Thoughts on ‘The Geopolitics of Digital Sovereignty: Contested Networks, Territories and Self-determination’ (Elgar, 2026)

Digital sovereignty is a core focus for us at PD, and this October we’re publishing our book, Digital Sovereignty: The Power to Decide. 

Ahead of its launch, Mike Bracken reviews some of the leading thinking on the topic.

A timely addition to the subject of digital sovereignty was released this month. The Geopolitics of Digital Sovereignty is a selection of 27 essays and papers by leading academics and researchers, edited by, among others, Frédérick Douzet, my colleague on President Macron’s global tech thinkers group.

This post is not a full book review, but a selection of observations that supplement and occasionally challenge our upcoming positions. 

The most important comment is to give this work praise: it is undoubtedly the definitive work on the subject so far, for public policy, academic and technology readers. It treats different versions of sovereignty neutrally, seeking to place sovereign responses from countries as diverse as Iran, China, Ukraine and the USA in their own context. This is grown up policy positioning, not polemic, and overall the work is excellently referenced and the various strands making up sovereignty are explored historically and topologically.

While each chapter is usually forensic on a specific issue - the explanations of Gulf power authoritarianism, Iranian network controls and French military strategy are outstanding - it is the teasing out of the friction points and inconsistencies in regional and national approaches that is compelling.

The book’s core argument is that in the last 15 years ‘digital sovereignty’ has become the central guiding principle of national and international policies. This may strike a UK audience as exaggerated. But at Public Digital, with decades of experience with hundreds of Government organisations, we concur strongly. The book is a reminder of how little the UK has engaged on the many issues within, and how isolated we appear on many issues ranging from sovereign cloud to digital capability.

As well as detailed examinations of place - Cuba’s attempts to protect its infrastructure, the Mediterranean interconnection hub - several tensions are examined in global political relations. Aude Géry explores law enforcement and transborder evidence and how the contradiction between national sovereignty and territorial integrity remains unresolved. 

The book excels in presenting a diverse view of current sovereign positions, and it is striking how many approaches to digital sovereignty seem to be logically untenable in the long term.

Arindrajit Basu neatly dissects the India Stack phenomenon through its economic, democratic and security narratives, showing how Indian companies and its citizens benefit while the country seeks to export the resultant domestic infrastructure solutions abroad. Whether satisfying these three constituents is tenable remains unknown.

What appears untenable is the US position as received by many other countries. Douzet and Guiffard’s explanation of ‘Why the United States doesn’t use the concept of digital sovereignty’ is peerless. Their position that a combination of American exceptionalism, the dual civilian and military genesis of the Internet, and their ability to weaponise interdependence for strategic, economic purpose can not be sustained without a digital sovereign strategy that unites their offensive and defensive positions. We agree that the Cloud Act (2017) may well have been the first definitive act of digital sovereignty, and as long as many states see it as an act of imperial overreach, the US desire to keep an open and non-fragmented Internet on which its security and economic power is supreme, is unlikely. 

The European coverage centres on the French responses over the last 20 years. Clotilde Bomont’s essay on the failures of the French sovereign cloud strategy of the early 2010s and the desire for a European Cloud solution pulls no punches, laying the failure squarely with ‘political decision makers’ lack of understanding of cloud technology’, and demonstrating the myriad working groups, delayed time to action and negligible investment levels involved compared to the US hyperscalars:

        “The IPCEI CIS [European Cloud infrastructures and services project ] launched in December 2020 and approved in 2023, it will provide up to €1.2bn in public funding with an additional €1.5bn in private investment. Currently 19 projects involving 90 European companies are expected.”

It’s hard to comprehend such delay and spending when Amazon is spending over €50bn in France and Spain in 2026 alone.

Closest to our hearts is Max Münßinger’s excellent placing of Europe’s real digital sovereign desire: “to create a framework in which non European capital acts as a digital supplier for European production without competing with leading European sectors." This ‘cake and eat it’ approach is equally untenable, and potentially explains the recent European Eurostack policy approach which comes a little late for this book’s analysis.

Rogier Creemers’ take on China is clear: the boundary-less, globally uniform Internet was always seen as a historical aberration in Beijing. The absence of a China camp internationally shows its assertion of sovereignty to be asymmetric and largely a manifestation of its domestic needs. In a highly integrated global economy, Government’s actions are limited and can cause harm within and without.

Overall this is the strongest collection of work published to date on digital sovereignty. It deals with complex related issues including law, cyber security, infrastructure and cloud, and makes the trade-offs and geopolitical challenges very clear. This is no polemic, nor are there easy solutions provided. It is light on economic and industrial policy, and all works of these kinds will find the subject of AI requires additions and edits in the near course. A few misses stand out: the Eurostack response to US policy in 2025 and a deeper analysis of a few countries and regions  - notably the UK, Israel and several African nations - would be an improvement.