The Construction of Digital Sovereignty in Struggles for Recognition

This empirical and historical chapter reconstructs the neocolonial aspects of the liberal ‘free cyberspace’ trope (Sect. 3.2) and outlines the development of normative imaginaries of digital sovereignty in China (Sects. 3.2 and 3.3), Russia (Sect. 3.4), India (Sect. 3.5), the EU (Sect. 3.6), and the US (Sect. 3.7). Following a constructivist approach, this outline contributes to sharpening the concept of digital sovereignty by focusing on the different concrete contexts of its emergence in international struggles for recognition. Regarding the years between 1996 and 2024, this chapter can also be understood as a global intellectual history of digital sovereignty in its own right. The historical narrative developed in this chapter is characterized by four partially overlapping phases: norm emergence (1996 to 2012), norm cascade (2013 to 2020), norm universalization (2016 to 2020), and norm internalization (from 2020 on) (Sect. 3.1).