di-Lab at the SWING School on Internet Governance 2026, Bruges

A week on digital sovereignty

Two di-Lab members, Seung Hyun Kim and Ryanna Saidnattar, went to Bruges for the week-long 2026 SWING School on Internet Governance, hosted by UNU-CRIS together with GIG-ARTS, the Internet & Communication Policy Centre, ICANN, and the Digital Constitutionalism Network. The school brings together graduate students, early-career researchers, and practitioners for five days of lectures and group work on the actors, processes, and policy challenges of internet governance.

This year's theme was digital sovereignty, which has become a buzzword in both academia and policy circles. At SWING 2026, it was broadly defined as the ability of states, regions, organisations, and individuals to make autonomous choices in the digital sphere. However, diverse actors - states, the European Union, and companies -  - all use the word differently, and this diverse usage meant in-depth discussions during the week for unpacking the terminology.

The programme structure moved back and forth, from the conceptual to the material, there and back again: governance and sovereignty as competing ideas, fundamental rights, competitiveness, and the EuroStack proposal, then undersea cables, satellites, semiconductors, cybersecurity, AI, indigenous data sovereignty, and perspectives from Russia and China. Group work followed the same logic, starting with mapping the actors, analysing competing definitions, then drafting policy recommendations.

A few points worth sharing

A recurring theme throughout SWING 2026 was that governance and sovereignty should not be treated as interchangeable concepts.. Governance concerns modes of coordination and organization, whereas sovereignty expresses political claims and aspirations. So rather than thinking that we  'move' from governance to sovereignty, as the framing often suggests, the discussions suggested that the more fundamental question is what claims to sovereignty are being produced. Research on digital sovereignty has long focused on what is said. It is now being built into infrastructure and policy, so the next step would be to look at what that actually creates in reality.

We found the second half of the week particularly engaging as it turned towards the more unexplored terrain of material aspects. Sessions on submarine cables, satellite infrastructures, semiconductors, and AI demonstrated that digital sovereignty is no longer only a matter of discourse or policy documents but is being embedded into critical infrastructures and technical systems. The session on undersea cables was a good example: 99% of intercontinental traffic runs through them, around 200 cuts happen every year, and the bottlenecks don’t happen at random spots but at geopolitical chokepoints. It also pointed to a gap: much of the work on digital sovereignty focuses on documents and discourse, and rarely goes to the field.

At the same time, the programme revealed an important research gap. Much of the existing digital sovereignty literature still concentrates on concepts, policy strategies, and official documents, while comparatively little work examines how sovereignty is enacted through infrastructures and organizational practices in the field. Finally, conversation on digital sovereignty is still largely European, in both perspective and participation.  This offers an opportunity for di-Lab to contribute complementary empirical work from Asia, broadening the geographical and conceptual foundations of digital sovereignty research.