"Digital sovereignty" is the idea that states should “reaffirm” their
authority over the Internet and protect their citizens, institutions, and businesses from
the multiple challenges to their nation’s self-determination in the digital sphere.
According to this principle, sovereignty depends on more than supranational alliances or
international legal instruments, military might or trade: it depends on locally-owned,
controlled and operated innovation ecosystems, able to increase states’ technical and
economic independence and autonomy. Presently, digital sovereignty is understood primarily
as a legal concept and a set of political discourses. As a consequence, it is predominantly
analysed by political science, international relations and international law. However, the
study of digital sovereignty as a set of infrastructures and socio-material practices has
been largely neglected. In this proposal, I argue that the concept of (digital) sovereignty
should also be studied via the infrastructure-embedded “situated practices” of various
political and economic projects which aim to establish autonomous digital infrastructures in
a hyperconnected world. Although this contribution is also a call for a wider and
comparative research programme, I will focus here on the “pilot case” of Russia, which is
the subject of an ongoing research project. Ultimately, the analysis of
infrastructure-embedded digital sovereignty practices in Russia shows how the Russian
discourse on Internet sovereignty as a centralized and top-down apparatus paradoxically open
up technical and legal opportunities for mundane resistances and the existence of “parallel”
Runets, where particular instantiations of informational freedom are still
possible.