Revisiting the Geopolitics of Sovereign Data
The Geopolitics of Sovereign Data
CASE STUDIES
Geopolitics is on everyone’s minds. Its intersection with information and communications technology is a prominent part of an energetic public debate. A central piece of it is an overwhelming preoccupation with the promise and the peril of artificial intelligence, and the market and political influence wielded by AI technology developers. Official bodies, from national governments to industry regulators, are taking a close look at what this means for their strategic and national security interests. State concerns with sovereign entitlements are not new, but “sovereign AI”, a term of art now in active circulation, is breathing new life into standard elements of statecraft and international relations. The United Kingdom now has a “Sovereign AI Unit”, Canada has a “sovereign AI strategy” and an “AI Sovereignty and Innovation Cluster”, and at the AI Action Summit in Paris at the beginning of 2025, France’s President Emmanuel Macron made sovereignty and “sovereign AI” pillars of French technology policy.
Sovereign Points of Origin
The UK, Canada, and France are not alone. Importantly, “sovereign AI” is less a new development than a variation on a recurring theme. There is a lot of historical ground to cover to properly understand how we got to this point. Technology innovation is always catalytic, but in recent years it has so radically upended much of how we conduct our daily lives that our ability to digest it all and adapt is under significant duress. That make this a good time for robust stock taking.
A decade ago, I started monitoring bits and pieces of what I thought of as a “geopolitics of information” focused on broadly defined problems of sovereignty, data, and risk in emerging markets. This was the era of big data and increasing talk of data privacy and control. I commissioned a series of essays in 2015 and 2016, worked closely with the authors, and the results were published in a monthly journal, Sovereign Data, I created for this express purpose and which is now on deposit at the British Library. I’ve reintroduced them here to surface themes and set the stage for new research and risk analysis.
The publication's purpose was to examine the "know-ability" of current information technology issues the influence they could have on political and market dynamics. Each monthly essay dealt with a topic in a single state or region, and covered Brazil, Burundi, China, India, Russia, South Korea, the South China Sea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The corpus of essays surfaced three themes: strategic state competition, domestic data regulation, and data threats and vulnerabilities.
Theme 1: Strategic State Competition
Sovereign Data explored this by framing technological development as a fundamental instrument of national power. This is illustrated in the coverage of the US-China "arms race" in high-performance computing, where supercomputers are presented as dual-use assets critical for both economic competitiveness and national security applications like nuclear weapons modeling. The theme is further developed in the analysis of the global competition to establish independent satellite navigation systems, such as China's Beidou and India's IRNSS, which are explicitly designed to challenge the long-standing US dominance of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The journal also highlights this dynamic in the realm of internet governance, detailing the divergent strategic visions among the BRICS nations as they collectively seek to establish a new model of "international information security" that serves as a direct riposte to American hegemony in the digital sphere.
Theme 2: Domestic Data Regulation
Articles that dealt with this theme looked closely at persistent state efforts to apply traditional, territorially bound concepts of legal and political control to the borderless domain of digital information. Sovereign Data meticulously documented this trend, offering case studies that revealed a wide spectrum of state capacity and motivation. At one end was Russia's decisive implementation of a data localization law, a policy that mandated the physical storage of Russian citizens' personal data on servers located within the country's territorial borders, thereby subjecting foreign technology companies to state inspection and control. At the other end of the spectrum was India, whose attempts to formulate a cohesive national cybersecurity policy were characterized as a "stuttering start," hampered by a lack of political will, under-resourced public institutions, and an over-reliance on industry self-regulation.
Theme 3: Data Threats and Vulnerabilities
This addressed the pervasive erosion of truth and the weaponization of data and narratives across diverse political contexts. The journal's analysis demonstrated that this was a global phenomenon, starkly evident in the reporting on China, where the deliberate manipulation of official economic statistics by the Chinese Communist Party was presented as a core strategy for maintaining political legitimacy. This theme also manifested in direct state repression of the media in Kenya and Burundi, where governments systematically silenced dissent and controlled political narratives, creating an information vacuum that hindered foreign investment and conflict early warning efforts. Crucially, Sovereign Data showed that even mature democracies are not immune, as seen in its analysis of the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum, where populist rhetoric and emotional appeals sidelined factual debate, creating a political environment where "numbers serve facts less than narratives".
Conclusion
The Sovereign Data case studies illustrate points that are now more relevant than ever: data infrastructure and high technology as levers and mechanisms of strategic competition, efforts to exercise control over domestic information landscapes, and systemic degradation of the information environment.
LIST OF CASE STUDIES
"BRICS set out vision for international information security." Sovereign Data Vol. 1, No. 1 (July 2015)
"Constraints in Kenya's information landscape." Sovereign Data Vol. 1, No. 2 (August 2015)
"High performance computing in US-China relations." Sovereign Data Vol. 1, No. 3 (September 2015)
"The risks of Russia's data localisation laws." Sovereign Data Vol. 1, No. 4 (October 2015)
"Media reporting on the South China Sea dispute." Sovereign Data Vol. 1, No. 5 (November 2015)
"Conflict early warning in Burundi." Sovereign Data Vol. 1, No. 6 (December 2015)
"South Korea renews information campaign on reunification." Sovereign Data Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 2016)
"Satellite technology and the new geopolitical frontier." Sovereign Data Vol. 2, No. 2 (February 2016)
"Trust in China's economic data." Sovereign Data Vol. 2, No. 3 (March 2016)
"India's cybersecurity challenge." Sovereign Data Vol. 2, No. 4 (April 2016)
"Fact-checking Britain's EU referendum." Sovereign Data Vol. 2, No. 5 (May 2016)
This reading list is compiled for reference purposes only. Inclusion does not constitute agreement or endorsement.
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