Digital technologies, digital infrastructures, and platform ecosystems have become critical resources for nations, organisations, communities, and individuals. As a result, questions of who controls digital infrastructures, who governs data, and who sets the rules for digital innovation have become concerns for public administration, economic strategy, and everyday life (Zuboff 2022). Artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps the domain where the question of digital sovereignty is currently most acute — raising issues of dependence, available alternatives, and open source solutions.
In this special issue, we use digital sovereignty to refer to the practical capacity of an actor (an individual, community, organisation, or nation) to make and enforce choices about how digital systems are sourced, procured, designed, governed, and used as well as to avoid, reshape, or exit dependencies that create risks to autonomy, rights, resilience, or collective values. This includes, but is not limited to, data governance and protection, reliance on global platform providers, service bundling and forced adoption, interoperability and standards, “choke points”, and transparency and control over AI models.
Digital sovereignty has become entrenched in the political rhetoric of countries and regions, such as Denmark, where municipalities and the Ministry of Digital Affairs are migrating from Microsoft to open-source software (EU 2025a), the EU with its Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty (EU 2025b), the migration strategy of many municipalities and states of Germany towards open-source (EU 2024), the digital nation-state building efforts of China, India and South Africa (Jiang 2024) and initiatives such as the Principles of Māori Data Sovereignty protecting the rights of indigenous populations (Temanararaunga 2025). While these developments have captured the attention of various research fields, including policy (Pohle and Thiel 2020), philosophy of information (Floridi 2014), internet governance (DeNardis 2014) and Law (Koops et al. 2016), many of these “black-box” the technologies involved. Digital sovereignty does also remain primarily as visions rather than accomplishments, and transition strategies are needed. Surprisingly, there remains comparatively limited published information systems research on the topic.
Yet information systems research should have much to contribute, given its socio-technical approach to the study of digital technologies in context. There is a substantial body of information systems research relevant to the digital sovereignty discourse by addressing questions including how states and organisations can navigate global digital ecosystems, how digital architectures and governance standards can be designed to support digital sovereignty, how digital sovereignty influences digital innovation and the short- and long-term implications for individuals' and communities’ autonomy, rights, resilience and risks.
Examples of relevant information systems research includes information infrastructure research (Hanseth and Lyytinen 2010) which has explored control and interdependencies in large-scale and global information systems. Digital innovation research (Lyytinen et al. 2016) has described the role of ecosystems, control points (Hanseth and Modol 2021) and generativity (Bygstad 2017) in digital innovation. Research on digital platforms has addressed issues of architecture and how to govern platforms (Constantinides 2018) and research on open-source software and digital public goods on how to facilitate autonomy, resilience, sustainability (Braa et al. 2004, Veit and Thatcher 2023) and develop public value (Nicholson et al. 2022). The body of information systems research on the human-artificial intelligence relationship related to, for example, transparency and norms (Grisold et al. 2025) is growing.
In this special issue, we invite empirically grounded and theoretically ambitious research that explains digital sovereignty as a socio-technical accomplishment including its tensions, trade-offs, and unintended consequences. We also welcome conceptual or review papers on the topic.
While we primarily expect papers based on qualitative research, we also welcome quantitative contributions, provided they emphasise the research context and the theoretical and practical implications of their findings. Papers must have a substantial information systems contribution foregrounding digital technologies in context, emphasising the specific nature of digital technologies, infrastructures, and platforms and their social implications.