Concept ‘Stretching’ or Concept Innovation? A Review of the Usages of Sovereignty in the Digital Sovereignty Literature
2025-08-22
Digital sovereignty and its cognate concepts have become staples of the digital governance debate; however, in the search for a shared understanding of the concept, the proliferation of claims to digital sovereignty by multiple different actors remains a contested issue. This study provides a review of 240 works, coded according to disciplinary area, actors mentioned in relation to digital sovereignty, and the types of relations explicitly or implicitly conceptualised within each work. I argue that the abundance of actors to which digital sovereignty is ascribed is not an issue per se; rather, the issue is that significant portions of the literature cluster around a digital sovereign ‘of choice’ and limit conversation with other strands. Those works that acknowledge the possibility of multiple coexisting digital sovereigns, or that see digital sovereignty as something that arises from the interactions among multiple actors, neither stretch the concept of sovereignty nor turn digital sovereignty into something different from sovereignty tout court: instead, they explore ways to innovate the concept of sovereignty as a whole and problematise our long‐held assumptions about it.