Digital sovereignty is a dynamic discursive instrument through which nation-states, corporations, epistemic communities and marginalised groups articulate claims of control over digital spaces, where the constructivist approach reveals sovereignty not as a fixed legal status but a fluid rhetorical device deployed in relational conflicts, multivocal strategies, and fluctuating power contexts; this fragmented sovereignty is exemplified by the attribute of adversariality, where political actors identify external or internal threats to justify assertive digital governance – for instance, EU rhetoric on “technological autonomy” frames both US Big Tech and Chinese infrastructure as security threats, mirroring similar discourses in India and Russia, while multiversity captures how the same actors pursue conflicting goals under the same sovereignty banner, as with the EU's push for open markets alongside strategic protectionism, or Indigenous communities invoking sovereignty both against corporations and their own state institutions, and latency addresses how digital sovereignty may remain unspoken when authority is uncontested, surfacing only when geopolitical or economic disruption challenges dominance, as seen in the rise of US discourse when Chinese tech gains influence, while instrumentality shows how sovereignty claims respond to policy crises – from AI ethics to cloud dependency – with context-specific goals, and hypocrisy emerges in the dissonance between sovereignty rhetoric and actual dependencies, exemplified by Europe's GAIA-X project inviting US tech firms while promoting autonomy, or China’s advocacy of state-led internet control coexisting with corporate pragmatism in global standard-setting bodies; the analytical framework proposed by Santaniello equips scholars to empirically dissect digital sovereignty narratives by abstracting five non-exclusive attributes – adversariality, multiversity, latency, instrumentality, hypocrisy – as heuristic variables for comparative research across regions, actors and technologies, clarifying the logic, contradictions and evolving meanings embedded in sovereign digital claims across the global technopolitical spectrum. Conceptualised by Mauro Santaniello in “Attributes of Digital Sovereignty: A Conceptual Framework” (2025), published in Geopolitics: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2025.2521548
