Nandini Chami, Renata Avila, Gabriel Karsan and Geraldine de Bastion
Who shapes digitalisation? Who owns infrastructure and who controls the Internet? What role do transnational corporations play? What is digital colonialism and which inequalities are reproduced by digitalisation? We will also address questions such as to what extent communication and information technologies can be used to break down power asymmetries.
We aim to unravel the diverse contextualities of Digital Sovereignty and it's the impactful scope of it's infringement
This panel aims at providing a platform to perspectives from the Global South on the combined field of digitalisation and sustainability. On the one hand, we will raise questions of distributive justice and path dependency in our globalised world, e.g. who benefits from present-day digitalisation, and who suffers from it and in what way? On the other hand, we will discuss self-determination and agenda-setting within existing socio-political and economic structures. Questions of power play a central role here: Who shapes digitalisation? Who owns infrastructure and who controls the Internet? What role do transnational corporations play? What is digital colonialism and which inequalities are reproduced by digitalisation? In addition to this critical viewpoint on digitalisation, we will also address questions such as to what extent communication and information technologies can be used to break down power asymmetries. Here, we find it particularly interesting to discuss possible trade-offs and how to deal with them. In short, we want to discuss approaches for a just digitalisation with a focus on possible solutions from people in the Global South. In this context, we also want to discuss what we need to demand from decision-makers in the Global North.