The intention is to advance a term that moves beyond the limits of data sovereignty to explain how governance over data-driven systems is distributed and contested, and suggests pragmatic pathways for more effective governance.
Abstract
Abstract The term data sovereignty—the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance of the country where it is collected or stored—faces implementation challenges. The legal deadlock over how to regulate transatlantic (E.U.–U.S.) data transfers reveal the difficulties of asserting “sovereignty” over data, a resource that flows transnationally through digital technologies. Among global regulatory efforts, the European Union’s struggle to ensure the supremacy of its data protection and privacy laws represents an interesting case from which to derive new theoretical and conceptual insights. This paper advances data agency—as agency mediated by data, not over it. The intention is to advance a term that moves beyond the limits of data sovereignty to explain how governance over data-driven systems is distributed and contested. The manuscript suggests pragmatic pathways for more effective governance as mere “control” over data is not enough to achieve meaningful insights derived from data technologies.
The European Health Data Space (EHDS), established by Regulation (EU) 2025/327, represents the EU’s most ambitious attempt to enable secondary use of health data across Member States while safeguarding individual rights. Yet the EHDS is fundamentally a data access framework: it enables institutional intermediaries to g...
A. Zwitter· Yearbook on Data Autonomy· 0 citations
The contemporary data economy is characterized by unprecedented opportunities for value creation alongside significant inequalities in the distribution of that value. Existing data governance frameworks, largely founded on the understanding of data as information and centred on privacy protection, have proven inadequat...
Paul Lawrence, M. Ferraris· London journal of research i...· 0 citations
The digital transformation of global society has fundamentally reshaped the intersection between state authority, technological infrastructure, and individual rights. Historically conceptualized through physical land borders and territorial jurisdiction, state sovereignty is increasingly projected into cyberspace as go...
Assertive claims of data sovereignty—mandatory localization, extraterritorial processing rules, and security-driven exclusion of foreign access—now sit in direct tension with the data flows on which cross-border commerce depends. The dominant scholarly treatment of this tension proceeds through the lens of fundamental...
Wei-Dong Zhang· Advances in Modern Biomedici...· 0 citations
The European Union's Digital Services Act promises to disrupt the power held by platform companies to determine how data needed to understand risks is accessed by researchers. Article 40 brings researcher data access into a governance
of
platforms framework, but how data are conceptualized in this regime is overloo...
Taylor Annabell· Media, Technology and Govern...· 0 citations
The study concludes that the legal and institutional frameworks governing cross-border data transfers in Tanzania are not yet effective in regulating digital platforms and recommends legislative and regulatory reforms, institutional strengthening, and policy and practice.
Josephina John· East African Journal of Law...· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
