Short call for papers at the ISJ website and link to the submission system
Digital technologies, digital infrastructures, and platform ecosystems have become critical resources for nations, organisations, communities, and individuals. As a result, questions of who controls digital infrastructures, who governs data, and who sets the rules for digital innovation have become concerns for public administration, economic strategy, and everyday life (Zuboff 2022). Artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps the domain where the question of digital sovereignty is currently most acute — raising issues of dependence, available alternatives, and open‑source solutions.
In this special issue, we use digital sovereignty to refer to the practical capacity of an actor (an individual, community, organisation, or nation) to make and enforce choices about how digital systems are sourced, procured, designed, governed, and used as well as to avoid, reshape, or exit dependencies that create risks to autonomy, rights, resilience, or collective values. This includes, but is not limited to, data governance and protection, reliance on global platform providers, service bundling and forced adoption, interoperability and standards, “choke points”, and transparency and control over AI models.
Digital sovereignty has become entrenched in the political rhetoric of countries and regions, such as Denmark, where municipalities and the Ministry of Digital Affairs are migrating from Microsoft to open-source software (EU 2025a), the EU with its Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty (EU 2025b), the migration strategy of many municipalities and states of Germany towards open-source (EU 2024), the digital nation-state building efforts of China, India and South Africa (Jiang 2024) and initiatives such as the Principles of Māori Data Sovereignty protecting the rights of indigenous populations (Temanararaunga 2025). While these developments have captured the attention of various research fields, including policy (Pohle and Thiel 2020), philosophy of information (Floridi 2014), internet governance (DeNardis 2014) and Law (Koops et al. 2016), many of these “black-box” the technologies involved. Digital sovereignty does also remain primarily as visions rather than accomplishments, and transition strategies are needed. Surprisingly, there remains comparatively limited published information systems research on the topic.
Yet information systems research should have much to contribute, given its socio-technical approach to the study of digital technologies in context. There is a substantial body of information systems research relevant to the digital sovereignty discourse by addressing questions including how states and organisations can navigate global digital ecosystems, how digital architectures and governance standards can be designed to support digital sovereignty, how digital sovereignty influences digital innovation and the short- and long-term implications for individuals' and communities’ autonomy, rights, resilience and risks.
Examples of relevant information systems research includes information infrastructure research (Hanseth and Lyytinen 2010) which has explored control and interdependencies in large-scale and global information systems. Digital innovation research (Lyytinen et al. 2016) has described the role of ecosystems, control points (Hanseth and Modol 2021) and generativity (Bygstad 2017) in digital innovation. Research on digital platforms has addressed issues of architecture and how to govern platforms (Constantinides 2018) and research on open-source software and digital public goods on how to facilitate autonomy, resilience, sustainability (Braa et al. 2004, Veit and Thatcher 2023) and develop public value (Nicholson et al. 2022). The body of information systems research on the human-artificial intelligence relationship related to, for example, transparency and norms (Grisold et al. 2025) is growing.
The contributions we are looking for:
In this special issue, we invite empirically grounded and theoretically ambitious research that explains digital sovereignty as a socio-technical accomplishment including its tensions, trade-offs, and unintended consequences. We also welcome conceptual or review papers on the topic.
While we primarily expect papers based on qualitative research, we also welcome quantitative contributions, provided they emphasise the research context and the theoretical and practical implications of their findings. Papers must have a substantial information systems contribution foregrounding digital technologies in context, emphasising the specific nature of digital technologies, infrastructures, and platforms and their social implications.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Information systems research addressing digital sovereignty related to:
- Foundations and mechanisms
- Conceptual and theoretical foundations of digital sovereignty in information systems and its unique properties compared to other conceptualizations of sovereignty
- Critical investigations of the sovereignty paradox – the sacrifice of sovereignty for the utility and efficiency of big-tech, related to path dependencies, shadow sovereignty and exit strategies
- The exercise of power by dominant players and its impact
- Architecture, governance, and emerging technologies
- The specific sovereignty challenges of digital infrastructure, platforms, AI and other emerging technologies such as quantum computing
- Sovereignty-by-design: interoperability, standards, modularity, API governance, devolved, horizontal and open architectures
- Open-source, digital public goods, and open data commons as strategies for autonomy, resilience, and public value
- AI for managing sovereign digital infrastructures
- Public sector and regulation in practice
- Global, regional and local governance, regulation and policy regarding data, platforms and infrastructures, and governance models
- Public sector digital sovereignty, including procurement, vendor lock-in, interoperability and capability building
- Rights, justice, and contested sovereignties
- Surveillance, digital identity, biometrics, and the sovereignty implications for rights and democratic accountability
- Digital sovereignty in development and “post-aid” contexts: shifting dependencies, infrastructures at scale, and long-term sustainability
- Indigenous populations and other minority groups who have been economically, socially and environmentally disadvantaged by colonisation; sovereignty is particularly important, especially regarding the use of their data, protection from misuse, stewardship, and maintaining integrity.
- Strategy
- Managing capability, skills, and technology gaps and deficits
- Managing choke points in critical technical layers
Managing national policy alignment
Important dates and contact information:
March 31st, 2027: Full paper submission deadline. This is a hard deadline and will not be extended.
Paper development workshops and dissemination:
We will set up workshops for paper development in the months prior to the submission deadline. These will be a mix of physical workshops (for example at IS conferences) and online virtual workshops. In addition, we will communicate the development of the special issue to those who wish to be informed. If you would like to be informed about paper development workshops and keep up to date on the development of this special issue, then please send us an email to sign up to our mailing list: digital-sovereignty@ifi.uio.no.
If you have any questions regarding this special issue, please contact coordinating Senior Editor Petter Nielsen (pnielsen@ifi.uio.no).
Editorial team
Senior Editors
- Petter Nielsen, University of Oslo, Norway
- Laura Brandimarte, University of Arizona, USA
- Ben Eaton, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
- Juliana Sutanto, Monash University, Australia
- Mary Tate, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
- Daniel Veit, University of Augsburg, Germany
Associate Editors
- Idris Adjerid, Virginia Tech, USA
- Tawfiq Alashoor, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Spain
- Armin Alizadeh, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
- Pierre-Emmanuel Arduin, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, France
- Irwin Brown, University of Cape Town, South Africa
- Wonhyuk Cho, Ewha Womans University, South Korea
- Jacqueline Corbett, Université Laval, Canada
- Tingru Cui, University of Melbourne, Australia
- Torgeir Dingsøyr, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
- Andreas Drechsler, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
- Daniel Gozman, University of Sydney, Australia
- Agam Gupta, IIT Delhi, India
- Riitta Hekkala, Aalto University, Finland
- Federico Iannacci, University of Sussex, UK
- Alexander Kempton, University of Oslo, Norway
- John Krogstie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
- Shi-Ying Lim, National University of Singapore, Singapore
- Shirin Madon, LSE, UK
- Johan Magnusson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
- Antonio Martini, University of Oslo, Norway
- Silvia Masiero, University of Oslo, Norway
- Eric Monteiro, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
- Priyanka Pandey, King's College, UK
- Roser Pujadas, University College London, UK
- Alexander Rieger, University of Arkansas, USA
- Tamara Roth, University of Arkansas, USA
- Hanlie Smuts, University of Pretoria, South Africa
- Timo Sturm, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
- Rounan Sun, Monash University, Australia
- Johan Ivar Sæbø, University of Oslo, Norway
- Benjamin van Giffen, University of Lichtenstein, Lichtenstein
- Marjolein van Offenbeek, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
- Will Venters, LSE, UK
- Pauline Weritz, University of Twente, The Netherlands
- Amber Young, University of Oklahoma, USA
- Xiaojie Zhang, Ocean University of China, China
- Markus P. Zimmer, University of Agder, Norway
Citation
This call can be cited as: Nielsen, P., Brandimarte, L., Eaton, B., Sutanto, J., Tate, M., and Veit, D. (2026). Call for Papers: Digital Sovereignty. Information Systems Journal.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the feedback on drafts of this call for paper from Johan Ivar Sæbø, Cecil Chua, Federico Iannacci, Angsana Techatassanasoontorn, Marco Marabelli, Eric Monteiro and Robert Davison.
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