By exploring the interplay between digital sovereignty and the fragmentation of digital ecosystems and internet governance, this special issue offers new perspectives on and highlights new puzzles related to the complex dynamics of a global digital political economy.
While existing research on digital international affairs develops our understanding of both cybersecurity and the evolving juxtaposition of the internet and regulatory authority of nation-states and other bodies (Dunn Cavelty, 2007; Eriksson and Giacomello, 2009; Mueller, 2010; Singer and Friedman, 2014; Valeriano and Maness, 2018; Cai, 2021), the expansion of the global digital economy and the rise of debates around technological sovereignty open up numerous new research avenues and challenges for international political economy (IPE) scholarship. A growing prominence of questions around ‘digital sovereignty’ – which gained greater importance first in relation to the Chinese party-state’s response to the internet (Zeng et al, 2017), then intensified with the growing power of platform firms – indicates a drive for contestation and disruption to global governance and supply chains and a reassessment of the economic and technological autonomy of societies, countries and individuals (Deibert et al, 2010; DeNardis, 2014; Manning, 2019).
A key research concern, therefore, is to capture the ongoing dynamics and drivers of fragmentations in pursuit of such digital self-determination and the simultaneous problematisation of digital dependencies. Some experts warn, for example, that due to a significant increase in national regulations around data collection, critical infrastructure protection and censorship of online content, as well as Sino-US competition over technologies, a ‘Cyber-Balkanization’ or ‘Splinternet’ arises as a central concern in what Mueller (2017) describes as a fragmenting ‘power struggle’ over the future of national sovereignty (see also Dunn Cavelty and Wenger, 2020). In a seminal text for the 2016 World Economic Forum, Drake, Cerf and Kleinwächter set out a useful topography to chart such fragmentation, distinguishing between three distinct forms: technical, governmental and commercial. Technical fragmentation refers to ‘conditions in the underlying infrastructure that impede the ability of systems to interoperate and exchange data packets fully and of the Internet to function consistently at all end points’; governmental fragmentation comprises ‘policies and actions that constrain or prevent certain uses of the internet to create, distribute, or access information resources’; and commercial fragmentation is defined as ‘business practices that constrain or prevent certain uses of the Internet to create, distribute, or access information resources’ (Drake et al, 2016: 14–15). While Drake et al’s typology encompasses a broad set of challenges, the neat categories cannot account for the complex layers and linkages between current policy shifts, ideas and technological materialities of today’s global digital political economy.
By exploring the interplay between digital sovereignty and the fragmentation of digital ecosystems and internet governance, this special issue and its articles add to a burgeoning field of study (Bellanova et al, 2022; Musiani, 2022; Adler-Nissen and Eggeling, 2024; Falkner et al, 2024) and offer new perspectives on the complex dynamics of a global digital political economy, which has significant effects on the global economy proper. A crucial and widespread concern is the question of whether digital fragmentation arises as a positive or negative trend from the various perspectives of policy makers, online users and firms. On the one hand, fragmentation challenges existing trade flows and digital products and services as well as the cohesion of institutions and established practices of global internet governance, therefore standing to potentially threaten future interoperability of digital technology and technical connectivity. A 2022 study on ‘Emergent Digital Fragmentation’ finds that since governments entered ‘into regulatory overdrive in digital sectors since the start of 2020 … regulatory heterogeneity is growing, posing an ever-greater risk of digital fragmentation’ (Evenett and Fritz, 2022: 5). On the other hand, some forms of fragmentation are perhaps a healthy correction to undesirable developments of digital capitalism and the unmitigated power of platforms. Protection of individual rights and data privacy (Hart, 2010; Mansfield and Rudra, 2021; Shibata, 2021), for instance, is a crucial tenet by which democratic societies aim to mitigate the negative effects of a highly interconnected technological civilisation – an environment rendered increasingly interdependent by multiplying layers of algorithmic processes, cloud-based autonomous systems and all-encompassing services of global platform firms (Atal, 2020; Calcara and Marchetti, 2021; Edler et al, 2021).
A growing multitude of digital fragmentations thus arises in an attempt to reinforce some digital sovereignty. Rich with implications, these fissures provide an illuminating conceptual prism through which to deepen, reframe and challenge existing IPE research on digital technologies, including ramifications for global governance and power structures, individual/societal liberation, material/ideational forces of change and the renewed relevance of perspectives on ‘public goods’. Connections between fragmentation and sovereignty bear a long conceptual genealogy, which can be traced through phases of IPE research around information technologies. Doing so requires a brief history of IPE as it matured with certain core concepts and categories, namely capitalism (LeBaron et al, 2021), labour and inequality (Lockwood, 2021), economic order and global structures (Gilpin, 2016), dependency and interdependence, as well as international regimes and global governance (Mueller, 2010).
IPE research on information technology burst forth with the early adoption of information and communication technologies in the 1970s and 1980s. Key underlying themes of market integration and regulatory harmonisation narrated the global spread of technologies, namely in the facilitation of globalised trade, logistics and communications (Sandholtz, 1992; Braman, 1995). Research on technical standards, international regimes and especially Keohane and Nye’s theme of ‘complex interdependence’ in the information age (cf Keohane and Nye, 1998) – advanced in contradiction to structural realist zero-sum theories – speak of a market concern with overcoming policy and regulatory fragmentations amid a globalising and increasingly interconnected world. A large portion of theoretical interest at this time lay in the interaction of information technologies with labour relations, renewed dependencies, inequalities in the Global South, contested global governance regimes and the shifting state-economy nexus (Brien and Helleiner, 1980; Underhill, 2000; Rosenau and Singh, 2002; Fuchs, 2017), with less focus on issues related to national sovereignty as such (but see Wriston, 1988; Litfin, 1999).
A second phase for IPE coincided with the widespread use and ramifications of information technologies around the world roughly through the 1990s and 2000s. Researchers at this time were concerned with societal and political transformations as well as emerging threats. As a result, new categories for transformed societies (that is, ‘information society’, ‘networked society’) developed alongside novel forms of political power (that is, social media and interactive mass communication) and emerging ideologies such as the notion of self-regulating markets or networks. A key theme of this phase was the opportunity for liberation of individuals and civil society through a decentralised internet with borderless global and instant communication, without a central authority. Such an optimistic promise resonated with prior notions of, for example, the ‘global village’ (coined by McLuhan in the mid-1960s), ‘time-space compression’ (that is, Giddens and Harvey drawing on Marx) and fringe ideologies such as ‘cyberpunk’, which were each prominent drivers of cultural change, often in the face of contemporaneous elitist neoliberal agendas (Valcanis, 2011; Dutton, 2023).
Thus, the research focus in IPE shifted from regulatory integration to the decentralisation of agency and authority, all the while dissolving certain distances within a complex and fragmented world system. Sovereign nation-states were judged to largely be in retreat (Rosenau, 1990; Strange, 1996), notwithstanding some counter voices asserting the persistent role of the state (Drezner, 2004; cf Barrinha and Renard, 2020; Möllers, 2021). Fragmentation arose, therefore, not as a problem, but rather a ‘pluralization of international institutions’ (Mueller, 2010: 8, emphasis in original) by which existing national jurisdictions were to be linked via new forms of emerging and evolving forms of networked governance (cf Braman, 2004). Furthermore, some scholars stressed the inclusive opportunities of technology to expand individual autonomy by enabling new forms of communicative power, cultural identity and political and social mobilisation (Hajnal, 2002; Singh, 2013). In such views, national sovereignty and the power of nation-states functioned mainly as the negative foil for this kind of emancipatory discourse – a contention that has recently returned with force in enquiries around blockchain-enabled modes of decentralised technological self-governance (Zwitter and Hazenberg, 2020; Santana and Albareda, 2022).
A third and most recent phase unfolded parallel to the rise of platform capitalism, Web 2.0 applications and what some call the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in the wake of the 2007/08 global financial crisis. Cryptocurrencies, the Internet of Things, large language models and other types of AI, as well as a growing number of autonomous systems of all kinds, evidence ‘the extent to which new digital transformations have penetrated core aspects of our lives’ (Brass and Hornsby, 2023: 615). IPE research in this moment refocused on (infra)structural forms of power and disruptions due to the concentration of financial and political power engendered in digitalised markets, platform economies and big data technologies (Srnicek, 2017; Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019; Staab, 2019; Atal, 2020; Bellanova and de Goede, 2022; Beaumier and Cartwright, 2024). As interdisciplinary scholarship on large technical systems and digital platforms expanded and stimulated closer cooperation between IPE, international relations (IR) and science and technology studies (STS) (Rietveld and Schilling, 2021; Weiss Evans et al, 2021; Mayer, 2022; Bueger et al, 2023; Rolf and Schindler, 2023), IPE authors also returned to some earlier research themes to consider the intersection of digital infrastructures and the digitalisation of the state-economy nexus (see for example Clarke, 2019; Beaumier and Kalomeni, 2021; Green and Gruin, 2021; Huang and Mayer, 2022; Westermeier, 2024). Fast-paced changes in entire economic sectors, labour relations (Moore and Joyce, 2020), communicative practices and the ever-expanding cyber national security apparatus gave rise to various contestations – key among them concerns regarding personal privacy, societal autonomy and digital sovereignty (Deibert et al, 2010; Floridi, 2020; De Goede and Westermeier, 2022) as well as interplay and intricate connections between states and platforms/big data firms (Hicks, 2021; Khan, 2021; Huang and Mayer, 2023).
The geo-politicisation of social media, AI and quantum computing has exacerbated concerns about interdependence and supply chains in the realm of US–China tensions. Indeed, this third phase of fragmentation research is marked by the problem of ‘Weaponized Interdependence’ (Farrell and Newman, 2019; 2021), in which states use different information and economic networks to control information flows and exert coercion on other states and/or multinational companies. Data localisation laws, for instance, which intend to maintain local user data within national borders, are a response to unregulated platform companies and the growing digitalisation-driven divide between the US, China and the rest of the world. It is in this vein that Bradford (2019) notes the ‘Brussels Effect’, by which the European Union uses regulation of the single market to set market standards and thus hold power over global economic operations. Europe’s official call for increasing technological autonomy, however, is up against the region’s double digital dependency on both China and the US (Mayer and Lu, 2023).
Amid this third phase of scholarship arise multiple interrelated dynamics of digital fragmentation, one of which entails the disruptive effects of growing inequality (that is, sharing and gig economies, see Graham et al, 2017; Vallas, 2019; Fredman et al, 2021) and public polarisation resulting from the spread of fake news and other manipulative social media-led narratives (Susser et al, 2019). Meanwhile, implementations of surveillance capitalism and digital authoritarianism turn ideas of ‘liberation technologies’ on their head (Morozov, 2011; Deibert, 2019; Zuboff, 2019), while social media platforms operate as powerful intermediaries that are seen not only as ‘governors’ (DeNardis and Hackl, 2015: 761–70), but also as threats to democratic stability in the spread of propaganda, disinformation and surveillance technologies. Furthermore, significant disruptions to the very fabric of IR/IPE actors could result from the growing number of automated weapons and increasingly autonomous intelligent systems (Grove, 2020), while variants of ‘digital colonialism’ (Youngs, 2007; Arora, 2016; Seoane and Saguier, 2020) and ‘digital imperialism’ (Gajjala and Birzescu, 2011; Kwet, 2019) are on the rise in the Global South, with clear implications for existing power relations. As Madianou (2019: 11) notes, ‘Not only does technocolonialism acknowledge the persistence of “imperial formations,” but it shifts the emphasis on the active work of the digital in turning colonial inequalities into tangible forms.’ A crucial challenge here is to analyse such novel trends by adapting and broadening existing IPE research on technology-driven development (Taylor et al, 2014; Taylor and Broeders, 2015; Hilbert, 2016; Mahrenbach et al, 2018; Aaronson, 2019) and digital inequality (Norris, 2001; Youngs, 2007) and expanding digital extractivisms (Chagnon et al, 2022: 778).
Another fragmentation came after the 2013 Snowden revelations, where concerns over privacy and data security led to an expansion of government-led regulation agendas, which ironically highlight the deep linkages between existing global digital structures (cf de Goede, 2021). Thus, suggestions of deglobalisation (via, for example, neomercantilism and de-risking policies) come up against (and ultimately appear premature in light of) the remaining potency of global connectivity and supply chain interdependencies (Butollo et al, 2024). Indeed, another sense of deep vulnerability arises where governments remain at once dependent on private global digital infrastructures for core services and public goods, while also implementing policies to push back on the growing power of digital platforms and adapting regulatory instruments to the changing logics of industrial digital capitalism (Mueller and Farhat, 2022; Blancato, 2024). All the while, notions of ‘digital sovereignty’ also include calls for progressive agendas that envision alternative digital futures, novel forms of collective ownership and the provision of public goods (Couture and Toupin, 2019; Timmers, 2019; Floridi, 2020).
If forced to align fully with the US or China, the world may indeed splinter into two rival blocs, each with its own parallel networks that barely, if at all, intersect. For example, the future may witness the emergence of two, largely disconnected Internets, the decoupling of certain GPNs and the continued expansion of Sino-centric financial networks. (Schindler et al, 2024: 1108)
Against this panorama, what follows in this special issue offers nuanced insights on these varieties and degrees of fragmentation through empirical case studies on cybersecurity governance, platform regulation, semiconductor policies and digital imperialism. The articles advance current IPE research around three key areas: global public goods, the state-market nexus under geoeconomic pressure and the forms of domination enabled by digital technology.
‘Global public goods and cyber governance fragmentation’: Hansel, Silomon and Neuber (2024) conceptualise cyber security as a global public (as opposed to private or exclusive) good in discussing a crucial empirical finding that national efforts to increase economic power and market control aggravate the under-provision of cybersecurity. Contrary to now dominant problematisations of ‘Weaponized Interdependence’ and oft negative views of digital interdependencies, these linkages maintain certain positive outcomes for global cybersecurity – for example, by encouraging instances of restraint among cyber attackers due to possible blowback effects.
Cai and Zhang (2024) also highlight the rising contradiction between the need for collaborative global cybersecurity governance and its simultaneous fragmentation. Since international cybersecurity is neither a purely public nor private good, the authors move beyond dichotomous approaches to digital sovereignty by focusing on cybersecurity as a quasi-global public good. Cai and Zhang develop a framework to examine fragmentation in cybersecurity governance and its causes by analysing the supply, distribution and consumption of quasi-global public goods. Current fragmentations are thus mapped as responses to imbalances in the supply and demand relationship between providers and consumers.
‘The state-market nexus and geoeconomic shifts’: Staab, Pirogan and Piétron (2024) revisit the theoretical puzzle of policy ideas and material changes in economic relations. Analysing Germany’s departure from a traditionally ordoliberal economic policy framework, they argue that the emergence of a new techno-industrial policy, which includes a higher degree of state activism, is related to rising geoeconomic tensions. In their view, the German case represents a distinctive form of (geo)economically motivated statecraft with neo-developmental features directed at enhancing commercial competitiveness rather than prioritising security under the banner of ‘technological sovereignty’.
Lambach and Monsees (2024) point out that European digital ambitions represent not only a regulatory or technological project, but also an economic, societal and geopolitical one. In that sense, they comprehend the discourse of ‘digital sovereignty’ as a performative attempt to rearticulate a European position in the ensuing Sino-US ‘tech war’. Lambach and Monsees’ work demonstrates how the EU’s digital sovereignty agenda, exemplified by its platform regulations and recent semiconductor initiatives, is a bricolage of incoherent ideas rather than a stringent agenda for increasing political sovereignty in the digital sector. Although the EU produces certain outcomes from these initiatives, these efforts are unlikely to impact internet integrity considerably, create more fragmentation or overcome existing digital interdependency structures.
‘Redefining the debate on imperialism and technologies’: Amoah (2024) highlights how Western technological superiority and its polarising and exploitative effects continue to affect Africa and, by extension, the Global South. To better understand the power dynamics that accompany the digitalisation of the global political economy in the global periphery, Amoah advances the notion of ‘digital imperialism’. Compared to alternative concepts such as digital colonialism, he argues that digital imperialism is a less state-centric concept and involves the manipulation of capitalist mechanisms tied to technological advancement and data flows. Finally, Amoah calls on other scholars from the Global South to contribute to this line of research by further fleshing out the political economy of digital imperialism.
Funding
The authors are grateful for financial support from the Return Programme of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia: Research Group ‘Infrastructures of China’s Modernity and their Global Constitutive Effects’.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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