International Political Economy of Digital Platforms: Sovereignty and Infrastructural Power

We aim to assemble interrogations of the variegated and actual experimentations of digital authoritarianism through the international political economy of digital platforms. Our collection of studies are grouped to two sessions that attempt to answer the question from two major lines.

In the first session, we are interested in the international political economy of platforms, meaning how platform companies transcend sectoral and territorial boundaries to gain, exercise and justify their power. We will examine the tension between the state’s territorial sovereignty and ‘functional sovereignty’ that platforms advocate and claim based on infrastructural power. Through opaque decision-making on matters such as algorithms, gatekeepers such as search engines and social networks shape the realities of billions by governing information flows. If code is law, its makers, digital platform and firms are powerful sovereigns in their respective fields (Pasquale, 2018). They not only assume the role of government and courthouse to run dispute resolution schemes to settle conflicts between buyers and sellers (Rory van Loo, 2020) but also intervene in law or regulation-making (Pinto et al., 2019). As digital firms move to displace more government roles over time, the logic of territorial sovereignty is replaced with functional sovereignty.