Digital sovereignty is the topic that keeps on giving. I’ve just uploaded a preprint of another paper I co-wrote with the wonderful Linda Monsees. After our very successful collaboration on the geopolitical imaginaries behind EU digital sovereignty practices, which was published in European Security last year, we have extended this line of inquiry further. Our new paper, „Beyond Sovereignty as Authority: The Multiplicity of European Approaches to Digital Sovereignty“, identifies four ideas behind European aspirations for digital sovereignty. Here’s the abstract: Digital Sovereignty is core to many contemporary debates on the regulation of digital technology, securing supply chains and strengthening the…
Monat: Februar 2023
So, apparently Kai Oppermann’s and my paper „Narratives of Digital Sovereignty in German Political Discourse“ is a top-cited paper for the 2021-2022 period in the journal Governance! And I have to be honest – that gave me a little thrill. I’m never too old to enjoy a pat on the head. It is certainly one of my papers that has generated the most responses. At digital policy meetings and conferences, I’ve had repeated cases of people saying that they read and liked it. Which is, of course, enormously gratifying, given how little attention most other academic articles get. It is…
In February 2023, US forces shot down a total of four flying objects over North America in quick succession. Since much is unclear so far, here are the known facts (as of 20 Feb 2023) first: # Altitude Date Crash site Aftermath 1 18,000m 4 Feb 2023 US territorial waters off North Carolina Debris was salvaged 2 12,000m 10 Feb 2023 US territorial waters off the North coast of Alaska Arctic conditions preclude salvage 3 12,000m 11 Feb 2023 Yukon Territory, Canada Crash site in mountainous terrain, debris not found 4 6,000m 12 Feb 2023 Lake Huron, Canada Crash site…
Yesterday’s discussion about internet fragmentation and digital sovereignty was fantastic. Francesca Musiani and Fernanda Rosa brought really interesting perspectives to the table – one from a European STS scholar, the other from a Latin American anthropologist – and Milton Mueller was an incisive and insightful commentator. (Go read some of their writings, they are all very good!) The event was livestreamed on Youtube and a recording will be made available shortly. During my initial comments, I made the point that I’d much rather talk about digital territory than digital sovereignty. When countered that this carries the risk of imposing physical…
Critical infrastructures (CI) are generally defined as those organisations, institutions, and networks whose functioning is essential to the survival and well-being of a society. They are typically grouped into functional „sectors“ which provide a specific service or good. I am currently thinking about scaling up the concept of CI to the global level – more on that in due course – and an early problem is to decide which sectors of CI I want to look at. You see, there is no globally accepted standard which sectors are considered critical. Instead, every country comes up with its own, slightly different…
I will take part in an online discussion event on the „Politics of (Dis)Connection“ this Wednesday. It was originally scheduled for last November but had to be rescheduled due to technical difficulties. Can the internet, the original network of networks, resist the contemporary strain, or was it built to accommodate these differences? In this talk three expert scholars on this topic, Daniel Lambach, Francesca Musiani and Fernanda Rosa, will give their views on the politics of global connection, its limitations, its future, and its discontent. Their talks will be discussed by one of the founders and prominent researchers of the…
In 2021, Carlo Diehl and I published an article called „The Territorialization of the Global Commons“ in the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, the journal of the IR Section of the German Association for Political Science. The official version is here and an ungated version is over at ResearchGate. We compared governing regimes for five commons: the high seas, the deep seabed, the atmosphere, outer space, and the poles. Our finding was that the two „classical“ modes of governing these spaces beyond national jurisdiction – division into sovereign territory, and internationalization – had been supplanted by what we call „functional territorialization“,…