In 1999, noted U.S. human rights scholar Louis Henkin delivered an emphatic (and now famous) lecture at Fordham School of Law calling for the erasure of “sovereignty,” or “that S word,” from international political and legal discourse. He argued that sovereignty had been used illegitimately to protect state control at the expense of human rights protection and enforcement.
“Digital sovereignty” today has received similar bashing—castigated as an excuse for state control of the digital sphere and an impediment to a genuinely free, open, and interoperable internet. Both Henkin and today’s critics of the “S word” are partially right. States often abuse the language of sovereignty to evade their responsibilities under international law and justify patterns of digital repression.
However, it is important to remember that sovereignty has also been an instrument for voicing the interests of the powerless, especially in postcolonial times. The Janus-faced use of sovereignty stems from the fact that it is not a neatly defined, stable doctrine or legal principle. As much as governments exploit digital sovereignty to justify repressive practices, less powerful states and citizens also use the term to challenge existing political, economic, and social power asymmetries. At its core, sovereignty is an “essentially contested concept.” Its malleability is a key reason for its durability in global political discourse, notwithstanding claims of its demise or calls for its abandonment. Rather than viewing the concept of sovereignty as a coherent doctrine or a desirable state of affairs in its own right, it is instructive to critically evaluate the language of sovereignty within the context of its use. In particular, are states invoking sovereignty to alleviate or entrench existing power asymmetries? Answering this question can clarify thinking about digital sovereignty and how it is deployed in heavily contested geopolitical contexts today.
Western states exploited ideas of sovereignty and statehood to create a paradigm where the colonizers had rights to sovereignty but colonized Indigenous communities did not, owing to differences in culture and mechanisms of governance. The colonizers weaponized the doctrine across the world to justify their brazen appropriation of land, property, and traditional knowledge systems which were replaced by colonial systems of government. After World War II, as countries began to decolonize, they started to assert their rights over their territory in the international sphere through the language of sovereignty, equality, and autonomy.
Arindrajit Basu is a PhD candidate at Leiden University and a nonresident fellow at the Centre for Internet & Society, India.
The 1962 General Assembly debate that culminated in Resolution 1803 on the “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources” marked the zenith of solidarity among the developing world around the concept of sovereignty. Yet, the developed world manipulated the tenets of international law to preserve their rights of investment stemming from precolonial times. The plethora of global rules and regulations brokered at international institutions and influenced strongly by global corporations, dubbed the “Transnational Capitalist Class,” resulted in further power asymmetries that compromised the autonomy of postcolonial states.
To use the words of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, this dynamic abetted neocolonialism, where a state “is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, [the state’s] economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” In essence, global cooperation and capital flows entrenched the power of colonial states and their companies at the expense of decolonized countries that were forced to accept these trade-offs.
The rise of the internet as a global popular phenomenon coincided with the emergence of the unipolar geopolitical moment of the 1990s, based on liberalism, free trade and information exchange, limited government intervention, and democratic American ideals.
Cyber exceptionalists, such as John Perry Barlow, defended the concept of an independent cyberspace—free from sovereign control and exercised over analogue spaces and territory. Western governments, particularly the United States, did not disagree with this position; they viewed a decentralized internet as an ideal tool for promoting American ideals and for “dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas.” Apprehensions about cyber imperialism did little to temper the liberal euphoria and techno-optimism of the moment. The laissez-faire approach to internet governance birthed corporate technology behemoths that offered disruption, innovation, and profits. Concerns that have taken center stage today, such as the abuse of market dominant positions, the rampant and unregulated spread of disinformation and misinformation, or the unrestrained appropriation and exploitation of data for corporate purposes, failed to initially provoke political or policy responses.
The optimistic ideals of an Americanized internet started unravelling as new geopolitical power centers and normative systems began to emerge. China’s Great Firewall, which restricts content from foreign websites in China’s information space, marked a key departure from the cyber exceptionalist and internet freedom narratives. China, along with Russia, has been one of the foremost proponents of cyber sovereignty discourse, which envisages state control over all internet activity and infrastructure within a country’s territory. While this idea has generally been dismissed as an authoritarian ploy to further information controls and suppress dissent, a number of democracies have started to use the narrative of digital sovereignty to advance their interests. European states, for example, have introduced their own digital sovereignty narratives to justify imposing regulatory controls over data, infrastructure, and companies within their jurisdictions. European leaders have stressed that technological or digital sovereignty is needed to protect the rights and security of their citizens. Similarly, emerging economies such as India have used digital sovereignty narratives to justify a range of domestic restrictions related to cross-border flows and content moderation requirements. India even banned Chinese applications, blaming alleged security risks they pose to Indian citizens. In addition, India has justified assertion of sovereignty over citizens’ data and digital infrastructure as the only antidote to of digital colonialism—described as the expropriation of Indian citizens’ data by Western companies.
Sovereignty is also being reimagined, reconfigured, and reclaimed by communities whose autonomy and agency over their own data has been denied. Groups such as the Māori Indigenous people in New Zealand and the Homeless Workers Movement in Brazil employ such rhetoric to reassert control over their personal data and enable civil society to circumvent unfavorable political power structures.
It is worth emphasizing that an internet unencumbered by the language of the “S word” is not free of power structures and instruments of control. As with any human-designed systems, power asymmetries and hierarchies have emerged in digital spaces. First, these power asymmetries occur between states. The United States still plays a talismanic role in the governance and technical preservation of the internet. The largest tech companies are headquartered in the country and much of the world’s data is stored in 2,701 data centers there. (Germany is a distant second, with 487 data centers.) The United States and China are battling for control over underwater cables that transmit data, and they are fighting to shape the technical standards that will govern the internet. Both countries conduct online extraterritorial surveillance against citizens of other countries using data transmitted through internet infrastructure they control; the primary constraint on U.S. surveillance efforts has come from the European Court of Justice.
Second, there are power imbalances between technology companies and their users. By exploiting weak data protection regimes, companies have been able to manipulate, use, and sell data, including personal data, for profit. Surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff lays out, treats individuals and communities as commodities, undermining human dignity and autonomy.
Third, there are major asymmetries between large and small companies. Competition laws have yet to confront the range of abuses undertaken by large companies in the digital economy. Regulators, especially in the European Union (EU), are waking up to this reality. The EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act offer promising options for preserving fair and contestable markets.
Finally, there is a significant asymmetry between states and their own people. Internet shutdowns, unjustified online censorship, and unbridled surveillance all exploit this imbalance. A functioning judicial system and constitutional levers of accountability are essential for individuals and communities to withstand and challenge such violations.
If the digital “S word” is removed from public discourse, these power asymmetries will remain in place. An unregulated internet will reinforce the concentration of power in a handful of states and large companies that have the resources to control internet infrastructure. Sovereignty, therefore, can serve as a tool for smaller states and communities to assert their security and economic interests. Using digital sovereignty in this manner turns decades of sovereignty discourse on its head. Communities can reimagine the concept of sovereignty as a means to legitimize and underscore their claims against more powerful states and companies.
The ideal of sovereign equality has been and can be championed by states as the basis for an equal say in the governance and development of the internet. New thinking around digital sovereignty that speaks to the origins and abuses of power in the digital economy and identifies ways to counter it is required. However, it is also important to be wary of the potential weaponization of sovereignty by powerful states seeking to advance digital repression. Censorship, internet shutdowns, or mass surveillance conducted by any state against its citizens undermines human dignity and autonomy. Justifying such actions through the language of sovereignty recalls similar abuses exerted by Western colonizers in previous eras. This is why the language of human rights must coexist with digital sovereignty discourse.
Much of the focus on countering hegemony in the digital world has focused on democracy and rights. That is an important but not the only piece of the geopolitical puzzle. It is essential to add power asymmetries to the mix. States and other actors will use all the tools at their disposal—military capabilities, economic heft, and convenient interpretations of law and language—to further their interests. Rather than retire the digital “S word,” it is preferable to encourage its coexistence and inclusion with human rights discourse to speak against power, rather than entrench it.
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.