19. June 2025: Workshop on Digital Sovereignty
18. March 2025
Sovereignty 2.0: Legal and Strategic Dimensions of Digital Governance
This workshop convenes policymakers, legal scholars, technologists, and industry leaders to dissect the multifaceted legal and geopolitical implications of digital sovereignty. The session will provide a structured yet fluid exploration of how Europe, the United States, China, and Russia are redefining state authority in the digital age, with particular emphasis on regulatory frameworks, strategic competition, and emerging governance dilemmas.
The workshop begins by mapping divergent facets of digital sovereignty debate, concentrating on four main points: cross-border offensive cyber operations, extraterritorial jurisdiction, cross-border data flows and technological decoupling. Participants will analyse and discuss policies and legislation of the four big actors addressing these four issues with the view of discerning trends, commonalities and divergences. The outcome of this part of the workshop should be a heightened understanding of the four main approaches: souveraineté à la Européenne (EU), sovereignty through market share (US), multipolar sovereignty (RU) and sovereignty within a “community of shared future” (CN).
Building on this comparative foundation, the workshop will next shifts focus to emergent challenges complicating traditional sovereignty paradigms and probe the compatibility of the divergent approaches in a world of escalating geopolitical tensions. Discussions will focus on matters such as the EU’s Cloud Certification scheme and its impact on cross-border data flows, or the feasibility of technological decoupling—evident in U.S. semiconductor export controls and China’s retaliatory AI investment surges—through the lens of international law and norms.
The workshop culminates in a forward-looking debate on Sovereignty 2.0 – a reconceptualization of state power that accounts for current and future disruptive digital technologies, and lessons which can and must be learned and implemented by States and companies wishing to navigate the new geopolitical reality, while remaining rooted in the rules-based international order.
About
Location
Digital Society Initiative, time will be specified