This paper starts from the observation that the scholarship on EU digital sovereignty (DS) has so far overlooked the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Despite the relative abundance of studies on DS, the existing research on digital sovereignty has focused almost exclusively on policies and discourses at the EU level, or the role of big states, particularly Germany and France. The absence of CEE from the scholarly debates on digital sovereignty is neither surprising, nor unfamiliar to scholars working on the region, as this closely reflects prevailing trends in geopolitics of knowledge. This is both an academic and a political problem, as it not only impoverishes our understanding of EU digital politics, but also reinforces existing hierarchies. The paper theorises the position of CEE in the EU, combining the literatures on small states and the hierarchical structure of transnational capitalism. It argues that the condition of CEE states is characterised by a dual disadvantage, as most of them are small and dependent at the same time, and discusses how this relates to digital sovereignty. Synthesising contributions from a broader project, it highlights the difference in conceptualisations of DS in CEE, and the ways how agency is exercised from the context of dual structural disadvantage. Thereby, this special issue makes a twofold contribution. First, it pluralises the research on EU digital sovereignty. Second, responding to the calls for decolonising the debate on CEE, it sheds light on the more general dynamics of hierarchies in European politics.

The presentation contrasts China’s project of Ecological Civilisation and the role of Electric Vehicles (EVs) with the European Union’s (EU) Green New Deal and electromobility strategy. The comparison reveals the persistence of deep geoeconomic and socio-environmental inequalities beneath the moralising language of “green” development in both contexts, but with significant differences in governance and market structure. Drawing on insights from economic anthropology, the study traces the transnational value chains connecting lithium extraction in Chile and Argentina to the expanding battery and EV sectors in China and the EU, highlighting how global energy transitions hinge on new forms of resource dependence, corporate integration, and state–capital entanglement. Through ethnographic insights and analysis of corporate strategies, regulatory frameworks, and national development visions, the article demonstrates how technological optimism and green moralities obscure the material and political realities of extraction in the South American lithium triangle and the sociotechnical regimes shaping consumption and production in China and the EU. By foregrounding the lived contradictions of “new energy,” the article reveals how climate-oriented industrial strategies simultaneously advance decarbonisation goals and reinscribe the old dependencies of the global economy, offering an anthropological lens on the frictions, alliances, and moral claims driving the contemporary green transition.

This paper revolves around the central question: how does a state aid-focused policy look like in cases of weak state capacity? We explore two unlikely cases of EU’s new industrial policy seen universally as laggards and failures - Bulgaria and Croatia- to explore the why and how of their participation in EU’s new industrial policy initiatives. We focus on what we call the paradox of state aid despite the state and explore the role of private business, subnational actors and academia in identifying, pursuing and exploiting EU-level opportunities for collaboration and funding in the context of weak state capacity and state capture. We focus on public-private collaborations such as INSAIT in Bulgaria and the IPCEI AI bid of Croatia, with the support of InfoBip. The non-state actors we explore operate outside of traditionally captured sectors such as agriculture and energy, which both gives them a space of action and constrains the levels of interest they can receive by governing parties. On the basis of semi-structured expert interviews and analysis of public documents, we identify the complementary strategies that various types of non-state actors use to involve the state, including lending administrative capacity, promising reputational advantages, and related to this - securing continued commitment through the related danger of reputational costs with foreign actors. Our analysis explores first, what state aid in strategic sectors driven by non-state actors means for the possibility of weak states to upgrade their industrial position, and second, what are the distributional outcomes between sectors within these countries.