Description
This study is the first to provide a systematic review of the academic literature on European Union (EU) digital sovereignty and identifies the trends that have emerged in recent EU policy documents. The study presents a qualitative literature review of academic articles that discuss the concept of EU digital sovereignty, complemented with a systematic quantitative review of academic articles and policy documents using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling. The objectives are to (1) identify the role played by the concept of digital sovereignty in different disciplinary fields; (2) highlight recent trends in the study and practice of digital sovereignty; (3) identify the key themes and trends relating to digital sovereignty in the policy documents published by the EU institutions; and (4) identify how this systematic review can help us inform the future digital sovereignty research agenda. Through integrating the qualitative and quantitative results, we identify the current EU digital sovereignty research as largely driven by policy initiatives, and that EU policy documents are marked by a certain inconsistent usage of the term digital sovereignty, along with unexpected thematic linkages between issues such as technology control and green energy policies. By unpacking the relations between the different themes in digital sovereignty and their evolution over time, we identify limitations in the current academic research in this field, as well as a number of avenues for future researchers to consider in studying this subject.
