastructures: lessons from Mediterranean interconnection hubs 105
10 Law enforcement and access to transborder evidence: the quest for the exercise of digital sovereignty 119
11 Digital civic sovereignty: a Habermasian conceptualisation and a first glance at its core conditions in cyberspace 133
PART III DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES OF DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY IN A GLOBAL COMPARISON
12 The evolution of the Cuban strategy towards connection and the affirmation of sovereignty 147
13 China, cyber sovereignty and the geopolitical moment 161
14 Digital sovereignty under kinetic siege: the transformation of Ukraine's information sovereignty 173
15 India's digital sovereignty narrative 189
16 Iran's strategy of digital sovereignty: the strategic control of Internet routes 203
17 Russia's digital sovereignty strategy 215
18 Why the United States doesn't use the concept of digital sovereignty 229
PART IV DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES OF A DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY: EU PERSPECTIVES
19 Digital sovereignty in France: from polarized debate to dispersed action 241
20 Digital sovereignty: revisiting the French perspective 247
21 Building digital sovereignty in the French military: doctrine, organisation and cyber combatants 259
22 Democratic sovereignty and new trends of online content regulation: the case of France 271
23 Digital sovereignty in Germany from the 1990s to the 2020s: prehistory, reception, and contradictions 283
24 Digital sovereignty: a matter of scale? From a sovereign French cloud to European cloud solutions 289
25 The geopolitical role of digital standards in the quest for European digital sovereignty 301
26 An imposed sovereignty? Implementing European digital sovereignty in the Western Balkans 313
27 Towards a city-level practice of digital sovereignty? Addressing the question of digital rights and democracy 327
