The DIGISOV project, with the support of the Chair in Digital regulation at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas, is organizing a workshop on Thursday, 5th December from 2 to 6 pm:
Salle 314, Centre Assas
92 rue d’Assas 75006 Paris
Discussions will take place in English. Admission is free, but to gain access to the building please sign up before the 4th December at: https://framaforms.org/workshop-digital-sovereignties-in-friction-5-decembre-2024-1732574446/
Program
14h-14h15: Introduction
Benjamin Loveluck (CERSA, Paris-Panthéon-Assas University)
Francesca Musiani (CIS/CNRS)
14h15-16h: Invited speakers
Chairs & discussants: Anastasia Iliopoulou-Penot (CDE, Paris-Panthéon-Assas University) & Séverine Arsène (CIS/CNRS)
Giovanni De Gregorio (Católica Global School of Law, Lisbon)
Digital Constitutionalism and Sovereignty
Over the past decades, the governance of the Internet has moved from an exclusive public-sector model to a hybrid system made of states and transnational corporations competing on a global scale. This trend has triggered not only illiberal regimes but also constitutional democracies to react in order to regain control, mainly through regulations, such as the GDPR and the Digital Services Act, which have expanded enforcement powers. This centralisation of state power reflects a shift back towards public authority, with states extending influence beyond borders and leading towards regulatory islands fragmenting the digital environment. This presentation examines the constitutional challenges raised by the consolidation of digital sovereignty and the role of digital constitutionalism in addressing the exercise of powers in the algorithmic society.
Elisa Oreglia (King’s College London)
Frictions and Flows: Studying Chinese Tech Expansion in Neighboring Countries
How do we study the impact that Chinese digital technologies are having around the world? Since the launch of the Digital Silk Road in 2015, a program within the Belt and Road Initiative that is focused specifically on digital investments, there has been a surge of media and scholarly attention towards the expansion of Chinese tech around the world, especially in developing countries. This is typically framed in geopolitical terms, with Chinese tech as the juggernaut that is conquering the world, and individual countries’ “digital ecosystems” (Van Dijck et al. 2018) having to align with either Western or Chinese tech spheres. This view not only ignores the context of socio-technical systems, where historical legacies and a wide variety of human actors are intertwined with tech, but also the material nature of digital artifacts, built to be modular and connected, and thus to embody and connect to a multitude of diverse digital systems. Following recent calls to move towards a relational understanding of China’s global expansion that acknowledges its entanglements with local realities and local agency (Franceschini and Loubere, 2022; Lee, 2022), I take « fragmented China » as my starting point, to study the multiplicity of actors – Chinese and non-Chinese, human and non-human in a nod to Latour – that are involved in the global expansion of Chinese tech, seen from the perspective of four countries: Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Cambodia, and China itself. In this talk, I will discuss my team’s multi-methodological and multi-country approach to studying frictions and flows encountered by Chinese tech outside of China, and present two case studies to explore the implications.
16h-16h15: Coffee break
16h15-18h: Presentation and discussion of work by junior researchers
Chair & discussant: Olessia Kirtchik (CERCEC/EHESS)
Clément Perarnaud (Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Brussels School of Governance)
Sanctions and Infrastructural Ideologies: Assessing the Material Shaping of EU Digital Sovereignty in Response to the War in Ukraine
This research interrogates the sanctions instated against Russian media by the European Union (EU) in response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. This article draws on extensive network measurements that show the heterogeneous implementation of the sanctions in EU Member States. It also aims to interrogate the effects of these new forms of sanctions, implemented at the infrastructure level of the internet, and reflect on their political implications for the EU’s approach towards the internet and the enhancement of its digital sovereignty. We show that the EU, through these infrastructural sanctions, has chosen to limit its influence to the content layer of the internet while leaving untouched the interconnection layer, mirroring the resistance of other multistakeholder organisations towards other sanctions and demonstrating how the EU’s digital sovereignty approach is structurally limited by the entanglement of internet “resources” at the global scale.
Samuele Fratini (University of Padua and University of Lugano)
Converging Frictions: the Swiss Contestation of Surveillance in the Context of Digital Sovereignty
This study examines the socio-material construction of Threema, a Swiss secure messaging application and the largest European-headquartered messaging app by user base. Originating from early work on the discursive construction of Threema, the research has evolved to assess how Threema’s privacy-oriented design, ethos, and policies result into hybrid forms of frictions. These frictions encompass its exclusive reliance on domestic data centers, a user base distributed along specific cultural lines, and its corporate opposition to EU-backed interoperability initiatives. Privacy, within this framework, is interpreted as a dynamic form of friction, as it is based on the regulation of data flows by harnessing political, geographical, and technical barriers. Threema’s status as the official messaging application of several Swiss institutions, including the Swiss Federal Administration, some Cantonal Administrations, the Border Police, and the Swiss Army, highlights the app’s peculiar alignment with Swiss digital sovereignty goals. This alignment underscores an unexpected convergence between hybrid privacy frictions and strategic national goals. As these privacy-related frictions stabilize, they translate into norms that support a localized, sovereign digital agenda, excluding foreign operators in favor of domestic solutions. The analysis reveals how Threema epitomizes a processual and infrastructure-driven model of digital sovereignty, where localized technological standards interface with national priorities, resulting in a form of strategic friction that supports Swiss autonomy in the digital domain.