Last year Kai Oppermann and I published a paper called „Narratives of Digital Sovereignty in Germany“ in the journal Governance. (It’s open access and it’s free – download it here.) The paper is probably the most popular I’ve ever written, at least when it comes to circulation across audiences. I got interviewed in Deutschlandfunk Kultur (23 April 2022), the paper is referenced in Wikipedia Germany and a Tagesspiegel Background article (24 June 2022), and numerous people have reached out and told me that they liked the piece.
The paper, which was hitherto only available as Early View, has now been assigned a journal issue – it will formally appear in July 2023. The full citation is now as follows: Lambach, Daniel; Oppermann, Kai (2023): Narratives of Digital Sovereignty in German Political Discourse. In: Governance 36:3, 693-709.
In case you’re still on the fence whether it’s worth checking out, here’s the abstract:
Digital sovereignty has become a prominent concept in European digital policy, and Germany stands out as its leading advocate in Europe. How digital sovereignty is being understood in German politics is therefore highly relevant for broader policy debates on the European level. This motivates the main objective of the article to map out the different meanings that are attributed to digital sovereignty in German political discourse. Specifically, the article adopts a narrative framework to reconstruct the narratives through which these meanings are constructed. The analysis identifies seven different but overlapping narratives of digital sovereignty in the German discourse that serve to promote partly contradictory political agendas. We argue that this diversity is not a bug, but a feature. Specifically, it supports rich internarrative linkages which benefit the broader resonance of each individual narrative. It also enables a broad set of political actors to enlist digital sovereignty for their specific priorities.
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