Description
Digital data and technologies have become key to the process of European security integration. The adoption of a comprehensive data protection regulation (GDPR) in 2016, and the more recent proposal for a Digital Services Act highlight how the European Union (EU) is taking a much more assertive stance in the digital field (Carrapico and Farrand, 2020). At the heart of these initiatives lies the concept of digital sovereignty. This panel aims at exploring how this concept redefines European security integration. Notably, it raises questions about what kind of security actor the EU wants to become, what security politics underpin European initiatives in the digital realm, and how power relations are redefined across Europe. Indeed, when we place digital sovereignty against a background of increased geopolitical competition, such developments raise important questions regarding how digital technologies shape our societies and challenge fundamental rights, who produces and controls digital infrastructures and how data processing practices are regulated. These questions have become particularly salient in the domain of European security integration (Bigo, 2014; de Goede, 2012), given its extreme sensitivity in terms of “conflicts of sovereignty” (Brack et al., 2021, Duez, 2019) impact of security policies on individuals and social groups (Brouwer, 2020), and an increasing reliance on digital data and technologies (Bellanova and Glouftsios, 2020).
