Geopolitics of digital infrastructure
This SIG examines the role of digital infrastructures as contested sites of geopolitical power. From semiconductor export controls to AI compute bottlenecks and calls for a common European industrial policy, the SIG analyses how dependencies in digital infrastructures are strategically mobilized by firms, states, and international institutions.
Who controls chokepoints in global AI value chains, and what kinds of power does that control generate? Are terms like sovereignty and autonomy adequate for understanding what is actually happening? Can legal frameworks effectively contribute to reshaping existing power dynamics underlying digital infrastructures? To answer these questions, this SIG focuses on concrete empirical sites of dependency and leverage for understanding how digital infrastructures mediate power, conflict, and negotiation in a contested global digital economy.
Exhausted Concepts
Debates on technology and geopolitics often fall back on a familiar set of terms: sovereignty, autonomy, resilience, and security. These concepts remain useful, but they are increasingly asked to explain too many different things at once. They can blur important differences between who owns infrastructure, who governs access to it, who maintains it, and who can turn dependence into leverage. The SIG asks where this vocabulary still clarifies, where it starts to flatten reality, and which new terms are needed to describe the geopolitics of digital infrastructure more precisely.
Concrete Chokepoints
The SIG directs attention to concrete chokepoints in digital value chains. Chokepoints are sites where access to technology can be granted, restricted, delayed, or conditioned, and where that control produces wider political and empirical effects. These include, for example, the allocation of advanced chips, the maintenance of semiconductor production machines, the financing of infrastructure, and the conditions under which governments allow firms to enter or remain in key markets. Looking at these sites helps make geopolitical power visible in a way that abstract debates often do not.
Bridging Disciplines
The geopolitics of digital infrastructure cannot be understood from any single angle. This SIG brings these conversations together by focusing on the sites where material systems, legal frameworks, political power, and economic dependence intersect. The SIG offers a space for developing a sharper language for understanding how digital infrastructures shape power today and for reflecting on how struggles over dependency, leverage and control can be practically remedied.