What does it mean to be
digitally sovereign?

This research project about Digital Sovereignty was conducted by Dr Johannes Thumfart at the Research Group (Law, Science, Technology, and Society) LSTS at Vrije Universiteit Brussels from 2020 to 2022 and was funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung’s Special Programme “Security, Society, and the State”.  It investigated digital sovereignty and its subfields, e.g., data sovereignty, informational, infrastructural and cyber sovereignty in the EU, the US, China, and Russia from a perspective based on contemporary intellectual history and political and legal philosophy.

Notable publications are:

• Johannes Thumfart, ‘The Norm Development of Digital Sovereignty between China, Russia, the EU and the US: From the Late 1990s to the Covid-Crisis 2020/21 as Catalytic Event’, in Enforcing Rights in a Changing World, ed. Dara Hallinan, Ronald Leenes, and Paul de Hert, Computers Privacy Data Protection (CPDP) 14 (London: Hart Publishing, 2021), 1–44.
• Wanshu Cong and Johannes Thumfart, ‘A Chinese Precursor to the Digital Sovereignty Debate: Digital Anti-Colonialism and Authoritarianism from the Post–Cold War Era to the Tunis Agenda’, Global Studies Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksac059.
• Marcus Michaelsen and Johannes Thumfart, ‘Drawing a Line: Digital Transnational Repression against Political Exiles and Host State Sovereignty’, European Journal of International Security, 25 October 2022, 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2022.27.