Sanctions and infrastructural ideologies: Assessing the material shaping of EU digital sovereignty in response to the war in Ukraine

Abstract

In this paper, we interrogate the sanctions instated against Russian media by the European Union (EU) in response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine. We do this in three ways. First, we present the outcome of extensive network measurements that show the heterogeneous implementation of the sanctions in EU Member States. Second, we explain how the sanctions fit the EU's digital sovereignty agenda. And third, we theorise the EU's digital sovereignty policies and sanctions as the emergence of a repressive state apparatus that forms a metagovernance regime with the ideological state apparatus of multistakeholder internet governance. We explain how networks are shaped in the dialectical relation between the ideological and repressive state apparatuses by showing how multistakeholder internet governance aims to stay politically neutral to accommodate the politics of different repressive state apparatuses. In turn, repressive state apparatuses define their demands in a technologically neutral way so multistakeholder internet governance can continue to develop and adapt communication networks. This research combines methods from Computer Science with theoretical frameworks from European Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies and International Relations. Through this work, we aim to contribute to the practice of interdisciplinary analysis of communication networks and debates on digital sovereignty, European infrastructuralisation, and internet governance.