Sovereignty has become a key concept of a world order in the process of re-sorting itself. While political, economic, and cultural systems increasingly drift apart, one sphere remains oddly entangled, interconnected, and mutually dependent: the digital world.
Under this observation, the second cohort of Fellows at the St.Gallen Collegium of the University of St.Gallen comes together to address the question of digital sovereignty – one of the central intellectual tasks of a present that increasingly experiences its own technological foundations as dependency.
Digital technologies have long become critical infrastructure for economies, states, and civil societies alike. Yet the more self-evident this infrastructure becomes, the more clearly its price emerges: those who rely on technology developed and operated abroad also relinquish a measure of their own agency. Already in 2021, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel, together with the heads of government of Denmark, Estonia, and Finland, called on the European Commission for it to be "time for Europe to be digitally sovereign." In the wake of the 61st Munich Security Conference, this call was taken up emphatically by European industry leaders – as a demand for an industrial policy strategy to reduce critical dependencies.
Yet digital sovereignty is more than a matter of state policy. As the World Economic Forum emphasizes, the issue concerns every level – down to the individual citizen: digital, technological, and data sovereignty refer to the ability to retain control over one's own digital data, tools, and infrastructure. Added to this is a deeper unease: what if technology itself becomes increasingly autonomous – if artificial intelligence turns into an independent actor alongside the human? This prospect raises the question of sovereignty with unprecedented urgency.
Digital sovereignty therefore cannot be reduced to a single discipline, level, or actor. It presents itself as a question of individual autonomy as much as of state agency, of corporate control as much as of global justice, of legal regulation as much as of the human's place in a world increasingly co-shaped by non-human actors. Possible avenues of research range accordingly from the digital autonomy of the individual, to the power of platform corporations and the digital sovereignty of companies, to questions of global inequality in access to digital control, and to the fundamental question of what sovereignty can still mean at all in a post-human digital world.
St.Gallen Collegium invites researchers from all disciplines to join this solution-oriented discourse – particularly where the technical intersects with the normative, the local with the global, and the individual with the institutional. Under this guiding question, the second cohort of St.Gallen Collegium Fellows will convene in fall 2026.
