# Concept ‘Stretching’ or Concept Innovation? A Review of the Usages of Sovereignty in the Digital Sovereignty Literature

Eric Repetto

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Eric Repetto. Concept ‘Stretching’ or Concept Innovation? A Review of the Usages of Sovereignty in the Digital Sovereignty Literature. Policy and Internet, 2025, 17 (3), 10.1002/poi3.70011. hal-05233935

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

OPEN ACCESS

# Concept ‘Stretching’ or Concept Innovation? A Review of the Usages of Sovereignty in the Digital Sovereignty Literature

Eric Repetto

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

Sciences Po, CERI, Paris, France

**Correspondence:** Eric Repetto (eric.repetto@sciencespo.fr)

**Received:** 17 February 2025 | **Revised:** 20 June 2025 | **Accepted:** 29 June 2025

**Funding:** This study was conducted while employed by Sciences Po as a doctoral candidate.

**Keywords:** data sovereignty | digital sovereignty | indigenous data sovereignty | relational sovereignty | technological sovereignty

## ABSTRACT

Digital sovereignty and its cognate concepts have become staples of the digital governance debate; however, in the search for a shared understanding of the concept, the proliferation of claims to digital sovereignty by multiple different actors remains a contested issue. This study provides a review of 240 works, coded according to disciplinary area, actors mentioned in relation to digital sovereignty, and the types of relations explicitly or implicitly conceptualised within each work. I argue that the abundance of actors to which digital sovereignty is ascribed is not an issue per se; rather, the issue is that significant portions of the literature cluster around a digital sovereign ‘of choice’ and limit conversation with other strands. Those works that acknowledge the possibility of multiple coexisting digital sovereigns, or that see digital sovereignty as something that arises from the interactions among multiple actors, neither stretch the concept of sovereignty nor turn digital sovereignty into something different from sovereignty tout court: instead, they explore ways to innovate the concept of sovereignty as a whole and problematise our long-held assumptions about it.

## 1 | Introduction

The past decade has seen the widespread introduction of ‘sovereignty’ to the debates on digital governance. Sovereignty’s various declinations in this field (e.g., digital sovereignty, data sovereignty, technological sovereignty, Internet sovereignty, cyber sovereignty and AI sovereignty) have become policy buzzwords especially in the European debate, crowned by Henna Virkkunen’s recent nomination as European Commissioner for Tech Sovereignty, and have also been taken up in activist circles (e.g., Haché 2014; Herlo et al. 2021).

The academic literature around this dimension of sovereignty has quickly extended to a huge variety of actors, whose claims to digital sovereignty have been discussed and often legitimised

by scholars. This appears clearly in three of the major reviews on the use of these concepts (Couture and Toupin 2019; Hummel et al. 2021; Pohle and Thiel 2020), which show researchers attributing digital sovereignty, for example, to states, individuals, Indigenous peoples and social movements among others. This is in clear contradiction to more classical works on sovereignty in IR and political theory, which see it as the purview of the state alone.

This has led to an emerging debate over how scholars should talk about digital sovereignty. Some (e.g., Roberts 2024) call for restraint, concerned that the shift in the meaning of digital sovereignty might ultimately make the concept meaningless. Others (e.g., Pohle et al. 2025) welcome instead the divergence, seeing digital sovereignty as an increasingly separate concept

<footnote>This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
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<footnote>© 2025 The Author(s). Policy & Internet published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Policy Studies Organization.</footnote>
and encouraging disconnecting it from its origins in traditional
sovereignty.

In this article, I argue for a third position: the multiplication of
digital sovereigns, if properly addressed, is a window into the
true nature of sovereignty. We lose our grasp on what sover-
eignty means only when we consider each (claimed) digital
sovereign separately from the others, as much of the literature
currently does. But the compresence of multiple sovereigns does
not set digital sovereignty apart from its roots either: it opens
instead a broader conversation on what sovereignty as a whole
is, which can allow us to recast the authority of the state and of
other societal actors both within the digital sphere and beyond.

1.1 | The State of Digital Sovereignty

Compared with its traditional formulations, the ‘sovereignty’ in
digital sovereignty has certainly evolved in its meaning. As
Hummel et al. argue, there are diverging interpretations of
digital sovereignty, but all share a common core around sov-
erignty as meaningful control, ownership or autonomy in ex-
ercising some kind of claims on data and/or the hardware and
infrastructure supporting it. This is a lightweight conception of
sovereignty, which is instead traditionally defined as ‘supreme
legitimate authority within a territory’ (Philpott 2020).

Past major reviews (Couture and Toupin 2019; Hummel
et al. 2021; Pohle and Thiel 2020) and more recent ones (Fratini
et al. 2024) all do an excellent job of categorising the different
approaches adopted in the literature. Couture and Toupin focus
on the actors to whom digital sovereignty is attributed. Pohle and
Thiel distinguish between individual and state autonomy, and
between sovereignty as security and sovereignty as economic
independence. Hummel et al. likely provide the most detailed
categorisation to date, distinguishing approaches according to the
agents of sovereignty, the contexts where the concept is applied,
the values encapsulated in it, the obstacles it seeks to address,
and how it plans to address said obstacles. Finally, Fratini et al.
focus especially on states and distinguish approaches based on
how and why digital sovereignty is pursued.

These reviews, however, in enumerating a variety of different
approaches, inherently show how the concept of sovereignty is
progressively changing as scholars, policymakers and activists
apply it to more and more actors in the digital sphere, rather than
just to the state. The difficulties in applying sovereignty to the
digital are not new (Bellanova et al. 2022; Ruohonen 2021); and
while the lack of a territory in cyberspace has become less of an
issue than it could have seemed at first (Lambach 2020), the
proliferation of proclaimed digital sovereigns remains a challenge.
Indeed, since the concept of sovereignty has been traditionally tied
to supreme authority over a territory, it has always implied a
strong exclusivity of the club of who could wield said authority
(i.e., states), seeing no power above them and expecting no
interference from their equals; this creates tensions between tra-
ditional views of sovereignty as a state prerogative and attempts to
claim digital sovereignty by and for other non-state actors.

These concerns generally focus on the possible ‘stretching’
(Sartori 1970) of the concept: as sovereignty is applied to more

cases which its definition would have originally excluded, users
change and dilute the meaning of the concept to allow for its
application to said new cases, but at the cost of forgoing
important elements of its original definition and losing preci-
sion and heuristic efficacy. Ultimately, we risk misunder-
standing each other when speaking of the same thing, or
equating sovereignty to broader and vaguer concepts such as
control. This critique has been succinctly echoed, most recently,
by Roberts (2024), who distinguishes between works which
stick to a traditional approach to (state) digital sovereignty
('deep but narrow') and works that dilute the meaning of digital
sovereignty to apply it also to other actors, whose approach to
sovereignty he characterises as 'broad but shallow'.

This is not the only approach to the problem, however. Others
have pointed out how the openness of digital sovereignty is a
key feature of its success (Lambach and Oppermann 2023).
Pohle et al. (2025) call for the ‘unthinking’ of digital sovereignty
instead: to disconnect the concept from and problematise its
roots in state sovereignty. They consider digital sovereignty as a
set of practices and discourses which provide legitimacy to
requests for autonomy in digital governance, no matter the
claimant (see also Bellanova et al. 2022); it is therefore to be
expected—and accepted—that the goals and policies conveyed
through such claims will vary significantly.

These academic debates are not ivory tower discussions: their
conclusions on how researchers should think and speak of
sovereignty have the potential to affect experts, policymakers
and activists. As a result, they can change how the concept is
used in the broader public debate to justify certain policies and
sideline others, and how it can legitimise or exclude the claims
to increased autonomy of specific actors. For example, sticking
to a traditional view of state sovereignty can delegitimise, for
better or worse, the claims of other actors to increased auton-
omy in the digital sphere. Meanwhile, ‘unthinking’ digital
sovereignty might detach it from sovereignty and justify treating
it as an exceptional concept to digital governance, untied to
other reflections on what sovereignty is and who is entitled to it
in other fields. Therefore, with this review, I want to question
both aforementioned approaches, propose a different perspec-
tive on how digital sovereignty should be addressed in the
academic debate, and discuss the potential effects of said per-
spective upon the larger public debate around it. More specifi-
cally, I argue that analysing the compresence of multiple actors
linked to the exercise of digital sovereignty can be a way to
recognise sovereignty’s inherently relational nature, and that
the feared stretching of the concept only comes from the way
our literature approaches it.

To do so, I investigate how and to what extent the proliferation
of digital sovereigns is actually stretching the concept of sov-
erignty. There are three research questions I ask:

1. What form does the proliferation of digital sovereigns in the digital sovereignty literature actually take?

2. How does it affect the academic debate on digital sovereignty?

3. How can the academic conversation on digital sovereignty change, with an eye especially toward the nonacademic implications of the possible approaches?
Key to this is investigating how the literature addresses the proliferation of different digital sovereigns: do multiple sovereign subjects appear together? Are their claims to (digital) sovereignty compatible or incompatible? And do different approaches appear side by side within the same disciplines and sub-disciplines, or do they develop new discipline-specific and narrower understandings of digital sovereignty? To achieve this goal, in this review, I consider not only who the main digital sovereigns are in each work but also the presence of secondary actors in the processes related to digital sovereignty's establishment, maintenance or contestation, and the way the relations among actors conform to or challenge the paradigm of sovereignty. I then map the different approaches against the boundaries between various academic disciplines and sub-disciplines.

Surprisingly I find that, on one hand, it is when scholars try to remain faithful to a traditional understanding of sovereignty that they actually end up stretching the concept: this happens because the notion of supreme and exclusive authority that sovereignty implies often translates into separate, discipline-bound clusters of works that apply sovereignty to their own category of legitimate digital sovereigns, with little conversation between each other. On the other hand, I find that when scholars acknowledge instead the multiplicity of different potential types of actors as digital sovereigns, the result is not truly a decoupling from sovereignty through an 'unthinking' of digital sovereignty; rather, the result is an unthinking, a reflection, that applies to both digital sovereignty and sovereignty as a whole, problematising the concept in ways which echo recent political theory

and IR research also outside of digital governance (cf. Loh and Heiskanen 2020; Srivastava 2022) and which remain fully translatable with(in) the broader paradigm of sovereignty.

Ultimately, I argue that the way forward for the field should not be a decoupling of the concepts, nor ‘purity’ and forced accountability to the original one. It should instead be to further acknowledge the proliferation of multiple digital sovereigns and investigate its consequences for our understanding of both digital sovereignty and sovereignty alike. When considering the public debate outside of academic boundaries, this perspective would ensure that the academic understanding of digital sovereignty does not help suppress the claims to digital sovereignty made by actors other than states. At the same time, it would also support dialogue between different reflections on power, authority and its redistribution away from states that happen across sectors such as digital governance, climate governance and democratic representation.

## 2 | Methods

The review follows standard frameworks on conducting systematic reviews (Moher et al. 2009; Strech and Sofaer 2012), with the addition of a citation threshold to the inclusion of works in the corpus—necessitated by the by-now huge size of the field. The corpus I analyse is composed of 240 peer-reviewed articles. The goal of the selection process was to include a broad array of relevant works on sovereignty in the digital, while keeping the selection down to a size that made reading them manageable for a single researcher (Figure 1).

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 1** | PRISMA chart of the selection process. Source: Own elaboration based on PRISMA guidelines.</figcaption></figure>
I carried out the selection first through a keyword-based search on Scopus, which identified all works which mentioned digital sovereignty, data sovereignty, technological sovereignty, technology sovereignty, Internet sovereignty, cyber sovereignty or AI sovereignty in their title, abstract or keywords. I retained all articles, books and book chapters with 10 or more citations at the time of the Scopus search (a first search was performed in October, and a second one in December 2024) and screened them for adequacy. I retained both works that were directly related to digital governance and works that mentioned the terms only in passing, as long as they had a specific understanding of who the term referred to and how. Works that instead reviewed multiple usages without taking a stance, such as literature reviews and surveys, were excluded. In total, this first search returned 214 results, which after excluding unsuitable works were reduced to 191.

I deemed the exclusion of works with less than 10 citations necessary to maintain the selection within a size manageable for thorough reading. Furthermore, it is consistent with the goal of the review, which is not to provide a comprehensive account of every work on the topic but rather to identify the dominant trends within the academic debate. The choice of Scopus was not an easy one, as the database has been shown to under-represent works in the social sciences and from outside Western academia (Tennant 2020)—although it does perform better on these issues than Web of Science (Pranckutė 2021). My choice was ultimately driven by the possibility of performing the keyword search also on abstracts and keywords without having to extend it to the whole text, which was not possible on Google Scholar and allowed for a better compromise between inclusivity and corpus size.

However, I also took measures to limit these risks. To compensate the risk of underrepresentation of certain sources on Scopus, I complemented the Scopus search with a second search on Google Scholar, carried out in April 2025. For each of the seven keyword strings I used, through this search, I also added to the corpus all articles that appeared among the first 100 results for each query, as long as they complied with the same requirements that I used for the Scopus search. The Google Scholar search added a total of initially 46 works, then reduced to 44: 19 for data sovereignty, 11 for digital sovereignty, 8 for cyber sovereignty, 4 for technological and technology sovereignty, 1 for Internet sovereignty and 1 for AI sovereignty. In all cases, the search stopped providing new works that were not part of the original corpus before reaching the 100-results threshold.

Additionally, I also strove to address the risk that the citation threshold might exclude potentially valuable but too recent scholarship. To include a sample of emerging scholarship in addition to the rest of the corpus, I searched all latest issues (as of April 2025) of each journal from which at least one article had been included in the corpus, and from them I added to the corpus all works that included in their titles, abstracts or keywords the abovementioned strings even when below the citations threshold. This last search returned six new articles, then reduced to five.

Ultimately, the resulting corpus has been a balanced one discipline-wise, including 142 social sciences and humanities

works out of 240, which produced an adequately broad overview of the usage of digital sovereignty across all fields.

Once collected, I coded the selected works inductively according to three variables:

* The actors presented as main digital sovereigns (more than one were possible);

* The other actors interacting with processes related to digital sovereignty;

* The relations of sovereignty between the actors, that is, the way sovereignty took place through or was affected by the inter-actor relations.

For the second variable in particular, rather than coding every actor being mentioned even just once, I limited the coding to those actors who were presented as explicitly affecting the claim to digital sovereignty of the main actor(s) and whose role was fundamental in shaping and making sense of such a claim. At the same time, I refrained from coding actors whose presence could be considered implicit but who were never mentioned. For the coding of the third variable, I did not rely necessarily on the author providing a definition or any abstract conceptualisation of the relationship, and the development of the categories took place also keeping in mind the academic literature on sovereignty proper. For all variables, the development of the different categories was inductive and went through multiple iterations, merging and splitting categories as it seemed fit to represent the variety in the works under review.

Finally, I also coded the disciplines of the journals where the articles were published, or of the books in the case of books and book chapters. The categories were originally based on the Scopus main classification but with some changes, especially maintaining a higher level of detail in the social sciences and humanities while grouping works from natural and IT sciences in larger groups.

Ultimately, the categories for the subjects in the first and second variables were 11, while for the third variable, the final categories were 9. The disciplinary categories were 30 instead. A brief list is provided below in Tables 1–3, while a detailed definition of the categories is provided in the coding annex to the article.

<table><caption>TABLE 1 | List of subject codes.</caption><tr><td>States and supranational organisations</td></tr><tr><td>Civil society and activists</td></tr><tr><td>Digital companies</td></tr><tr><td>Hackers and similar malicious actors</td></tr><tr><td>Indigenous peoples</td></tr><tr><td>Individuals/citizens</td></tr><tr><td>Local government</td></tr><tr><td>Nondigital, nonpolitical companies and organisations</td></tr><tr><td>Researchers</td></tr><tr><td>Unspecified</td></tr></table>

Source: Own elaboration.
3 | The Results

The results are summarised in Tables 4–7. Table 4 shows which actors were presented in the reviewed works as digital sovereigns. It shows that public actors at the national and supra-national levels are the most frequent digital sovereigns, but they are not the single dominant ones. Indigenous peoples and individuals are also very frequent claimants, then distantly followed by the rest (Figure 1).

<table><caption>**TABLE 2** | List of codes for relations of sovereignty.</caption><tr><td>Coexistence (multiple different sovereigns side by side)</td></tr><tr><td>Competition (a zero-sum game between the claims to sovereignty of multiple subjects)</td></tr><tr><td>Mediation (one subject mediating the exercise of digital sovereignty of another)</td></tr><tr><td>Opposition (one subject as an obstacle to the establishment of another's digital sovereignty)</td></tr><tr><td>Participation (popular sovereignty turning into state sovereignty through democratic representation)</td></tr><tr><td>Sharing (multiple sovereigns needing each other to exercise their digital sovereignty)</td></tr><tr><td>Support (one subject's active involvement being necessary to the establishment of someone else's digital sovereignty)</td></tr><tr><td>Unclear</td></tr><tr><td>None</td></tr></table>

Source: Own elaboration.

Table 5 shows the overlap between actor types in the various works, and Table 6 shows the relations between them. Finally, Table 7 summarises which patterns are dominant in the various disciplinary fields. Both Tables 5 and 6 show that works focusing on one kind of actors as digital sovereigns tend to exclude most other subject types from occupying a similar or complementary role: other subjects are either absent or presented in roles of opposition or competition to the primary digital sovereign. Furthermore, when they do acknowledge other actors, works focusing on the same kind of digital sovereigns share similar patterns in the other kinds of subjects—and the roles they adopt—that they acknowledge. As a result, the reviewed works form distinct clusters, which I show in Figure 2 and will present separately in the rest of this section.

<table><caption>**TABLE 4** | Frequency of each main subject occurring among the works under review.</caption><thead><tr><th>Total</th><th>240</th><th>100.0%</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>States and the EU</td><td>105</td><td>43.8%</td></tr><tr><td>Indigenous peoples</td><td>67</td><td>27.9%</td></tr><tr><td>Individuals</td><td>57</td><td>23.8%</td></tr><tr><td>Nondigital companies</td><td>18</td><td>7.5%</td></tr><tr><td>Civil society</td><td>15</td><td>6.3%</td></tr><tr><td>Local government</td><td>10</td><td>4.2%</td></tr><tr><td>Digital companies</td><td>3</td><td>1.3%</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: Multiple main subjects are possible, and the percentages do not add to 100%.

Source: Own elaboration.

<table><caption>**TABLE 3** | List of discipline codes.</caption><thead><tr><th>Social sciences and Humanities</th><th>STEM, IT and medical sciences</th><th>Mixed or unaffiliated</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Communication</td><td>Engineering</td><td>Agriculture</td></tr><tr><td>Cultural studies</td><td>Environmental studies</td><td>Data science</td></tr><tr><td>Demography</td><td>IT sciences</td><td>Defence studies</td></tr><tr><td>Development studies</td><td>Medical sciences</td><td>Digital (miscellaneous)</td></tr><tr><td>Economics</td><td>Natural sciences</td><td>Sustainability studies</td></tr><tr><td>Education</td><td></td><td>Miscellaneous</td></tr><tr><td>Geography</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>History</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Interdisciplinary digital humanities and social sciences</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Law</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Library and Information Sciences</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Management</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Philosophy</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Political science and international relations</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Postcolonial and third world studies</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Social sciences (miscellaneous)</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Sociology and political science</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Statistics</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Urban studies</td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

Source: Own elaboration of the Scopus classification.
<table><caption>TABLE 5 | Frequency of co-occurrences between main sovereigns (columns) and other main sovereigns or actors otherwise interacting with processes related to digital sovereignty.</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>States and the EU</th><th>Indigenous peoples</th><th>Individuals</th><th>Nondigital companies</th><th>Civil society</th><th>Local government</th><th>Digital companies</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Total</td><td>105</td><td>67</td><td>57</td><td>18</td><td>15</td><td>10</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Co-occurring with</td><td></td><td>100.0%</td><td>100.0%</td><td>100.0%</td><td>100.0%</td><td>100.0%</td><td>100.0%</td></tr><tr><td>States and the EU</td><td>X</td><td>X</td><td>42</td><td>62.7%</td><td>11.1%</td><td>8</td><td>60.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Indigenous peoples</td><td>2</td><td>1.9%</td><td>X</td><td>X</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Individuals</td><td>9</td><td>8.6%</td><td>1</td><td>1.5%</td><td>55.6%</td><td>7</td><td>70.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Nondigital companies</td><td>3</td><td>2.9%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>X</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Civil society</td><td>4</td><td>3.8%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Local government</td><td>1</td><td>1.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Big tech companies</td><td>43</td><td>41.0%</td><td>8</td><td>11.9%</td><td>11.1%</td><td>11</td><td>33.3%</td></tr><tr><td>Hackers</td><td>1</td><td>1.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>5.6%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Researchers</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>42</td><td>62.7%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Unspecified</td><td>4</td><td>3.8%</td><td>2</td><td>3.0%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><td>None</td><td>51</td><td>48.6%</td><td>3</td><td>4.5%</td><td>27.8%</td><td>3</td><td>0.0%</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: Multiple co-occurring subjects were frequent; therefore, the percentages do not add to 100%.

Source: Own elaboration.
<table><caption>TABLE 6 | Frequency of types of sovereignty relations for each main sovereign and for all the corpus.</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>States and the EU</th><th>Indigenous peoples</th><th>Individuals</th><th>Nondigital companies</th><th>Civil society</th><th>Local government</th><th>Digital companies</th><th>Total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Total</td><td>105</td><td>100.0%</td><td>67</td><td>100.0%</td><td>18</td><td>100.0%</td><td>10</td><td>3</td><td>100.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Coexistence</td><td>7</td><td>6.7%</td><td>2</td><td>3.0%</td><td>17</td><td>29.8%</td><td>11</td><td>1</td><td>33.3%</td></tr><tr><td>Competition</td><td>5</td><td>4.8%</td><td>40</td><td>59.7%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>8.3%</td></tr><tr><td>Mediation</td><td>11</td><td>10.5%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>1</td><td>1.8%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>21.7%</td></tr><tr><td>Opposition</td><td>30</td><td>28.6%</td><td>50</td><td>74.6%</td><td>21</td><td>36.8%</td><td>3</td><td>7</td><td>5.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Participation</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>70.0%</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>Sharing</td><td>6</td><td>5.7%</td><td>1</td><td>1.5%</td><td>3</td><td>5.3%</td><td>0</td><td>20.0%</td><td>0.8%</td></tr><tr><td>Support</td><td>7</td><td>6.7%</td><td>2</td><td>3.0%</td><td>10</td><td>17.5%</td><td>0</td><td>30.0%</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Unclear</td><td>2</td><td>1.9%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0</td><td>40.0%</td><td>5.0%</td></tr><tr><td>Null</td><td>51</td><td>48.6%</td><td>3</td><td>4.5%</td><td>19</td><td>33.3%</td><td>5</td><td>0.0%</td><td>3</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: Multiple types together were possible and percentages do not add to 100%.

Source: Own elaboration.

Given that only three works consider digital corporations as possible sovereigns, and that they always do so in conjunction with other possible digital sovereigns, I will not focus on them as a separate cluster.

States and supranational actors (especially the EU) appear alone in more works than any other type. Moreover, in most cases where other subjects are present, these are digital companies, which are shown as obstacles to the establishment of state or EU digital sovereignty due to their control over critical technologies, services and supply chains, exposing states and the EU to risky structural dependencies. Big Tech companies are, however, usually not acknowledged as possible sovereigns in their own right in these relations, and can sometimes be seen more as a vehicle for the external influences of other states rather than as an autonomous threat. This traditional view of supreme state sovereignty is the dominant one in political science, sociology, IR, law, economics, communication studies and the interdisciplinary journals of digital humanities and social sciences.

States and the EU, however, also sometimes appear in more complicated relationships with other actors, especially—again—with digital companies: their sovereignty in these cases can be presented as inextricably linked with the agency of the digital corporations, which the authors depict as vehicles and mediators of state sovereignty's application domestically and internationally (see Budnitsky and Jia 2018; Plantin and De Seta 2019; and Hong and Goodnight 2022; but also, outside of the corpus of this review, Bradford 2023). State digital sovereignty can also be presented as comparable to company efforts to centralise networks around themselves and institutionalise their acquired positions (Pohle and Voelsen 2022). Especially in communication studies and interdisciplinary digital humanities and social sciences, this view of state sovereignty tempers the former, more traditional one, potentially seeing state sovereignty as *relational* and mediated rather than absolute. Here, seeing sovereignty as relational means sovereignty is not the property of a single actor (e.g., the state) that would exist independently from other agents, but that instead sovereign power can only make sense and be exercised thanks to the existence of multiple interacting actors, sovereign or not. For example, state sovereignty over the regulation of public discourse is both exercised over *and* relying on the companies managing the major digital platforms, which both apply state regulations but also add their own preferences over the types of allowed content, decide over the modes of policing speech, and make the final calls at the enforcement level.

Indigenous peoples are the second most frequent digital sovereigns. They appear predominantly in relation to states and to scientific researchers and institutions. Their claim to sovereignty is largely opposed to that of the settler state, and especially opposed to the settler state's epistemic dominance of the institutions and practices that collect data and produce knowledge about Indigenous communities. These works always appear within the framework of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS), which refers to the right of Indigenous peoples to govern the collection, ownership and application of data about Indigenous communities, peoples, lands, lifeways and resources (Kukutai and Taylor 2016; Lovett et al. 2019).
<table><caption>TABLE 7 | Disciplines and sub-disciplines where each pattern of sovereignty is prevalent.</caption><thead><tr><th>State sovereignty (unmediated)</th><th>State sovereignty (possibly mediated)</th><th>Indigenous sovereignty</th><th>Individual/data holder sovereignty</th><th>Bottom-up sovereignty</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Development Studies</td><td>Communication Studies</td><td>Data Science</td><td>Agriculture</td><td>Geography</td></tr><tr><td>Defence Studies</td><td>Interdisciplinary Digital Humanities and Social Sciences</td><td>Demography</td><td>Education</td><td>Urban Studies</td></tr><tr><td>Economics</td><td></td><td>Environmental Studies</td><td>Engineering</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Law</td><td></td><td>Management</td><td>IT Sciences</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Political Science and International Relations</td><td></td><td>Medical Sciences</td><td>Social Sciences (miscellaneous)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Social Sciences (miscellaneous)</td><td></td><td>Natural Sciences</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Sociology and Political Science</td><td></td><td>Postcolonial and Third World Studies</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>Social Sciences (miscellaneous)</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>Sociology and Political Science</td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: Disciplines where two patterns are equally dominant will appear under both. Disciplines with few articles and no dominant pattern are not shown.

Source: Own elaboration.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2 | Visual representation of the main clusters. Source: Own elaboration.</figcaption></figure>

IDS is a strand born as a critique of the coloniality intrinsic in settler states' statistic institutions and systems. It adopts a broad approach to digital sovereignty, which mirrors the wider concerns of the advocates of Indigenous sovereignty: not only political self-determination, but also economic and cultural sovereignty. For this reason, Indigenous peoples are the only group in relation to whom researchers are mentioned: researchers become relevant actors when community knowledge

is included in the sphere of sovereignty. Some of the works reviewed focus on colonial practices and explicitly conflictual lenses (Cormack and Kukutai 2022; Dutta et al. 2021; Mann and Daly 2019), while others address possible cooperation with researchers and/or the state (Robinson et al. 2021; Zurba et al. 2022). In all cases, however, the goal is to achieve self-determination in data and Internet governance, reducing reliance on the state (and nonindigenous companies) as much as
possible. Works including this approach are the majority (or close to) of digital sovereignty works in the natural and medical sciences; in environmental studies; in data science, demography and statistics; in management, sociology and miscellaneous social sciences publications; and in journals and books with explicit third-world and postcolonial scopes.

After Indigenous peoples, it is individuals and organisations that appear the most often, and they appear often together as data owners, their data sovereignty intended as the ability to retain ultimate control over the data they own and/or produce. While cybersecurity concerns appear for both, the framing is more technical and focused on malicious actors and security risks when revolving around companies/organisations (e.g., Zrenner et al. 2019); individuals are instead more often explicitly pitted also against digital corporations and their data mining economic model (e.g., Hackfort 2021). Their sovereignty is often portrayed as reachable not (only) through state regulation, but through technical means that increase privacy, limit top-down control and reduce cybersecurity and surveillance risks autonomously from other actors once implemented, such as data encryption, federated architectures and digital twins. Such methods do not rely on institutions upholding the law to protect the data holders' autonomy, but instead make certain types of data hard or impossible to access to external actors, potentially up to the state's law enforcement itself—as in the case of encryption. This approach is predominant especially in the non-social sciences: besides education studies, it dominates the IT sciences, agricultural and sustainability studies.

This points to an interesting split between social and 'technical' understandings of sovereignty: where, traditionally, scholars have seen sovereignty as a social construct that legitimises the authority of the sovereign, others have instead developed a conception of sovereignty as a technical architecture, providing independence and control to certain actors and denying it to others. This split does not simply follow disciplinary boundaries, as these 'technical' understandings of sovereignty are also used to support the digital sovereignty of activist collectives especially (e.g., Haché 2014). Instead, it seems that those researchers who focus on the sovereignty of subjects who do not have, and do not wish to acquire, lawmaking powers have seen in code and the autonomous design of digital services an alternative way to develop effective and autonomous regulation, supporting the autonomy of sovereigns who do not wish to simply replace the state.

Finally, local government (especially cities) and civil society (especially activist movements) appear more rarely, but they also often appear together in the same works, mainly in critiques of smart city projects. These works tend to criticise so-called technocapitalist approaches, which privatise the use of digital technologies in the smart city to govern communities: they challenge state sovereignty and Big Tech power and favour individual and popular sovereignty through bottom-up technology ownership and control (up to designing and developing hardware and digital infrastructure themselves). They may differ according to their focus, however: those that relate technological sovereignty more to the city focus on digital initiatives developed by the democratically elected municipality, which guarantee personal data sovereignty for the citizens

through control of the city council over the technologies used and the data produced (Charnock et al. 2021); when social movements are the main sovereigns instead, sovereignty is articulated through a variety of autonomous initiatives by different groups, each geared to the group's and its users' own needs (Haché 2014; Lynch 2020); and if they both are presented as sovereign, they cooperate with each other to ensure technological sovereignty against both state surveillance and technocapitalist exploitation (Calzada 2023; Vadiati 2022). These works are dominant in the fields of geography and urban studies (besides being present also among much activist literature, such as Herlo et al. 2021).

# 4 | Discussion

## 4.1 | Proliferation and Clustering

My first and second research questions asked what form the proliferation of digital sovereigns in the digital sovereignty literature actually takes, and how it affects the academic debate. The results show that, rather than a general multiplication of digital sovereigns, this proliferation has led to the formation of several clusters of works (see Table 7), siloed within pre-existing disciplinary boundaries and focusing on one or two types of actors as digital sovereigns. These clusters have developed nuanced understandings of digital sovereignty among themselves, all while seemingly eschewing conversations with all other works that portray different types of actors as digital sovereigns.

Such clusters have formed not only around the sovereign state, but especially also around Indigenous peoples and around individuals and companies as data holders. Works on Indigenous data sovereignty acknowledge only another actor as digital sovereign, the state, and mostly focus on reducing its reach as much as possible: state and Indigenous sovereignty are largely locked in a zero-sum game. Meanwhile, both works on traditional state-centred digital sovereignty and individual data sovereignty usually acknowledge no other sovereign. Each cluster avoids conceptual stretching by forming its own understanding of digital sovereignty and by limiting interaction with works belonging to other clusters.

Within this context, my argument is that we are not just witnessing a stretching of the concept of sovereignty in the digital sphere, driven by the proliferation of digital sovereigns. Instead, we are seeing a clustering of works around their digital sovereigns of choice, which is caused in no small part precisely by an attempt to preserve the traditional understanding of sovereignty while grappling with an increase in sovereign claimants. As seen above, sovereignty traditionally has a 'unitary' bias: it is the attribute of a single type of actors (i.e., states), who see no other actor above them, and only other actors of their kind as equals (Philpott 1995). Furthermore, as both Philpott and Roberts (2024) note, it carries with it a notion of legitimate authority, rather than simple control: meaning that said authority does not just equate brute coercive power, but instead needs to be considered acceptable and justified by the community that experiences it. These characteristics—unitary and legitimate power—have not been abandoned in much of the literature reviewed. Conceptual stretching is generally associated with the concept's definition
losing relevant elements which would otherwise limit the range
of cases it can apply to, that it can *denote*; it is a trade between
definitional intensity and denotional extension, which, however,
makes the concept itself less poignant and useful as it is applied
to more and more cases. However, what we instead see here is
that the supreme, unitary character of sovereignty is maintained,
as works focusing on one type of digital sovereign avoid
acknowledging their coexistence with others—or if they do, often
frame their interactions as zero-sum games. Furthermore, no
cluster has actually abandoned legitimacy as a criterion of sov-
ereignty either, as digital sovereignty is often framed as a legiti-
mate right (based on human rights or on some form of social
contract between the community and the wielder of sovereignty)
to increased control and autonomy against the illegitimate power
of other actors.

Therefore, sovereignty's lamented stretching in these works
derives less from each strand broadening the notion of sover-
eignty, and more from the clash between the multiplication of
claimed digital sovereigns on one side, and the attempt to
reconstruct around them a concept of sovereignty as close to the
traditional one as possible. Stretching appears fully not within
the clusters, but from a bird's eye view of them; and is actually
reinforced by the lack of conversation between them.

This conclusion is reinforced if we look instead at those
strands which acknowledge the compresence of multiple
subjects in the exercise of digital sovereignty. For example,
works such as Musiani (2022) and Plantin and De Seta's (2019)
see state sovereignty as a principle that interacts with the
infrastructural power of other actors, including digital com-
panies. A variety of strategies have to be deployed, both in the
West and in China, to ensure that said infrastructural power
does not conflict with state aims; at the same time, however,
companies with infrastructural power are not just a threat to
overcome, but they can also cooperate, support and mediate
the exercise of the state's sovereign powers, exercising their
leverage when doing so due to the necessity of their involve-
ment. Meanwhile, articles such as Rone (2024), Lynch (2020)
and Vadiati (2022) address digital or technological sovereignty
as a bottom-up demand, an expression of popular sovereignty
which can be represented by multiple collective groups and
institutions—sometimes in concert, and sometimes in com-
petition with each other. In these strands, sovereignty is not
simply stretched: its extension to or mediation through mul-
tiple actors is coupled with theoretical reflections and inno-
vations, rather than simply being an oversight. At the same
time, such reflections are valid not just for digital sovereignty,
but for sovereignty as a whole.

Among these latter strands, I argue that two broad trends can be
seen. In the first, sovereignty still appears as an attribute of the
state, but the illusion of unchallenged supremacy over other ac-
tors that derives from it is questioned. The exercise of sovereignty
in the digital sphere is only possible through the mediation of
other actors, especially those corporations which run major
platforms and/or own significant portions of digital infrastructure:
even when they do not challenge state sovereignty, state sover-
eignty must be articulated through them, providing them with
influence and leverage and complicating simple 'public versus
private' or 'public controlling private' dichotomies.

In the second trend, it is popular sovereignty that takes centre
stage. It is not stretched, but it is instead the monopoly of the
state on its representation which is problematised by activists
and researchers. If the people are those who are ultimately
sovereign, then also lower levels of the state apparatus can
appropriate the role of expressing and defending the sovereignty
of their constituents, against both the power of the state and of
Big Tech companies; or, even more radically, activist collectives
can take up that mantle, adopting technical solutions and
organisational forms that ensure their ownership of digital
technologies and the data they produce.

4.2 | Acknowledging Plurality and Relationality

What must be the way forward, then? In my opinion, these
works show that the multiplication of potential digital sover-
eigns can actually be a critical opportunity to investigate what
sovereignty is and our misconceptions about it, rather than be a
cause of concern. It is the lack of conversation between different
clusters that is the main issue plaguing the conceptualisation of
sovereignty in the digital sphere: the stretching of the concept
comes from those strands that engage less with the others,
avoiding the need to acknowledge the multiple claimants to
digital sovereignty that have emerged in the past few years.
Such acknowledgement can counter the stretching of sover-
eignty, rather than favour it; and disciplines such as geogra-
phy, urban studies and communication studies, plus the
emerging field of interdisciplinary journals dedicated to the
digital humanities and social sciences, have indeed proven
open to these kinds of conversations.

Furthermore, while such an approach resonates well with Pohle
et al.'s call for 'unthinking' digital sovereignty, these reflections
crucially need not detach the meaning of digital sovereignty
from our understanding of sovereignty tout court. Instead, they
can problematise and innovate sovereignty as a whole. The
proliferation of digital sovereigns in the public and academic
debates can prompt us to reconsider sovereignty's traditional
top-down representation of political authority: this representa-
tion fails to account for the power of non-state actors in medi-
iating, directing and constraining the state's exercise of its
authority, and thus is often used to discursively legitimise the
state's growing power instead. It can also make us reconsider
the uneasy tension between popular and state sovereignty: it
can question the state's monopoly over the representation of
popular will in favour of more dispersed forms of exercising
sovereignty, where multiple different actors cooperate in rep-
resenting popular sovereignty.

If we look at the broader conversation around digital sover-
eignty, acknowledging multiple actors potentially involved in
the exercise of digital sovereignty—and increasing conversation
among the clusters—would undoubtedly affect also the public
debate, and not only the academic one. Sticking to a traditional
view of state sovereignty can delegitimise the claims of other
actors to increased autonomy in the digital sphere; and de-
coupling sovereignty and digital sovereignty can potentially
justify treating digital sovereignty as an exceptional concept to
digital governance, untied to other reflections on what sover-
eignty is and who is entitled to it in other fields, such as climate
governance and democratic representation. The academic debate on digital sovereignty could and should instead support the usage of digital sovereignty as a prompt to revisit our traditional understandings of power and authority in our societies, both within and outside of digital governance.

Furthermore, also in the academic debate such reflections could be put in conversation with similar discussions in the wider social sciences. Certainly, they would align digital sovereignty to existing reflections on the rise of (digital) networks and of a 'network society' (Castells 2004; Van Dijk 2020), where decentralised, flexible webs of actors replace top-down relations of hierarchy and authority as the fulcrum of governance. However, and perhaps more importantly, they can also align with a broader rethinking of sovereign authority which goes beyond the historical rise (and fall) of networked governance: such a rethinking lets us recast the nature of sovereignty as a plural effort even as states return as key players in the digital sphere and beyond.

Indeed, already since the 90s, critical approaches to sovereignty have highlighted how state sovereignty is not a description of an actually existing state of affairs, but rather a discursive ideal, which can be invoked to justify the centralisation of power and authority within the hands of certain state actors (Biersteker and Weber 1996; Werner and De Wilde 2001). More recently, these reflections have also been used to investigate how the ideal of sovereignty shapes our perception of the state and, crucially, hides the role of other actors in exercising the state's sovereign power (Dunn 2009; Loh and Heiskanen 2020; Srivastava 2022). In the latter context, the literature on digital sovereignty can provide its own insights into these debates and on how sovereignty is evolving, investigating how multiple claimants to digital sovereignty can coexist and cooperate, how the digital sovereignty of one actor can be exercised only through the mediation of others, and how sovereignty through technical means might coexist with sovereignty through legal architectures.

By this, I do not mean to argue that incompatible understandings of sovereignty may not exist. The results of this review show that the proliferation of actors variously entwined with digital sovereignty should not discourage us from still using the concept of sovereignty; however, the ways in which we conceptualise this plurality of actors might still ultimately clash with each other.

In particular, those works that acknowledge a plurality of possible digital sovereigns (e.g., Lynch 2020; Rone 2024; Vadiati 2022) might clash with those that only acknowledge a plurality of actors in the exercise of digital sovereignty (e.g., Musiani 2022; Plantin and De Seta 2019). The latter works still focus only on the sovereignty of the state, and simply investigate how it is mediated in its exercise by other actors; while on the other hand, works belonging to the former strand, which has developed around local government and activist collectives, seem more amenable to the coexistence and cooperation of multiple digital sovereigns. In both the former and latter cases, sovereignty appears as *relational*, as the product of the relations between multiple actors. There would be a key difference, however. In the latter strand—still focusing on the sovereignty

of the state—this relational sovereignty would still also be an ultimately unitary one, centred around the state and produced through the relations between the sovereign state and non-sovereign actors; while in the second strand it would also be a *plural* sovereignty, characterised by the compresence of multiple digital sovereigns.

At the same time, the actual fault line between these two groups might also be another. The plurality of digital sovereigns within the latter group could still be traced back to a single, unitary sovereignty: that of the people. In such a case, the differences between the two would fade, as popular sovereignty is in fact simply mediated by a plurality of representatives. However, what would remain would be the difference between state and popular sovereignty as each strand's priority, two sides of the same coin, which could nonetheless still lead to diverging perspectives.

It is not within the purview of this review to explore whether these different perspectives might be compatible or not, and how they might potentially be brought together. However, these are stimulating questions that cannot be answered unless we place the clusters of the digital sovereignty literature in conversation with each other. The possible solutions to these inconsistencies would nurture a lively academic debate and further inform the policy and activist debates on digital sovereignty, addressing inconsistencies and staving off the risk of stretching the concept of sovereignty.

## 5 | Conclusions

Digital sovereignty and its cognate concepts have become staples of the digital governance debate, but it remains difficult to agree on a single understanding of their meaning. As several different types of actors claim digital sovereignty for themselves or have it ascribed to them, some scholars have warned of the risk of stretching the concept of sovereignty (Roberts 2024), while others have claimed that digital sovereignty should be 'unthought' and detached from traditional sovereignty (Pohle et al. 2025).

In this review, I argued that many of the inconsistencies are not due to the abundance of actors to which digital sovereignty is ascribed, but rather to the way significant portions of the literature cluster around their digital sovereign 'of choice' and limit conversation with other strands. At the same time, acknowledging the multiplication of claims to digital sovereignty and the possibility of multiple actors mediating the exercise of sovereignty does not necessarily imply neither a stretching of sovereignty as a concept, nor a mismatch between digital sovereignty and sovereignty as separate concepts. Instead, it has shown to be the best way to innovate the concept of sovereignty as a whole, through the problematisation of our long-held, traditional assumptions about it. Ultimately, I argue for increased conversation among the various clusters and for the acknowledgement of multiple potential digital sovereigns; this would innovate both sovereignty and digital sovereignty as academic concepts, while avoiding the delegitimization of non-state claimants to digital sovereignty and the insulation of the digital sovereignty discussion from other similar debates in the public sphere.
## Acknowledgments

The author thanks Thierry Balzacq, Rocco Bellanova and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their invaluable feedback, and Vrinda Sharma for her constant encouragement.

## Ethics Statement

The research respected Sciences Po's ethical guidelines and did not need, due to its nature, to be submitted to the Ethics Committee for review.

## Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

## Data Availability Statement

The data for this article were downloaded from Scopus and gathered from Google Scholar through the procedures detailed in the methods section. An Excel file reporting all the peer-reviewed articles collected as data and coded for this study can be freely requested at the following email: ericrepetto@gmail.com.

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## Supporting Information

Additional supporting information can be found online in the Supporting Information section.

Coding Annex.