27.8.2025, 16–18 at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 3rd floor. Snacks and drinks will be served after the lecture – welcome!
You can also follow the lecture online via Zoom. Click here to to join the meeting.
The prevailing discourse around digital sovereignty has emerged from fundamentally retrospective frameworks of technological governance. During the Internet's early proliferation, states primarily sought to exclude specific data and information from their jurisdictional boundaries. This exclusionary approach – what can be termed "lock-out sovereignty" – represented a defensive posture rooted in a classical Westphalian conception of the nation-state, where sovereignty is conceived as an absolute, territorially-bounded authority exercised within clearly demarcated borders. More recently, the rise of artificial intelligence has generated a shift towards “AI sovereignty”, which operates through an almost inverse logic, emphasizing states' capacity to access, harness, and deploy data generated within their territorial jurisdictions—a strategy of "lock-in sovereignty". Despite their differences, both approaches remain tethered to a backward-looking imaginary of digital evolution, where the nation-state is treated as the natural and necessary container of sovereignty. This framework inherently limits their transformative potential by anchoring digital governance in antiquated models of territorial control and exclusionary politics.
This talk critiques such a framing, particularly in the African context, rethinking features – e.g. softness, fragility – that have historically been perceived as negative attributes of African nation-states, and reconnecting with early ideas of decolonization as a world-making, rather than a state-making process (Getachew, 2019). In particular, it advocates for a fundamental reorientation toward the transformative possibilities embedded in "networked sovereignty" (Mbembe, 2016), a concept rooted in precolonial African political traditions that transcends the limitations of state-centric governance. Unlike the backward-looking, territorially-bound logic of conventional digital sovereignty, networked sovereignty offers a forward-oriented alternative that prioritizes interconnected, collaborative forms of authority that extend beyond narrow national interests.
This networked paradigm opens pathways toward a more genuinely international and planetary conception of digital evolution—one that moves beyond the zero-sum competition inherent in Westphalian frameworks toward collaborative, distributed models of digital governance. By drawing on African political philosophies that emphasize relational authority and collective decision-making, networked sovereignty presents an alternative to the restrictive binary of lock-out versus lock-in approaches, offering instead a more expansive, inclusive, and ultimately sustainable framework for navigating digital futures that serve broader human and ecological interests rather than merely defending or advancing isolated national prerogatives.
Iginio Gagliardone in the inaugural SA-UK Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a fellow of Wits’ Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute. He is the author of “The Politics of Technology in Africa” (2016) and “China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet” (2019). His most recent work examines the international politics of Artificial Intelligence and the emergence of new imageries of technological evolution in Africa.