A Digital Sovereign, by any other name

It’s impossible to consider digital jurisdictions or national powers in humanitarian response without using the word sovereignty - and yet, the word sovereignty is a trap. Not because there’s anything wrong with sovereignty, per se, but because - borrowing from the Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya - “I do not think it means what you think it means.” That confusion is especially complicated for humanitarian response, who - especially in refugee and migratory crises - often have to juggle multiple, competing claims of jurisdiction over data and digital operations. The problems embedded in ‘digital sovereignty’ and ‘digital self-sovereignty’ don’t come from, perhaps surprisingly, the ‘digital’ so much as the ‘sovereignty’. In other words, when it comes to translating our fundamental rights - and the structures that enable us to exercise them - into digital systems, the biggest problems aren’t what the systems mean, but about how they work - and don’t. The core distinctions are important, not only for understanding how sovereign rights work, but for designing how they might realistically work in framing national and individual agency in digital systems. And, as a result, how humanitarian organizations might design their digital interventions, balancing individual rights with claims of sovereign authority