Statecraft, Sovereignty and Digital Government

 Confirmed invited speakers include:

• José van Dijck
• Dang Nguyen
• Paolo Gerbaudo
• Lina Dencik
• Fenwick Mckelvey

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From early “e-government” initiatives in the 1990s and efforts to build the Virtual State, to the vision of governments as platforms in the 2010s and today’s experiments with AI, states have long sought to harness digital technologies to transform and reimagine how they interact with citizens.

The 2010s saw many countries begin to collaborate on what is often referred to as “digital transformation,” drawing ideological inspiration from broader shifts associated with Web 2.0. Terms such as collaboration, participation, and openness gained traction and helped shape a new vision of digital government, as well as an international community committed to its realisation.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, maintains a Digital Government Index with participation from 38 countries (OECD 2023), which draws directly on these ideals. For countries near the top of the rankings—such as Denmark, Korea, and the UK—maintaining their position has been a sustained focus (Schou & Hjelholt 2018).

Beyond international collaboration and benchmarking, Estonia has used its “Digital Estonia” initiative as a form of post-Soviet nation branding (Kattel & Mergel 2019), while in Ukraine, “digitalisation” has been reoriented around needs emerging from war (Nehrey et al. 2022).

These examples illustrate how national digital government strategies are both shaped by and play out on an international stage. While these are digital transformation initiatives, they can also be fruitfully understood as forms of (digital) statecraft—that is, as “the art of conducting state affairs … either domestic or foreign” (Kurian, 2011: 1608), involving the strategic use of power (technologies, modes of cooperation, branding, and so on) to advance state interests. 

Digital government initiatives also frequently involve commercial partnerships and related forms of dependency. In the UK, for example, the government recently signed a five-year agreement with Microsoft “to pursue their digital transformation and innovation ambitions, through access to cost savings on Microsoft 365, the Azure cloud platform, Business Applications, and for the first time, Microsoft 365 Copilot” (Microsoft).

In late 2023, Palantir was awarded a £330 million contract to build and operate a “federated data platform” for the National Health Service (Campbell, 2023). Such dependencies are not new, but they now unfold within a highly turbulent geopolitical context marked by the rise of new autocratic formations (Applebaum, 2025) and a generalised democratic “backsliding” (Haggard and Kaufman, 2021).

Alongside earlier critiques of commercial outsourcing and creeping neoliberal marketisation in digital government, we must now consider more overtly political concerns. The need for “digital sovereignty” is actively debated in the European Parliament and other forums, and some public organisations are beginning to move away from U.S. Big Tech solutions. In a recent report, for example, Denmark’s Minister of Business and Industry remarked: “If we only use their solutions, it makes our society extremely vulnerable in a world that is changing with pressure from great powers, geopolitical tensions, and a technology race. That is why we must develop our own solutions” (Desmarais, 2025). 

How should we think about digital government and the provision of public services in light of these changing geopolitical and technological contexts? This two-day symposium seeks to explore this and related questions. We seek to highlight and contribute to recent discussions of digital sovereignty, to explore emerging forms of digital statecraft, and to reflect on how these relate to existing digital government and digital transformation initiatives. 

We welcome presentations from fields such as—but not limited to—Science and Technology Studies (STS), software and platform studies, media studies, international relations, political theory, political geography, and cultural studies. Indicative topics include: 

• Digital sovereignty 
• Digital transformation initiatives 
• Transnational collaboration around digital transformation 
• Public-private relations between consultancies/tech companies and the state 
• Digital government as an exercise in statecraft (both internal and external) 
• Software as a source of soft or hard power 
• The persistence of open-source initiatives within public services and resources 
• Critical accounts of “Govtech” 
• Historicising digital transformation 
• Citizen or civil software 
• AI and digital government 
• Case studies of alternatives to Big Tech in the public sector 
• GitHub and government software 

We are planning an edited volume or special issue, and we hope the symposium will serve as the foundation for a network of researchers and practitioners to collaborate on further exploration in this space. 

The symposium is hosted by the DIGI-FRONT project, led by Irina Papazu (IT-University of Copenhagen) and Jessamy Perriam (ITU/Australian National University), and co-hosted by Nathaniel Tkacz (Goldsmiths, University of London). 

The symposium will be organised around keynotes (announced later), paper presentations, and discussions. It is in-person and requires the submission of an abstract and presentation of a paper. Remote participation or presentation is not possible. 

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words (excluding bibliography) by December 12, 2025. 

Questions can be directed to Nate Tkacz n.tkacz (@gold.ac.uk) or Irina Papazu irpa[@]itu.dk.