by Samuele Fratini
Fratini, S. (2025). The sociotechnical politics of digital sovereignty: Frictional infrastructures and the alignment of privacy and geopolitics. Big Data & Society, 12(4), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251400729. (Original work published 2025)
When policymakers and scholars talk about digital sovereignty, they mostly talk about laws, borders and state power. Nevertheless, everyday technologies often seem to do the same kind of political work. I applied a Science & Technology Studies approach to Threema, a Swiss secure-messaging app, because it offered a rich, situated case where design choices, contracts and marketing all appeared to be doing something like sovereignty in practice.
In the paper I argue two linked things. First, digital sovereignty is best seen as a hybrid black box: a provisional assemblage where technical choices (encryption, server location), institutional arrangements (procurement, service clauses) and discursive claims (trust, Swissness) come together and, unexpectedly, reinforce state digital sovereignty by reducing foreign dependencies. Second, the moments that reveal how that order is made are frictions — specific tensions that open the box. I trace three productive frictions in the Threema case: privacy (limits on metadata and surveillance), seclusion (refusal to interoperate), and territorialism (integration within institutions and servers).
Empirically, interviews with Threema staff and Swiss institutional actors, together with corporate and institutional documents, show how these frictions translate into concrete outcomes: server-location clauses, closed architectures, and privacy narratives that align private infrastructure with public expectations.
What should readers take away? If we want a meaningful theory of digital sovereignty, our epistemologies cannot stop at laws. We need to pay attention to procurement rules, certification systems and the everyday design decisions of developers: the practical mechanisms through which sovereignty is actually enacted. This paper offers the conceptual foundation to ground geopolitical competition onto everyday sociotechnical practices.
