Following Jasanoff and Kim’s concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries,” this chapter examines the rhetoric, regulatory frameworks and policies employed in constructing imaginaries of digital sovereignty in China, Russia, and India – three member countries of BRICS and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation). A central finding is that these sociotechnical imaginaries center on protecting national cultural identity, or “cultural sovereignty,” against the “free flow of information,” a motive echoing NWICO debates in the 1970s and 1980s and WSIS discussions in the early 2000s. The development of these countries’ digital sovereignty imaginaries is deduced from their unique histories and governance approaches. Furthermore, the SCO’s crucial role as a platform to promote the partly authoritarian Chinese conception of cyber/information sovereignty is demonstrated. Another key finding is that imaginaries of digital sovereignty relate to a non-secular understanding of the state in all three examined countries. In this sense, the global emergence of digital sovereignty is comparable to the evolution of Westphalian sovereignty from the confessional wars in early modern Europe. The chapter concludes that an informed debate on digital sovereignty must consider both the dangers of digital authoritarianism and the productive potential of digital decolonization.

This chapter explores how the Indian state asserts its digital sovereignty through digital public goods, including the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), which is overseen by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an entity governed by the Reserve Bank of India. This chapter demonstrates how, as part of the “India Stack,” indigenous digital payment design, architecture, and governance mechanisms allow for accessible, secure, and interoperable transactions in a mobile-first, open API-based payment network. This significantly reduces India’s dependence on foreign financial systems and protects it from shocks that could result from foreign sanctions (e.g., US economic sanctions of Russia in 2014 impacting MasterCard and Visa users in Russia). However, such a system is not without potential drawbacks, some of which include the dominance of foreign entities (e.g., Google Pay) on UPI as well as state-sanctioned monopolies that may minimize civil society participation and market competition. Besides interoperability and risk mitigation, the authors also advocate a multi-stakeholder governance model for the national digital payment system to bolster public ownership and institutional checks and balances.

While China’s approach of re-territorializing the cyberspace is well known, this chapter argues that there is an emerging tendency of China expanding its regulatory power beyond territorial borders, which indicates a more spatially expansive notion of China’s digital sovereignty. This chapter examines this shift from territoriality to extraterritoriality in the conception and practice of China’s digital sovereignty by focusing on three recent regulatory initiatives, that is, the Personal Information Protection Law, the Data Security Law, and the order by the Ministry of Commerce on blocking unjustified extraterritorial application of foreign legislation and measures. From these initiatives, the chapter identifies two main approaches of broadening the spatial dimension of China’s digital sovereignty and argues that they reflect how the notion of digital sovereignty is developed to incorporate China’s changing geostrategic interests. This adaptation of China’s digital sovereignty can be compared to practices of the EU and the US to observe both contrasting trends and important regulatory emulations. The trend toward extraterritoriality, while conditioned by multiple internal and external factors, is likely to face important conceptual and practical challenges.

This chapter explores digital sovereignty claims in Brazilian activism on Mastodon, the most relevant development of federated social media. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement has always advanced digital sovereignty discourses, emphasizing bottom-up struggle for control and autonomy over technology. Federated social media are the open source response to the rise of corporate digital platforms and their proprietary business model. However, most narratives about FOSS struggles, including Mastodon, emerge from the core of the global capitalism. The specific appropriations of digital sovereignty discourses by Mastodon activists in the Global South and, in particular, in the BRICS are still understudied. This is even more relevant because of the history of technological sovereignty in the global periphery, in which bottom-up activism has been much closer to the state than in most FOSS narratives. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and country data, the chapter contributes a nuanced understanding of how Brazilian activists articulate and shape digital sovereignty discourses. It finds out that Brazilian activism represents a step toward the politicization of the FOSS movement, but still attaches little value to the geopolitical dimension of social media struggles, departing from the historical contribution of FOSS activism in the Global South.

In a world of weaponized interdependence, middle powers have policy choices that can enhance their autonomy. However, having this policy space is not enough. In order to turn the policy space into policy enactment, domestic politics has to align in a particular way. This chapter considers India and Brazil as examples of “middle powers” and analyzes their capacity to enact autonomy and safeguard their digital sovereignty. The authors argue that when independent institutions’ interests are incorporated into the policymaking process and are not usurped by the parliamentary (political) process, they observe the enactment of autonomy-enhancing policies. Brazil’s and India’s data localization policies are illustrative case studies. While Brazil and India are both open democracies with a technoeconomic landscapes characterized by a similar technoeconomic landscape with a hybrid mixture of foreign-owned and domestically owned companies, they have adopted different data localization policies. The authors argue that the divergent paths of Brazil and India are due to the nature of the policymaking process. India’s policymaking incorporated the interests of independent institutions. In contrast, Brazil’s parliamentary process usurped policymaking power from its independent institutions and has not yet granted the mandate and tools to either existing or necessary new institutions, such as regulatory agencies, to address this emerging and already pressing set of issues. Thus, for countries to enact policies to enhance their digital sovereignty, the interests of independent institutions must be incorporated, and their power must be increased.

This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the book by disentangling the myriad discourses and interpretations of digital sovereignty from the perspective of the Global South and emerging power alliances. It argues that BRICS countries symbolize the “rise of the rest” in an increasingly multipolar world, their digital policies critical to the future shape of global internet, and digital governance. In this book, the idea of digital sovereignty itself is viewed as a site of power contestation and knowledge production. Specifically, the chapter identify seven major perspectives on digital sovereignty in a complex discursive field: state digital sovereignty, supranational digital sovereignty, network digital sovereignty, corporate digital sovereignty, personal digital sovereignty, postcolonial digital sovereignty, and commons digital sovereignty. The chapter highlights the affinities and overlaps as well as tensions and contradictions between these perspectives on digital sovereignty with brief illustrative examples from BRICS countries and beyond. While a state-centric perspective on digital sovereignty is traditionally more salient especially in BRICS contexts, increasing public concern over user privacy, state surveillance, corporate abuse, and digital colonialism has given ascendance to an array of alternative perspectives on digital sovereignty that emphasize individual autonomy, indigenous rights, community well-being, and sustainability.

Digital sovereignty is a fluid and complex concept. This chapter highlights the necessity to consider digital sovereignty strategies, policies, and governance mechanisms from a holistic and long-term perspective. Digital sovereignty plays a pivotal role in fostering self-determination, while remaining critical to cybersecurity and the control capabilities of the “digital sovereign.” The “sovereign” can be an individual, a community, a corporation, a state, or a group of states. Taking an agnostic approach to digital sovereignty, the authors explore diverse practices and provide insight into what this concept means in practical terms. Digital technologies can facilitate enormous advancements to be put at the service of people, but can also be weaponized against individuals, corporations, and nation-states. BRICS countries’ approaches offer telling examples of not only how and why the need for digital sovereignty can emerge but also how dysfunctional the implementation of digital sovereignty policies may become without a coherent and long-term vision. Ultimately BRICS experiences illustrate that enhancing a digital sovereign’s self-determination, cybersecurity, and control is likely to reduce the undue influence of other digital actors. However, the success of a digital sovereignty strategy largely depends on the understanding, consistency, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, organizational capabilities of aspiring digital sovereigns.

From 2018 to 2022, the ResisTIC (Criticism and circumvention of digital borders in Russia) project team has endeavored to analyze how different actors of the Russian Internet (RuNet) resist and adapt to the recent wave of authoritarian and centralizing regulations by the Russian state, with a particular focus on online resistance that reveals so far lesser-known social practices and techniques for circumventing online constraints. The chapter undertakes an infrastructure-based sociology of the RuNet, focusing on the technical devices and assets involved in surveillance and censorship, and on the strategies of resistance and circumvention “by infrastructure” that follow. The empirical core of the chapter will provide an overview of a number of studies undertaken by the ResisTIC project team in the past few years. While the presentation of the case studies will by necessity be relatively brief, presenting them together will allow to draw some general conclusions about the state of infrastructure-based digital sovereignization in Russia.

Today’s platformization of services was an “unforeseen” phenomenon when the WTO was established. However, through the pro-liberalization WTO jurisprudence developed in past decades, the GATS market access commitments have played more than a marginal role in the story of the emergence of datafication, leaving the door open for big tech companies. Without question, platforms’ associated datafication practices influence human society, in terms of their beauty as well as their peril. The perilous side therefore calls into question whether international trade commitments negotiated in the pre-digital age should be sustained in this datafied world. In the FTA context, Chapter 3 argues that listing nonconforming measures under the Cross-Border Trade in Services Chapter represents the most critical step in reserving a state’s “digital sovereignty.” Such inscriptions ensure that a state does not risk committing to future services and associated delivery means that did not exist at the time of treaty negotiations. Nonetheless, market access obligations do not prevent states from adopting domestic regulations in pursuit of legitimate national policies. Digital trade liberalization must be accompanied by the introduction of data regulations to address the potential risks and harms.