The DIGISOV project, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), and the Research Chair in Digital Regulation, Paris-Panthéon-Assas University are organizing the “Digital Sovereignty in Conflict” international conference, which will examine the tensions, contestations, and competing understandings surrounding digital sovereignty.

Bringing together scholars from political science, sociology, science & technology studies, international relations, law, and related disciplines, the conference will explore how claims to sovereignty are articulated, negotiated, and challenged across different digital domains and jurisdictions, in the context of international rivalries, trade wars, and a resurgence of armed conflicts. It will provide a forum for interdisciplinary discussion on the different dimensions of these conflicts, as well as their implications for the governance of digital technologies.

Download the call for papers as .pdf

Digital sovereignty has become one of the defining fault lines of contemporary politics. The apparent consensus of the early internet era, premised on free flows of information, private sector self-regulation, and minimal state intervention, is now overtly challenged. In its place has emerged a profoundly conflictual landscape in which digital infrastructures, regulatory frameworks, and the control of data are openly treated as instruments of geopolitical power, economic competition and, in the most acute cases, armed conflict. States, corporations, international organisations, and civil society actors are now locked in sustained contests over who governs the digital realm, on what terms, and in whose interest.

The dominance of a small number of US technology companies over cloud infrastructures, undersea cable networks, and platform ecosystems constitutes an entrenched form of digital power that shapes the governance possibilities available to all other states. It also leaves them vulnerable to wide-ranging data collection (as the Snowden revelations made very clear nearly 15 years ago), security loopholes and even outright termination of essential services. The massive data centre buildouts concentrated in a handful of jurisdictions – driven by the escalating computational demands of artificial intelligence – are deepening rather than dispersing these asymmetries, as access to compute capacity becomes a decisive condition of economic and political competitiveness.

On the other hand, China has also taken a decisive edge on many levels of the digital stack, including platform services and AI development. Its Digital Silk Road, which bundles infrastructure investment with equipment supply, technical training, data-sharing arrangements, and governance frameworks across Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, has been presented as a competing form of digital expansionism – extending Chinese technical standards and surveillance architectures through the dependencies created by connectivity provision. In both the US and the Chinese cases, the language of development and partnership conceals structural relationships of dependency whose governance implications are only beginning to be theorised.

The conflict over digital sovereignty is also a conflict over regulation itself – over which jurisdiction’s rules travel furthest and on whose terms. Here the European Union occupies a singular position. Through its successive waves of digital legislation and the extraterritorial reach of the so-called “Brussels Effect”, it has positioned itself as the global standard-setter for data protection, platform accountability, and AI governance. This regulatory assertiveness has provoked sharp resistance from the United States, where both government and industry have increasingly characterised EU digital regulation as discriminatory industrial policy and as attempts at global censorship, targeting American companies under the guise of rights protection.

These dynamics are further intensified by the fracturing of the liberal trading order. Ongoing trade wars – expressed most sharply through US export controls on advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment, investment screening regimes, and the weaponisation of market access against China – are reshaping global technology supply chains in ways that force emerging and ‘middle powers’ to navigate between competing poles. The question of strategic dependency in the face of competing hegemons, long treated as a concern of defense policy, has migrated to the centre of digital governance. The EU’s belated recognition of its own dependency on US cloud infrastructure and Asian semiconductors, and its halting attempts to address it through the Gaia-X initiative, the EU Chips Act, and cloud sovereignty certification schemes, exemplifies the difficulty of asserting regulatory autonomy in conditions of entrenched technological dependence.

In the most extreme cases, violent political repression and armed conflicts have made visible the degree to which digital infrastructure is now inseparable from the conduct of war. Russia’s war in Ukraine since 2014 and full-scale invasion in 2022 has shown that the re-routing of traffic in occupied regions, satellite connectivity, cyberattacks on critical systems, drone navigation, information operations, and the mobilisation of social media platforms have all become integral dimensions of the conflict. Iran presents a different but related configuration, which is familiar in many other countries: a state that deploys connectivity as a tool of internal repression, throttling internet access and activating kill switches in response to waves of domestic protest.

Arguably, these evolutions may signal the resurgence of imperial logics in digital form. Yet these conflicts are not organised as a clean confrontation between fixed geopolitical blocs. Alongside open rivalry, the field of digital governance is marked by a paradoxical permeability: norms move across borders, are translated and adapted, borrow from rivals, and produce hybrid outcomes that confound simple narratives of convergence or fragmentation. In line with overall accounts of multiplexity and an unfolding multi-order global system, digital governance is both fraught with ‘weaponized interdependencies’ and marked by attempts at reasserting margins of strategic autonomy.

***

This conference invites original contributions that examine digital sovereignty through the lens of conflictuality, broadly construed: from armed conflict and geopolitical rivalry to regulatory competition, trade warfare, infrastructure dependency, and the structural tensions between state power and individual rights. We welcome research from political science, law, sociology of science and technology, international relations, and interdisciplinary approaches. Empirical, theoretical, and comparative contributions are all welcome, including work that moves beyond Euro-American frameworks.

The conference will be organised along the three following research axes and contributions may address the associated suggested issues:

Axis 1 – Data and Market Regulation as Sites of Conflict in a Multiplex World

The governance of personal data and the regulation of digital market power have become primary arenas of sovereignty contestation (Fabbrini, Celeste & Quinn, 2021; Moore & Tambini, 2022; Huang & Mayer, 2023; Heidebrecht, 2024). The GDPR has reshaped global corporate practice and inspired legislative imitation across jurisdictions (Bradford, 2020). Competition policy targeting platform monopolies has generated surprising convergences between actors as divergent as the EU and China, while diverging sharply in purpose and political context (Zhang, 2021; Wang & Gray, 2022). Artificial intelligence governance is emerging as a further site of conflict, with risk-based EU frameworks, China’s “mainstream values” content requirements, and US export controls each encoding distinct assumptions about who governs AI, in whose interest, and with what rights protections (Radu, 2021; Ferrari, 2024; Harcourt, Radaelli & Trein, 2026).

Contributions under this axis may address:

• The mechanisms and limits of the “Brussels Effect”;
• Comparative approaches to platform competition regulation;
• Relationship between data localisation requirements and surveillance capacity;
• The translation and inversion of rights-based regulatory frameworks in non-liberal contexts;
• Governance of AI systems as a site of geopolitical conflict;
• Tensions between data sovereignty and the conditions for legitimate cross-border data flows 

Axis 2 – Controversies and Crises over Digital Infrastructures and Industrial Strategies

Digital sovereignty cannot be reduced to regulation alone. Infrastructures such as undersea cables, cloud server architectures, semiconductor supply chains, and technical standards shape the practical possibilities of governance in ways that often outrun formal legal frameworks; they are not neutral technical facts but distributions of power that determine who can observe, interrupt, or condition access to digital life at scale (Musiani, 2022; Glasze et al., 2023; Fratini, 2025; Dammann, 2026). The contest over 5G and 6G standards exemplifies how governance values are encoded in technical specifications (Maxigas & ten Oever, 2023), while States are now treating semiconductor supply chains as strategic sovereignty infrastructure (Monsees, 2025). Cloud sovereignty initiatives – from France’s cloud de confiance to Russia’s post-2022 pivot toward Chinese providers – illustrate both the ambitions and the limits of sovereignty-by-infrastructure (e.g. Blancato, 2024). Open source software occupies an ambiguous position: simultaneously a tool of state sovereignty projects and a commons-based alternative to proprietary platforms (Ermoshina & Musiani, 2025; Sarkar, 2026).

Contributions under this axis may address:

• Geopolitics of technical standards in telecommunications, AI, and internet protocols;
• Strategic use of infrastructure investment to project governance norms;
• The political economy of cloud sovereignty strategies;
• Semiconductor industrial policy and its implications for digital autonomy;
• Weaponisation of connectivity and the politics of kill switches;
• Open source software as both sovereignty instrument and governance commons;
• Dependency structures created by infrastructure lock-in

Axis 3 – The Battle for the Digital Public Sphere

The governance of the online public sphere is the domain in which digital sovereignty most directly intersects with the legitimacy of the state, democratic politics and freedom of expression (Gorwa, 2024; Flonk, Jachtenfuchs & Obendiek, 2024). It is also the domain most visibly transformed by war, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated (Lokot, 2023; Daucé, Loveluck & Musiani, 2025). Moreover, the US model of platform immunity and near-absolute speech protection has been progressively challenged domestically while its global reach – through Section 230-inspired trade provisions and the dominance of US platforms – erodes (Bollinger & Stone, 2022). The EU’s Digital Services Act establishes a risk-based platform governance framework that is already influencing analogous legislation in the UK, Australia, and Brazil (Husovec, 2024), although it has also raised serious doubts about its effectiveness (Griffin, 2025).

Contributions under this axis may address: 

• Comparative platform liability and content governance frameworks;
• Governance of algorithmic systems and disinformation;
• Circulation of content regulation norms across regime types;
• Encryption policy and the cross-regime convergence of surveillance demands;
• The role of civil society and non-state actors in contesting platform governance;
• Management of AI-generated content 

Paper proposals should include a title and an extended abstract of maximum 800 words (including bibliography). Abstracts should cover the research question(s), theoretical framework, approach and methodology, and empirical outcome or expected findings.

Do not include biographical notes or your contact information in the abstract text.

They should be submitted through the conference submission page by 30 October 2026.

Blancato, F. G. (2024). The cloud sovereignty nexus: how the European Union seeks to reverse strategic dependencies in its digital ecosystem. Policy & Internet, 16(1), 12-32.

Bollinger, L. C. & Stone, G. R., eds. (2022). Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bradford, A. (2020). The Brussels Effect. How the European Union Rules the World. Oxford University Press.

Dammann, F. (2026). Situating digital sovereignty in the material geographies of internet infrastructures: lessons from Mediterranean interconnection hubs. In G. Glasze, A. Cattaruzza, F. Dammann, & F. Douzet (eds.), The Elgar Companion to the Geopolitics of Digital Sovereignty. Contested Networks, Territories and Self-Determination (pp. 97-111). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Daucé, F., Loveluck, B. & Musiani, F., eds. (2025). Digital Authoritarianism in the Making. Repression and Resistance on the Russian Internet. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Ermoshina, K., & Musiani, F. (2025). Vers une souveraineté fédérée ? Mobilisation de plateformes décentralisées pour l’autonomie numérique européenne. Réseaux, 43(254), 77-112.

Fabbrini, F., Celeste, E. & Quinn, J., eds. (2021). Data Protection Beyond Borders. Transatlantic Perspectives on Extraterritoriality and Sovereignty. Oxford and New York: Hart Publishing.

Ferrari, F. (2024). State roles in platform governance: AI’s regulatory geographies. Competition & Change, 28(2), 340-358.

Flonk, D., Jachtenfuchs, M., & Obendiek, A. (2024). Controlling internet content in the EU: towards digital sovereignty. Journal of European Public Policy, 31(8), 2316-2342.

Fratini, S. (2025). The sociotechnical politics of digital sovereignty: frictional infrastructures and the alignment of privacy and geopolitics. Big Data & Society, 12(4).

Glasze, G., et al. (2023). Contested spatialities of digital sovereignty. Geopolitics, 28(2), 919-958.

Gorwa, R. (2024). The Politics of Platform Regulation. How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation. Oxford University Press.

Griffin, R. (2025). Governing platforms through corporate risk management: the politics of systemic risk in the Digital Services Act. European Law Open, 4, 223-253.

Harcourt, A., Radaelli, C. M., & Trein, P. (2026). A question of style? Regulating artificial intelligence in the European Union and the USA. Big Data & Society, 13(3).

Heidebrecht, S. (2024). From market liberalism to public intervention: digital sovereignty and changing European union digital single market governance. Journal of Common Market Studies, 62(1), 205-223.

Huang, Y., & Mayer, M. (2023). Power in the age of datafication: exploring China’s global data power. Journal of Chinese Political Science, 28(1), 25-49.

Husovec, M. (2024). Rising above liability: the Digital Services Act as a blueprint for the second generation of global Internet rules. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 38(3).

Lokot, T. (2023). Russia’s networked authoritarianism in Ukraine’s occupied territories during the full-scale invasion: control and resilience. LSE Public Policy Review, 3(1), 1-8.

Maxigas, & ten Oever, N. (2023). Geopolitics in the infrastructural ideology of 5G. Global Media and China, 8(3), 271-288.

Monsees, L. (2025). The paradox of semiconductors – EU governance between sovereignty and interdependence. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 38(1), 3-21.

Moore, M. & Tambini, D., eds. (2022). Regulating Big Tech. Policy Responses to Digital Dominance. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Musiani, F. (2022). Infrastructuring digital sovereignty: a research agenda for an infrastructure-based sociology of digital self-determination practices. Information, Communication & Society, 25(6), 785-800.

Radu, R. (2021). Steering the governance of artificial intelligence: national strategies in perspective. Policy and Society, 40(2), 178-193.

Sarkar, A. (2026). Searching for European alternatives: digital sovereignty, digital patriotism, and the emerging geopolitics of software adoption. arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.15767.

Wang, Y., & Gray, J. E. (2022). China’s evolving stance against tech monopolies: a moment of international alignment in an era of digital sovereignty. Media International Australia, 185(1), 79-92.

Zhang, A. H. (2021). Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism. How The Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.