Conference Agenda

The financial system is a crucial pillar of the world economy. Because an ever-growing portion of economic activity has shifted online, scholars interested in changes in the world economy have been reflecting on the impact of the digitalisation of financial technologies and, to a lesser extent, on their causes. Despite their significance, political science has not systematically reflected the dynamics of new actors entering the field and technological advancements. The paper makes a theoretical contribution and proposes the concept of a digital fix. The concept covers three dimensions: the spatial dimension of digital finance, the problems to be fixed, and the political economy dynamics resulting from capital’s search for new investment opportunities. The paper applies the concept of a digital fix to understand policy responses in three different regions covering diverse issues like interconnectivity, interdependence, and the infrastructure of digital finance. The paper demonstrates that the concept can be used effectively to explore the role of the digital in the shift, deepening, or altering of global asymmetries and hierarchies within the international financial system, as well as the actors and interests behind these changes. This allows us to reflect on the role of digital finance in processes like geo-economisation and geo-politicisation more generally.

While recent scholarship has made significant progress in addressing the narratives and policy shifts associated with digital sovereignty (Falkner et al., 2024), conceptual analyses remain largely rooted in neorealist frameworks, emphasizing control and power. Through well-established concept analysis, this study seeks to determine whether the "digital" layer of sovereignty offers new analytical insights into the concept itself or merely functions as a contemporary policy motto.

Employing a concept analysis methodology, this research investigates three major contexts of theorization: political and normative, explanatory and empirical, and everyday and practical (Berenskötter & Guzzini, 2024). The paper addresses the ontological implications of digital sovereignty by questioning whether the addition of "digital" enhances our understanding of sovereignty as a concept. Does this "newness" reveal deeper ontological dimensions, or is it confined to the operational realm of contemporary policy measures?

A comprehensive review of scientific articles indexed in major databases is complemented by a single-case study of EU AI policy from 2017 to 2020. This empirical case involves a qualitative content analysis of EU documents and public consultation results, mapping the term’s usage within policy discourse. These analyses form the basis for evaluating whether digital sovereignty represents a substantive theoretical evolution or remains tethered to practical exigencies.

Through this approach, the paper situates digital sovereignty within the broader landscape of sovereignty’s conceptual evolution. It contrasts the notion’s potential as an analytical tool with its framing as a transient political narrative embedded at the (foreign) policy level, which has had limited impact on scholarly reflection.

In its efforts to create a single market for data, the European Commission has launched various data space initiatives across all sectors of society (such as agriculture or health) that would help overcome existing technical and legal barriers to seamless data sharing. From a technical point of view, these policies are enforced by means of setting up a highly scalable and modular backend infrastructure that can be tailored to any business needs. This paper shows the importance of considering the move toward digital platform business models in the study of European interoperability, both by looking at their technicalities and performativity. Adopting a material–technical perspective on platforms as developed within media studies, and bringing this literature in conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and European studies, this paper suggests that a focus on the political economy of platforms and their technical configuration is key to understand how this novel form of data integration is re-ordering power arrangements over data sharing and governance. Through a detailed study of the roll out of DG CONNECT’s open-source middleware platform “Simpl”, this paper seeks to make two broader contributions. First, it identifies a new logic of platform economy behind the implementation of EU digital policy initiatives (such as the Data Governance Act and the Data Act) that enables new decentralised practices of data sharing and use to emerge across the public and private sectors. Second, it draws out how this new logic is accompanied not only by the coopting of platforms as “services” but also crucially by a breakdown of the categories of data provider/consumer, owner/user.

This article seeks to explain the success of litigation strategies pursued by interest groups defending a public interest (hereafter public interest groups). We focus on the sub-field of data transfer between the European Union and the United States, where the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), through rulings indirectly triggered by such groups, has invalidated a Commission’s decision relating to EU-US arrangements (Safe Harbour in 2015, then Privacy Shield in 2020). How can we explain the success of litigation strategies in this field when many factors pushed in the opposite direction? Answering this question allows us to understand the conditions that lead to successful litigation strategies, especially those pursued by public interest groups, in the European Union and beyond. It may also provide us with an appropriate analytical framework for discussing the likelihood of success of future litigation, now that the Privacy Shield has been replaced by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. To evaluate the likelihood of litigation successes, we propose an analytical model based on five elements derived from the new institutionalist theory: actors and instruments (rational choice institutionalism), processes (historical institutionalism), context and legitimacy (sociological institutionalism). Although we cannot prove that all five elements are necessary conditions for success, we argue that litigation successes in the cases we studied (the Schrems rulings) were very likely because all five elements were combined, even if the relative weight of each element slightly varied.