[Air-L] communication +1 special issue on *Digital Sovereignty* OUT NOW (open access)

[Christoph Borbach]

Dear AoIR fellows,

I am pleased to announce that the /communication +1/ special issue on 
**Digital Sovereignty** is now published (open access). The issue 
contains nine research papers and one dialogue: 
https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/issue/221/info/

Our introduction to the special issue (“The Digital Leviathan: 
Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies”), which also 
summarizes and discusses all the contributions, can be found here: 
https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/article/id/3521/

Best wishes, and I really hope you enjoy reading the special issue!
Christoph
_____

/communication +1/ • Volume 11 • Issue 2 • 2025 • *Digital Sovereignty*
/edited by Christoph Borbach and Tristan Thielmann
/
This special issue explores digital sovereignty as one of the defining 
yet most contested concepts of contemporary digital politics. While 
sovereignty has traditionally been tied to the nation state, current 
debates—ranging from platform governance and data capitalism to the 
discourse on Sovereign AI—demonstrate that power is increasingly 
mediated by corporate infrastructures and algorithmic systems. Bringing 
together inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives from Media and 
Communication Studies, Critical AI and Data Studies, Science and 
Technology Studies, Political Philosophy, Sociology, and Information 
Systems Research, the special issue examines how sovereignty is enacted, 
negotiated, and reconfigured across diverse sociotechnical domains. 
Rather than treating sovereignty as a stable property—of states, 
organizations, or individuals—the authors conceptualize it as a 
relational and transformative concept embedded in design, digital 
practices, and technologies of datafication. The contributions 
demonstrate that digital sovereignty is best understood as a 
multi-layered site where infrastructures, data ethics, and imaginaries 
intersect, foregrounding how agency and autonomy are redefined within 
the entangled human–machine ecologies of the digital age. In this way, 
the special issue positions digital sovereignty as a central object of 
inquiry for Critical AI and Data Studies, offering conceptual tools to 
address its practices, ethics, platforms, and theories.

*Dialogue:*

• Stéphane Couture, Sophie Toupin, and Christoph Borbach: “Sovereign AI, 
the fragmented internet, data crawlers, and the opacity of consent 
forms: A dialogue on digital sovereignty”

*Contributions:*

• Tristan Thielmann and Christoph Borbach: “The Digital Leviathan: 
Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies”
• Leah Miriam Friedman: “Who is sovereign and how? Informing data 
sovereignty initiatives beyond borders through analysis of autonomous 
health movements”
• Gwen Lisa Shaffer: “Trust, transparency and technology: Providing 
digital sovereignty through a Digital Rights Platform”
• Renée Ridgway: “Designing digital sovereignty—an open federated EU web 
index for search”
• Anne Mollen: “Struggling with generative AI: Digital 
self-determination along infrastructures of automation”
• Jose Francisco Marichal: “Data rights reconsidered: Reimagining 
digital freedom through Lefebvre’s Right to the City”
• Thomas Wendt: “Understanding digital agency: Digital transformation as 
an organizational update of subjective sovereignty”
• Stephan Packard: “Post-digital, post-human sovereignty: Combined 
imaginaries in current political communication”
• Dennis Lawo, Gunnar Stevens, and Jenny Berkholz: “Three actors, eight 
models: A relational lens on digital sovereignty”