Network Sovereignty
Contextual Quote
"As the digital realm has become pervasive in our everyday life, sovereignty is no longer a birthright of states alone. Tech platforms, governments, and networked communities already wield overlapping jurisdiction in the digital space. Network Nations offer a civic trajectory that leverages the affordances of digital networks while resisting both corporate enclosure and state surveillance. By re‑embedding sovereignty in commons‑based infrastructure, voluntary membership, and polycentric institutions, Network Nations could revitalise the democratic promise of collective self‑determination for the twenty‑first century.
Whether they succeed depends less on code than on culture: the shared willingness of globally dispersed humans to imagine themselves not only as users or consumers, but as co‑owners and co‑governors of the networks that increasingly shape their lives."
- Primavera De Filippi and Felix Beer [1]
Description
Primavera De Filippi and Felix Beer:
"Network sovereignty captures the emergence of new forms of sovereignties grounded in network technologies and digital infrastructures. Network sovereigns do not operate within the territorial borders of the nation-state, instead, they exercise political agency within, through, and by virtue of networks. To analyse this emerging concept as both a continuity and a rupture with the Westphalian model, we can revisit the classical triad of sovereignty—space, population, institution—through the lens of networks."
(https://networknations.network/essay/)
Discussion 1: Claims for Sovereignty in Network Landscapes
Primavera de Fillipi and Felix Beer:
"The digital landscape is characterized by three distinct categories of actors with contending claims to a new form of “network sovereignty” over the digital realm: corporate platforms, nation-states, and networked communities.
1. Corporate Platform Sovereigns: The Rise of Techno-Feudalism
A striking manifestation of network sovereignty comes from the rise of large digital platforms—such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft—which control key services and infrastructure (e.g. search, app stores, e-commerce, social media), setting and enforcing rules that shape public discourse, economic activity, and data flows. Shoshana Zuboff (2019) and other critics (e.g. Pasquale, 2023) argue that these firms have accumulated governing power that enables them to act as “quasi-sovereign” actors.
1. Spatial Dimension:
These platform giants have constructed vast, enclosed digital spaces sometimes called walled gardens – that are not geographic but infrastructural—defined by proprietary protocols, algorithms, and interfaces. Their boundaries are enforced not by physical borders but by APIs, logins, and software permissions. Julie Cohen (2017) terms these “techno-feudal” spaces: governed, enclosed, and extractive. These platform territories are modular, interoperable only on their terms, and architected to maintain user dependency and competitive advantage.
2. Personal Dimension:
The populations of tech giants often rivals—and sometimes even surpasses—those of large nation-states. For instance, Meta’s Facebook hosts over three billion users, a population larger than any existing country. Users engage under quasi-citizenship: subject to platform rules via terms of service, algorithmic governance, and discretionary enforcement. While governed, they lack the rights or democratic input expected in traditional polities.
3. Institutional Dimension:
Platforms maintain institutional architectures that mimic state functions—moderation policies, trust and safety teams, and quasi-judicial bodies like the Oversight Board. These structures often operate beyond the reach of democratic oversight, creating what Frank Pasquale (2023) calls “functional sovereignty”: the ability to define and enforce norms of participation, communication, and commerce within a governed domain, without needing formal recognition from the international system.
Platforms’ network sovereignty demonstrates how authority can be exercised over digital space and networked populations, with little recourse to territorial jurisdiction or democratic accountability. Indeed, the sovereignty of digital platforms is not grounded in formal international law but enacted through infrastructural dominance, user dependency, and market entrenchment. As Pinto (2018) notes, entire nations depend on a few companies for critical infrastructure, creating asymmetric power relations with no democratic oversight. At the same time, platforms require states (for contract enforcement, intellectual property regimes, etc.) to secure their position—demonstrating both autonomy from, and dependence on traditional sovereign structures (De Filippi & Belli 2021).
2. Digital Statehood: Extending Nation-States into the Digital Realm
Far from being passive observers to this corporate ascendance, nation-states are developing their own strategies to assert sovereignty in networked spaces. Rather than delegating authority to tech platforms, many states are extending their sovereignty claims into the digital domain through surveillance infrastructure and regulatory regimes that attempt to govern their citizens’ digital life.
1. Spatial Dimension:
Some states are actively re-territorializing the digital realm by creating virtual borders that solidify regulatory oversight and strengthen jurisdictional claims. China’s “Great Firewall” represents the most comprehensive attempt to create a controlled national digital space through technical means. Russia’s “sovereign internet” law similarly aims to create a nationally bounded internet infrastructure that can operate independently from the global Internet network, if necessary. Conversely, some states are extending their territorial presence beyond physical borders. Estonia’s e-residency program, for instance, allows non-Estonians to establish digital identities and businesses under Estonian jurisdiction, effectively expanding the state's digital territory.
2. Personal Dimension:
Nation-states are asserting claims over citizens in the digital realm, regardless of the platforms they use (Rejiers, Orgad, De Filippi 2023). Some states have engaged in what Ziyaad Bhorat and Martin Rauchbauer (2023) call “networked authoritarianism”— the strategic use of information technology by authoritarian regimes to surveil, repress, and manipulate domestic and foreign populations. China’s social credit system shows how states can monitor, evaluate, and control subjects through datafication (Cheung & Chen, 2021). Similarly, a few democratic states are similarly extending citizenship into digital realms, with digital identity systems like India's Aadhaar and Estonia’s e-ID, bringing both digital and physical identities under state oversight.
3. Institutional dimension:
States are building new institutions to exercise sovereignty in the digital realm. These include dedicated cybersecurity agencies and specialized cyber military commands (e.g. the U.S. CYBERCOM). The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) represents an institutional attempt to project regulatory sovereignty across digital networks, backed by significant enforcement mechanisms and financial penalties. States are also increasingly engaging in digital diplomacy—negotiating agreements that establish norms of behavior in cyberspace, such as the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime or various bilateral cyber non-aggression pacts.
Over the past decade, “digital sovereignty” has emerged as a central theme in policy debates—particularly in Europe (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). It is generally framed as a pathway to a more ordered, value-driven, regulated and therefore secure digital space—promising to address a broad range of challenges, from safeguarding individual rights to ensuring political and legal enforceability as well as fair economic competition. However, the nationalisation of cyberspace also represents a significant transformation of sovereignty itself, as states must increasingly contend with the technical realities of borderless networks that resist traditional territorial control. This has led to a hybrid form of sovereignty that combines traditional state authority with new technical affordances, creating what might be termed “digital statehood”—a form of sovereign authority that extends state power into networked spaces while adapting to their unique characteristics and constraints."
3. Networked Communities: Civil Society Seeking Political Agency
"The third actor category emerges directly from the social fabric of global connectivity itself: networked communities. These communities are formed through voluntary association and sustained interaction through both online and offline spaces, interrelating different people and places across the world. These range from open-source software communities and decentralized autonomous organizations, to diaspora networks and translocal cultural movements. Despite their diversity, they share common traits: they are socially connected, digitally networked, and geographically dispersed.
1. Spatial Dimension:
Networked communities operate primarily through shared digital commons and platforms built around community governance rather than corporate control or state regulation. The Bitcoin network, for instance, exists as a distributed ledger maintained across thousands of computers worldwide, creating a form of sovereign space that transcends national borders. Similarly, federated social networks like Mastodon establish interconnected but autonomous “instances” that function as semi-sovereign digital territories. These spaces are defined not by geographic boundaries or corporate ownership, but by shared protocols, technical standards, and governance norms.
2. Personal Dimension:
Networked communities construct their populations through voluntary affiliation rather than citizenship or platform enrollment. Members join based on shared values, interests, or identity, progressively building the cultural and social foundations of nationhood—a shared sense of identity, purpose, history, and future vision. The Ethereum ecosystem, for example, has fostered a distinct community identity with its own cultural practices, specialized language, and collective narratives. Similarly, diaspora networks leverage digital tools to maintain cultural continuity and political solidarity across national borders, forming transnational communities with their own political agency.
3. Institutional dimension:
From the formal governance processes of major open-source projects to the algorithmic consensus mechanisms of blockchain networks, networked communities are building institutional capacity for self-governance. Yet these communities typically operate outside formal political recognition, relying on specific organizations (e.g., the Ethereum Foundation) to coordinate large-scale collective action or represent community interests in relation to established political entities. Balaji Srinivasan’s (2023) concept of the "Network State" ("a highly aligned online community with the capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states") represents a novel approach to institutionalizing these communities, which has been adopted by several initiatives, such as Praxis Society (2024) among others. Yet despite its disruptive rhetoric, the Network State largely recreates traditional forms of sovereignty, integrating the corporate logics of tech startups into a nation-state institution.
The sovereignty claims of networked communities reveal both. This raises an important question: Can emerging forms of network sovereignty serve collective self-determination rather than corporate profit or state control? As digital networks become primary mediums of human association, the question isn't if new political forms will emerge—but which ones. If we want democracy to thrive in the digital realm, we must design novel institutions that enable networked communities to exercise meaningful self-governance in the digital world."
(https://networknations.network/essay/)
Discussion 2: Functional Sovereignty and Community Self-Governance
Primavera de Filippi and Felix Beer:
"What distinguishes these networked communities from mere online communities is their growing aspiration for self-determination—a defining characteristic of nationhood. This aspiration manifests not as a desire for territorial sovereignty but as a pursuit of functional sovereignty: the capacity to define and govern their own affairs with meaningful autonomy. Indeed, these communities are characterized by a desire to self-govern, manage collective resources, establish dispute resolution mechanisms, and represent their members' interests in relation to other entities.
Unlike territorial sovereignty, which claims absolute authority over a defined geographical area, functional sovereignty focuses on operational autonomy within a specific domain of service provision (Pasquale, 2023). As such, it is inherently relational rather than absolute. It doesn’t seek power over others, but rather power to act with minimal external interference.
Examples of functional sovereignty in action include:
- Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) that govern open-source software ecosystems such as Polkadot OpenGov or Optimism Collective: these organisations rely on decentralized blockchain technology, establishing their own rules for governance and public goods funding (Poux, De Filippi, Ramos 2020), resolving disputes, and maintaining their own infrastructure that operate outside of the purview of the law (De Filippi & al., 2022)
- Diaspora network cooperatives, such as Afro-descendant communities in Latin America and Europe: these communities use digital tools to coordinate remittances, fund community-led archives, and govern cultural projects through collective voting—outside the control of any single state. By self-managing identity, heritage, and resources across borders, they assert functional sovereignty over their cultural preservation and formation.
- Burning Man regional events: all “local burns” adopt shared principles—like radical inclusion and mutual aid—internalised into their own localized governance frameworks, showcasing how cultural coherence can sustain autonomous coordination across diverse geographies. These temporary autonomous zones exhibit a form of functional sovereignty as they establish their own governance structures, conflict resolution mechanism, and resource allocation systems that operate largely independently from state authority, effectively creating parallel social orders with their own norms and enforcement mechanisms during the duration of the events.
These examples demonstrate that functional sovereignty can thrive in networked spaces, where community governance is sustained through shared protocols, practices, and norms rather than territorial control. What binds these communities is not geography but a collectively constructed self-governance capacity—the power to shape their own social, cultural, and technical environments."
(https://networknations.network/essay/)
Characteristics
Felix Beer and Primavera de Filippi:
"Drawing from our previous definition of sovereignty and its three constitutive elements–space, population, institution–, we analyse below the extent to which Network Nations exhibit these components, and can thus be regarded as a new form of network sovereignty.
1. Networked Space: Self-Sovereign Infrastructure
In a network society, infrastructure is territory. Unlike the Westphalian paradigm, where sovereignty is anchored in geographic control, Network Nations assert spatial authority through the design, operation, and stewardship of self-sovereign infrastructure. The polity’s survival does not depend on a fixed location, but on its ability to persist across distributed digital environments—to exit, fork, and reassemble without loss of data, identity, or integrity.
To achieve this, Network Nations treat their digital stack as a commons, not a commodity. The technical infrastructure for Network Nations must therefore embody the same values and aspirations of these networked communities. This means resisting dependencies on corporate or state-controlled systems, and instead cultivating infrastructure that is collectively built, governed, and maintained. Stewardship, not ownership, becomes the operating ethic.
This stack spans three nested layers:
Physical substrate: Community-run hardware infrastructure such as data centres, off-grid mesh relays, and hyperlocal microgrids. By minimizing reliance on centralized providers, these infrastructures mitigate chokepoints and ensure operational independence.
Protocol substrate: Open standards for routing, storage, and consensus (e.g. IPFS, Secure Scuttlebutt, libp2p) provide cryptographic auditability and encode the right of exit. Communities can adapt or fork these protocols to maintain alignment with collective values.
Application substrate: Governance functions such as identity, treasury, and voting are built as composable, modular services. Each can be redeployed on alternative hosts or chains, reducing the cost of recovery and limiting capture by any single party. Together, these layers support the spatial dimension of network sovereignty where core functions persist across shifting technical substrates. As discussed in Section 6, Web3 technologies offer key primitives to instantiate this architecture at scale.
2. Networked Population: Voluntary Citizenship
Membership in Network Nations represents a fundamental shift from traditional citizenship paradigms. Rather than being assigned at birth or through residency, citizenship is voluntary, not inherited. Individuals can hold multiple forms of network affiliations—such as an Austrian passport, a Gitcoin passport, and membership in an Afro-Diasporic Network Nation—without triggering zero-sum loyalty conflicts. This model embraces multi-positionality, reflecting the layered, intersectional nature of identities in a hyperconnected world where people form diverse and meaningful affiliations across contexts.
At its core, Network Nation citizenship is opt-in, placing individual agency at the center of political belonging. This stands in stark contrast to the Westphalian model, where citizenship is automatically conferred based on residence or ancestry. Citizens choose to join communities that align with their values, interests, and aspirations, creating stronger foundations for collective action through shared purpose rather than geographic coincidence.
Moreover, Network Nation citizenship is revocable. Members retain the right to exit if a community no longer aligns with their needs or principles. This right of exit functions as a critical mechanism of accountability, compelling governance structures to remain responsive and adaptive. Unlike traditional nation-states, which often impose significant legal or bureaucratic barriers to renouncing citizenship, Network Nations must continually earn the trust and loyalty of their members through legitimate, value-aligned governance.
The population of a Network Nation is bound together not merely by formal citizenship mechanisms but through active cultivation of collective identity. This cultural dimension is what transforms a decentralized network into a cohesive community that recognizes itself—and is recognized by others—as a nation. Shared narratives, values, symbols, and practices help forge a collective sense of belonging that extends beyond purely functional relationships. As Benedict Anderson (1983) described in his concept of imagined communities, such belonging emerges not from face-to-face interaction, but from a shared imagination of collective life. In this way, Network Nations become more than governance systems—they are cultural entities, sustained by the narratives and symbols that interconnect the nodes in the network.
Unlike traditional states, which typically rely on centralized institutions to define and disseminate culture, Network Nations must build culture from the bottom up, using distributed tools and community-led practices. This involves the emergence of shared rituals, the documentation of common histories, the creation of educational formats, and the support of collective cultural production. Such practices deepen internal cohesion and foster the distinctiveness supports recognition by other entities.
While digital networks can support and enable new cultural practices, ranging from virtual gatherings to distributed commons-based production, Network Nations will likely incorporate both digital and physical dimensions., e.g. local nodes hosting in-person gatherings that connect to the broader network, creating opportunities for embodied community experience that complements digital interaction. These physical manifestations of community life help bridge the gap between online association and the full-spectrum human experiences that have traditionally grounded national identity.
3. Networked Institution: Polycentric Scaffolding
In a Network Nation, authority is fundamentally polycentric: multiple semi-autonomous centers handle complementary functions within a shared constitutional framework (cf. Ostrom, 2005). Power is deliberately distributed—horizontally across functions and vertically through checks and balances—to prevent capture by any single interest group. This structure marks a clear departure from both the centralized hierarchies of traditional nation-states and the opaque, often unaccountable governance of platform sovereigns.
Governance in Network Nations combines social processes—such as deliberation, norm-setting, and reputation—with technical functions, including automation, data analysis, and networking protocols. While some functions can be encoded and automated, others require human judgment and collective interpretation. The social layer establishes legitimacy and addresses normative questions, while the technical layer ensures consistency, transparency, and resistance to manipulation.
Crucially, governance rights are contribution-staked rather than capital-staked. Influence is earned through verifiable, sustained service—whether via code contributions, mutual aid, research, or cultural work—and recorded in non-transferable credentials. This meritocratic approach ties governance authority to demonstrated commitment and service to the community, rather than financial investment or inherited status. By making credentials non-transferable, Network Nations prevent the emergence of governance markets that could reproduce plutocratic power structures.
Network Nations must operate through sophisticated governance systems capable of operating at multiple scales simultaneously. Internally, polycentric structures allow diverse domains—such as infrastructure, dispute resolution, resource allocation, and cultural development—to adopt tailored governance mechanisms while remaining accountable to shared constitutional principles. This enables local adaptability alongside systemic coherence in the network.
Externally, Network Nations must establish diplomatic interfaces to engage constructively with legacy institutions—nation-states, international bodies, and other Network Nations. These interfaces enable translation between governance paradigms, allowing Network Nations to represent their interests and collaborate on transboundary issues. Such capacity is key to gaining recognition and influence within the broader global governance ecosystem.
Ultimately, effective governance in Network Nations is not about centralizing power, but about designing coordination protocols among distributed nodes. These protocols must address foundational questions: How is membership defined and managed? How are collective decisions made and enforced? How are resources fairly allocated? How are disputes resolved across nodes? And, most importantly, how can democratic accountability be maintained across jurisdictional boundaries?"
(https://networknations.network/essay/)
Technology
The Web3 Sovereign Stack for Network Nations
Primavera de Filippi and Felix Beer:
" The flourishing of Network Nations hinges on developing robust self-sovereign infrastructure that enables these communities to coordinate effectively while maintaining independence from both state control and corporate capture. This is where Web3 technologies play a crucial role: as the building blocks for new infrastructural systems that are collectively owned, transparently governed, and resistant to external control, they offer a practical pathway toward self-determination in the digital age.
Web3 is a term used to refer to a wide variety of open-source, permissionless, and decentralized technologies—ranging from blockchain networks to peer-to-peer protocols, distributed file storage, and verifiable identity frameworks. Together, these tools provide the necessary foundation for programmable governance architectures that are privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant and transparency-enhancing. In doing so, Web3 technologies have the potential to power self-sovereign networks that can operate independently from centralized intermediaries (De Filippi et al., 2024).
For Network Nations, Web3 is not just a toolkit—it is a precondition for functional sovereignty. By leveraging these technologies, they can make collective decisions, manage shared resources, and coordinate actions across jurisdictions—with minimal external interference. In this way, Web3 empowers the creation of a new generation of borderless social, economic, and political institutions that are rooted in voluntary association and shared accountability.
Moreover, Web3 technologies make it possible for Network Nations to develop, manage and fund shared resources—or commons (Ostrom, 2005)—in ways that go beyond the constraints of both markets and nation-states. Mechanisms such as blockchain-based tokenization, programmable incentives, and protocol-based governance enable the design of new forms of value creation, while ensuring that the value generated can be transparently and equitably redirected toward public goods—such as open-source software, community services, or knowledge repositories. Network Nations can utilise these programmable mechanisms to encode commons-based governance systems directly into their infrastructure, automating access controls, contribution logistics, and dispute resolution (Bennett, 2025).
At the same time, Network Nations should regard their Web3 stack as a commons in its own right. Every layer of the stack—from consensus mechanisms to user-facing applications—constitutes shared infrastructure that is essential to their community’s capacity for self-governance (Li & Chen, 2024). Indeed, if these foundational protocols were governed opaquely by centralized actors or captured by rent-seeking actors, Network Nations would risk losing the very sovereignty they aspire to establish. Collective stewardship of this stack is therefore not optional, but foundational to their long-term autonomy, legitimacy and resilience.
A key advantage of Web3 infrastructure is its modularity. The stack is composed of interoperable layers—settlement, execution, data, identity—each of which can be independently swapped, upgraded, or forked (Schneider et al., 2021). This flexibility and adaptability ensure that Network Nations are not locked into static technical systems but can remain responsive to their communities’ evolving needs, values and circumstances.
However, infrastructure alone is not enough. While Web3 tools are essential, they do not guarantee the emergence of legitimate or enduring Network Nations. True self-determination also depends on a community’s ability to cultivate collective identity, uphold legitimate governance, and sustain resilient institutions. Technology provides the scaffolding—but social cohesion and political agency remain the foundation (De Filippi et al., 2024).
The Web3 stack serves as the enabling substrate for Network Nations. Its contributions align with the three core pillars of any sovereign system."
(https://networknations.network/essay/)
Typology
Primavera De Filippi and Felix Beer:
1. Networked Spaces
"Traditional sovereignty presupposes a territorially bounded, continuous, and mutually exclusive domain in which each point of land, sea, air, or even outer space can be assigned to a single jurisdiction. Digital networks unsettle this territorial approach, introducing what Castells (2004) terms a space of flows—a global, real-time interaction arena constituted by data routes, cloud infrastructures, and software protocols. This new form of spatial arrangement—operating across time zones and jurisdictions—overlays and reorganises the space of places—rooted in physical proximity and territorial continuity, enabling distant, synchronous, and distributed coordination.
In this topology, sovereignty is not tied to territorial control but to the ability to configure and govern the infrastructures that mediate digital flows. Whoever can design, maintain, or disrupt these flows—whether through routing architectures, content moderation systems, platform interfaces, or cloud-based storage—exerts a new form of power, which Laura DeNardis (2014) describes as infrastructural power: the authority to allow, deny, prioritize, or surveil interactions by shaping the underlying technological stack.
Networked space dissolves the direct link between geography and authority that structured the Westphalian state system. Networks span across the globe and—unlike geographical regions—their boundaries are not fixed: they are often modular, overlapping (subject to multiple regimes), and selectively permeable (allowing differentiated access). As such, they dissolve the traditional logic of sovereignty: power is now exercised through the control of digital infrastructures rather than control over bounded territory. Thus, network architectures—not maps—become the primary medium through which spatial authority is asserted, contested, and lost.
2. Networked Population
Traditional sovereignty regards citizens as residents of a nation-state, recorded by census and governed by territorial jurisdiction. This link between people and place has long underpinned the legitimacy of sovereign power, as governing a territory meant governing those inhabiting a defined space.
In networked environments, populations are held together by relational connectivity rather than physical proximity. They are constituted by individuals who may reside across multiple geographies but are linked through continuous digitally mediated relationships. What defines closeness is not location on a map but position in a social graph, where proximity is ultimately a function of relationality: two actors are “close” because they are linked by flows of information, attention, value, or resources (Wittel, 2001). Similarly, identity becomes fluid and relational rather than defined by place of birth or residency. Thus, in these social formations, belonging is performative rather than inherited, constituted through ongoing interaction and contribution within the network (boyd, 2010). To be part of a networked population is to be continually engaged as a node in a socio-technical system.
One defining characteristic of networked populations is their plural and overlapping affiliations. Individuals simultaneously inhabit multiple networks: one might be simultaneously a member of a transnational movement, a contributor to a global open-source project, a participant in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). These affiliations operate under distinct governance logics, different norms, and expectations. This leads to a condition of multi-positionality, in which individuals are subject to various—and often conflicting—forms of allegiance and authority (boyd, 2010).
All this profoundly impacts the nature of sovereignty: sovereign power over networked populations does not depend on geography but upon the capacity to shape and govern the infrastructures of social interaction. Sovereignty, in this sense, becomes a matter of relational design: structuring the flows of engagement and determining the conditions under which collective life is made legible and actionable in networked spaces. In sum, networked populations represent a shift from territorial subjects to relational actors, whose political identity is defined not by where they are located, but by how and with whom they interact.
3. Networked Institutions
The third pillar of sovereignty relates to institutional capacity—the ability to establish rules, enforce decisions, and maintain legitimacy over time. In the Westphalian model, institutional power is vested in the apparatus of the state, typically subdivided into the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers. State institutions historically exercise centralised authority over defined territories and bounded populations, ensuring internal legitimacy and external diplomatic recognition.
If territory and population mutate under network conditions, institutions must also evolve. Digital networks are subject to regulation from traditional institutions; but they are also increasingly capable of building native governance systems that reflect their distributed, modular, and protocolized logics.
Yet, in terms of governance, networked institutions are still in early stages of development. They are either consolidated but proprietary (e.g. run by corporations), flexible but fragile (e.g. based on informal norms and practices), or fully experimental (e.g. using new technological frameworks). Regardless of their characteristics, they all come with unresolved issues when it comes to effectiveness, scalability, and legitimacy.
The main challenge—and opportunity—lies in designing institutions capable of legitimizing and operationalizing sovereignty within networked digital systems. This means moving away from traditional territorial forms of authority toward new institutional grammars that reflect the realities of digital life: decentralized, participatory, interoperable, and adaptive. As we move further into a networked society, the question is not whether sovereignty will persist, but what forms it will take, who will exercise it, and how its legitimacy will be constituted."