Dear AoIR fellows, I am pleased to announce that the /communication +1/ special issue on **Digital Sovereignty** is now published (open access). The issue contains nine research papers and one dialogue: https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/issue/221/info/ Our introduction to the special issue (“The Digital Leviathan: Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies”), which also summarizes and discusses all the contributions, can be found here: https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/article/id/3521/ Best wishes, and I really hope you enjoy reading the special issue! Christoph _____ /communication +1/ • Volume 11 • Issue 2 • 2025 • *Digital Sovereignty* /edited by Christoph Borbach and Tristan Thielmann / This special issue explores digital sovereignty as one of the defining yet most contested concepts of contemporary digital politics. While sovereignty has traditionally been tied to the nation state, current debates—ranging from platform governance and data capitalism to the discourse on Sovereign AI—demonstrate that power is increasingly mediated by corporate infrastructures and algorithmic systems. Bringing together inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives from Media and Communication Studies, Critical AI and Data Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Political Philosophy, Sociology, and Information Systems Research, the special issue examines how sovereignty is enacted, negotiated, and reconfigured across diverse sociotechnical domains. Rather than treating sovereignty as a stable property—of states, organizations, or individuals—the authors conceptualize it as a relational and transformative concept embedded in design, digital practices, and technologies of datafication. The contributions demonstrate that digital sovereignty is best understood as a multi-layered site where infrastructures, data ethics, and imaginaries intersect, foregrounding how agency and autonomy are redefined within the entangled human–machine ecologies of the digital age. In this way, the special issue positions digital sovereignty as a central object of inquiry for Critical AI and Data Studies, offering conceptual tools to address its practices, ethics, platforms, and theories. *Dialogue:* • Stéphane Couture, Sophie Toupin, and Christoph Borbach: “Sovereign AI, the fragmented internet, data crawlers, and the opacity of consent forms: A dialogue on digital sovereignty” *Contributions:* • Tristan Thielmann and Christoph Borbach: “The Digital Leviathan: Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies” • Leah Miriam Friedman: “Who is sovereign and how? Informing data sovereignty initiatives beyond borders through analysis of autonomous health movements” • Gwen Lisa Shaffer: “Trust, transparency and technology: Providing digital sovereignty through a Digital Rights Platform” • Renée Ridgway: “Designing digital sovereignty—an open federated EU web index for search” • Anne Mollen: “Struggling with generative AI: Digital self-determination along infrastructures of automation” • Jose Francisco Marichal: “Data rights reconsidered: Reimagining digital freedom through Lefebvre’s Right to the City” • Thomas Wendt: “Understanding digital agency: Digital transformation as an organizational update of subjective sovereignty” • Stephan Packard: “Post-digital, post-human sovereignty: Combined imaginaries in current political communication” • Dennis Lawo, Gunnar Stevens, and Jenny Berkholz: “Three actors, eight models: A relational lens on digital sovereignty”