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Abstract
Addressing cases from Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Spain, Togo, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Zimbabwe, this article discusses the global phenomenon of internet shutdowns (ISs) from the normative perspective of Just Securitization Theory (JST). It focuses on the conflict between arguments used to justify ISs and the negative impact of ISs regarding fundamental and human rights. This article develops strict criteria for when ISs might be legitimate as extraordinary security measures in emergency situations. Following JST, these criteria are based on citizens' right to physical integrity, the expectation of reasonable success, proportionality, harm minimization, and specificity. I argue that it is not legitimate to use ISs to enact collective punishment, preemptive censorship, or hamper legitimate political protests. While denying the legitimacy of the vast majority of ISs on these grounds, I sketch four exceptional scenarios ("WhatsApp lynchings," "US Capitol 2021," "Computer virus," and "False alarm") in which ISs can be legitimate. JST also includes states' duty to desecuritize once a threat has been neutralized. In this way, a balanced discussion of ISs as an exceptional measure from the perspective of JST contributes to the establishment of a customary positive human right to digital connectivity in the normal situation.

AbstractAuthoritarian regimes' unrestricted collection of citizens' data might constitute an advantage regarding the development of some types of AI, and AI might facilitate authoritarian practices. This feedback loop challenges democracies. In a critical continuation of the Pentagon's Third Offset Strategy, I investigate a possible Democratic Offset regarding military applications of AI focussed on contestation, deliberation, and participation. I apply Landemore's Open Democracy, Hildebrandt's Agonistic Machine Learning, and Sharp's Civilian-Based Defence. Discussing value pluralism in AI ethics, I criticise parts of the literature for leaving the fundamental ethical incompatibility of democracies and authoritarian regimes unaddressed. I am focussing on the duty to disobey illegal orders derived from customary international humanitarian law (IHL) and the standard of 'meaningful human control', which is central to the partially outdated debate about lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). I criticize the standard of 'meaningful human control' following two pathways: First, the ethical and legal principles of just war theory and IHL should be implemented in military applications of AI to submit human commands to more control, in the sense of technological disaffordances. Second, the debate should focus on the societal circumstances for personal responsibility and disobedience to be trained and exerted in deliberation and participation related to military applications of AI, in the sense of societal affordances. In a larger picture, this includes multi-level stakeholder involvement, robust documentation to facilitate auditing, civilian-based defence in decentralized smart cities, and open-source intelligence. This multi-layered approach fosters cognitive diversity, which might constitute a strategic advantage for democracies regarding AI.

AbstractGovernments all over the world are constructing discourses of digital sovereignty. However, the history of this concept is understudied. This paper delves into the Chinese academic publications from 1994 to 2005, where concepts such as "network/cyber sovereignty" (网络主权) and "information sovereignty" (信息主权) began to emerge. The period is marked by the introduction of the internet in China in 1994 and the 2005 Tunis Agenda, a pivotal moment in the internationalization of demands for sovereignty over the internet. By reconstructing the post–Cold War geopolitical, economic, cultural, ideological, and regulatory context of the examined publications, we highlight the academic discourse as forming part of a sociotechnical imaginary of digital sovereignty, which is characterized by a peculiar mixture of the explicit critique of "cyber colonialism" (网络殖民主义), authoritarian positions, and the embrace of digitalization and its possibilities.