Digital Sovereignty and Polarisation

The afternoon session at I-POLHYS 2024 starts with Claudia Padovani, who is reflecting on the implications of political polarisation from a gender perspective. In light of persistent gender inequalities, normative perspectives may be valuable, but there is a need for further definitional work here, and there are several international initiatives and bodies that might help to address this. However, a binary approach continues to dominate, and more intersectional perspectives that connect gender with other inequalities would be useful.

There are plenty of initiatives to create change, but a full perspective on gender inequalities is still missing. Gender concerns and principles still need to be more thoroughly integrated especially into policies and other documents addressing the digital realm – and all of this also connects to the question of polarisation, since gender inequalities are very often connected into polarisation dynamics and polarising rhetoric and ideologies. Similarly, there is a need to look at institutional political spaces, like the European Parliament, to see how gender inequalities play out in political rhetoric in such institutions.

Activism towards policy change poses dilemmas: women’s rights are in peril from far-right rhetoric, but activism aimed at protecting women’s rights also reinforces the ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric of such far-right groups, further deepening polarisation between them and the rest of society.

Work on digital sovereignty is also interesting here: while this concept is also being used by authoritarian regimes, we must not ignore the more interesting approaches to it emerging from the Global South and the broader majority world. The longitudinal development of digital sovereignty narratives might enrich the study of polarisation, too, aligned as it is with the development of other key concepts that intersect with polarisation in various contexts.

How might the exploration of digital sovereignty also include feminist and other perspectives, then? What visions of technology might it uncover? For instance, recent work on menstrual apps suggest that the physical body and the data body deserve the same rights, requiring an extended version of sovereignty rooted in solidarity and justice; sovereignty is conceived of here as a collective formation, and this might echo the question of how polarisation intersects with national and international contexts. How might national-level polarisation affect the potential for international collaboration? Similarly, do differences between polarised actors undermine the creation of gender-inclusive policies?

(OK, not sure I did this full justice – this was very information-dense…)