Resisting and Claiming Digital Sovereignty: The Cases of Civil Society and Indigenous Groups

In this contribution to “Unthinking digital sovereignty,” we review some discourses and practical proposals that resist or challenge the digital sovereignty of “established states.” Our focus centers on two distinct sociopolitical groups engaged in such practices. The first group we highlight is what we call “civil society,” which is composed of nongovernmental, nonprofit organizations, and collectives, often inspired by anti-capitalist, autonomist, and anarchist ideas, actively involved in building self-managed digital infrastructures based on free and open-source software and hardware. The second group consists of Indigenous peoples and organizations that have developed a robust discourse on “data sovereignty,” referring to the sovereignty of knowledge and data related to them. Finally, we discuss four contributions from our review that help “unthink” digital sovereignty: (1) the values of autonomy and self-determination, which are quite important beyond state-centric models; (2) the cultural dimensions of digital sovereignty; (3) the question of “openness,” which emerges as a point of tension between the perspectives; and finally; (4) the relevance of the concept of sovereignty itself in addressing these issues.