Description
In contemporary International Relations (IR) scholarship, discussions of the European Union’s (EU) digital politics almost inevitably encounter the concept of digital sovereignty. Both in academic debates and political discourse, the term has emerged as a central yet contested notion, prompting scholars to interrogate its origins, meanings, and implications.
This paper contributes to these debates by exploring how digital sovereigntist policies influence structural arrangements in the global economy and the power dynamics they constitute and condition. It develops a theoretical perspective that combines insights from International Political Economy (IPE) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) by drawing on Susan Strange’s eclectic structural framework–particularly her multilayered conception of structural power–and integrating an infrastructural perspective within it.
This interdisciplinary lens foregrounds the mundane and often invisible processes of infrastructuring that underpin global economic networks. From this viewpoint, digital sovereigntist policies can be understood as part of ongoing processes of infrastructuring–subtle interventions that steer these processes in particular directions. In doing so, they influence not only the shape of infrastructural arrangements but also the configurations of structural power in the global political economy.
The argument is illustrated through case studies of digital technologies designated by the EU as central to European digital sovereignty. These cases trace how EU policies shape the design of individual technologies, the infrastructures of which they form integral parts, and the broader economic structures in which they are embedded. By doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on European digital sovereignty, to scholarship at the intersection of IR and STS, and to emerging neo-Strangean approaches within IPE.
