Fifteen Eighty Four

In a world largely shaped by Silicon Valley tech giants, the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, now expanding to new members —are emerging as influential players in the realm of digital policy and innovation. With 40% of the world’s population and a quarter of global GDP, the BRICS nations command substantial resources, particularly personal data, a cornerstone of the modern digital economy. Despite the grouping’s significance, their approaches to digital sovereignty—understood as the exercise of agency, power and control over digital infrastructures, data, and services—remain underexplored.

This blog distills insights from a pioneering book project—Digital Sovereignty with the BRICS Countries: How the Global South and Emerging Power Alliances Are Reshaping Digital Governance—which we edited together to explore digital sovereignty from a Global South perspective. This book foregrounds the BRICS countries’ attempts to navigate a digital landscape dominated by U.S.-based corporations. By examining their historical, legal, geopolitical, and technological strategies, this book which features ten chapters provides a nuanced understanding of their contributions to a multipolar digital future.

BRICS and the Quest for Digital Independence

The BRICS bloc was conceived as a response to the 2008-2009 global financial crises and the perceived limitations of a Western-dominated economic order. Similarly, their digital sovereignty initiatives reflect aspirations for greater autonomy from Silicon Valley-centered digital ecosystems. While the internet was once celebrated as the enabler of a borderless “global village”, it has become a crucial space of competition for national, regional, international, corporate and civic interests. The BRICS nations face complex challenges as they balance privacy and security, sustainable economic growth and aspirations for global influence.

Our book has adopted an agnostic approach to study how the BRICS countries are constructing digital sovereignty narratives, policies and actions. We decided to scrutinize the BRICS approaches not only because they offer telling illustrations of how Global South leaders are constructing their digital sovereignty, but also because their approaches are increasingly influencing and shaping their regional and international partners, thus having direct or indirect impact.

In the Global South, these policies are often viewed as models for achieving technological independence, fostering innovation, or increasing control. Importantly, BRICS countries’ strategies have started to be adopted by some of the most developed countries that are desperately trying to build their digital independence, having realized their unsustainable dependence on so-called “big tech”.

In this respect, our book provides useful food for thought for policymakers, researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders alike on a group of remarkably understudied developing countries. Our study tellingly demonstrates that digital sovereignty does not necessarily mean digital isolation or digital autocracy. On the contrary, it frequently means reclaiming agency, self-determination over digital technologies and the capacity to understand, develop and regulate such technologies effectively by a wide array of actors.

A Framework for Understanding Digital Sovereignty

Traditional notions of sovereignty, rooted in territoriality, legal equality and non-interference, struggle to accommodate the realities of the digital age. In practice, power over digital infrastructure and data is unevenly distributed, often concentrated among a few Silicon Valley companies that exercise quasi-normative, quasi-executive, and quasi-judicial powers. Scholars have called this phenomenon “corporate digital sovereignty,” highlighting the disproportionate influence of private actors on global digital governance.

To capture the multifaceted nature of digital sovereignty, our book has adopted a more expansive framework encompassing the following seven perspectives:

1. State Digital Sovereignty: Nation-states asserting control over digital architecture, data, protocols and services.
2. Supranational Digital Sovereignty: Regional alliances, like but not limited to the EU, developing unified policies.
3. Network Digital Sovereignty: Decentralized control by communities or networks prioritizing network interoperability and freedom from nation-states.
4. Corporate Digital Sovereignty: The dominance of tech giants in driving digital economies and shaping digital norms.
5. Personal Digital Sovereignty: Empowerment of individuals to control their digital identities and personhood.
6. Postcolonial Digital Sovereignty: Efforts by former colonized nations – which do not necessarily coincide with modern states –  to reclaim autonomy, access, ownership and control in the digital sphere.
7. Commons Digital Sovereignty: Community-driven governance of shared digital resources and production of digital public goods.

These perspectives highlight the diverse agents and interests shaping digital sovereignty. In the BRICS context, this framework underscores the interplay of aspirations for autonomy and the practical challenges of implementation.

The BRICS Approach to Digital Policy

The BRICS nations have undertaken a range of initiatives to assert digital sovereignty:

• China: Through policies promoting domestic tech giants and the Great Firewall, China has established a digital ecosystem rivaling Silicon Valley. However, its authoritarian approach raises concerns about surveillance and censorship.
• India: The India Stack, an open-source digital infrastructure initiative including a biometric digital ID program Aadhaar, a Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) for personal data consent-management, exemplifies how decentralized, state-supported projects can enhance accessibility and foster innovation.
• Brazil: After pioneering open source software adoption, passing its landmark Marco Civil da Internet in 2014 and its general data protection law (known as “LGDP”) in 2018, Brazil also constructed undersea cable EllaLink connecting the country directly to Europe to bypass U.S. surveillance. The Pix payment system, developed by Brazil’s Central Bank, has disrupted traditional e-payment models in Brazil, promoting financial inclusion and breaking corporate monopolies.
• South Africa: An African leader in digital development, South Africa blends Chinese/European tech infrastructure, U.S. digital platforms, and its own data governance laws. Its data protection framework showcases efforts to balance security with privacy, though challenges remain in curbing surveillance.
• Russia: Russia’s recent digital development epitomizes digital autharchy. After adoption of data localization in 2015 and the Sovereign Internet Law in 2019, the RuNet project reflects an aggressive push toward internet sovereignty, but it also highlights the costs of isolation and risks of authoritarian control.

While these initiatives illustrate the potential of digital sovereignty, they also reveal certain pitfalls. Policies driven by authoritarian motives or short-term goals risk undermining broader aspirations for empowerment and equity.

Global Implications of BRICS Digital Sovereignty

BRICS countries’ approaches are not only shaping their national landscapes but also influencing global norms. In the Global South, these policies are often viewed as models for achieving technological independence and fostering innovation. However, the dual-edged nature of digital sovereignty—its potential for empowerment and its susceptibility to misuse—necessitates a critical evaluation of their long-term outcomes.

As the BRICS+ model has been gradually rolled out, four more countries—Egypt, Ethiopian, Iran, and the UAE—joined the BRICS bloc as official members with 13 partner countries (including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Nigeria) announced in 2024. Whether “post-Western” or “alternative to Western”, the establishment and expansion of the BRICS model symbolizes a global trend towards multipolarity rather than unipolarity.

Embedding Sovereignty into Technology

A notable trend among BRICS countries is the integration of sovereignty into technological design to shape their digital transformation efforts. This approach moves beyond traditional regulation to embed policy goals within digital infrastructure itself.

Examples include India’s open-source Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), built over the past decade to enable identification, financial inclusion and e-governance for 1.5 billion people, in the context of the “India Stack”; and Brazil’s Pix System, a digital public infrastructure enabling seamless, inclusive e-payment services while breaking the previous dependence on the corporate monopoly of Visa and MasterCard on this sector.

These initiatives illustrate how technology can be leveraged to advance sovereignty while fostering innovation and inclusivity. However, their scalability and adaptability across diverse contexts remain key areas for further research.

Conclusion: Toward a Multipolar Digital Future

The BRICS nations’ efforts to assert digital sovereignty signal a broader shift toward a multipolar global digital order. By challenging the dominance of Silicon Valley and fostering indigenous innovation, they are paving the way for more equitable and diverse digital governance models. However, their experiences also highlight the tensions and trade-offs inherent in pursuing sovereignty.

This exploration underscores the need for a nuanced understanding of digital sovereignty that goes beyond state-centric paradigms. China’s private Internet enterprises complicate the state’s sovereign power. Bottom-up social movements such as India’s #SaveTheInternet movement both rejected Facebook’s Internet.org initiative as a form of digital colonialism and reshaped state digital sovereign norms. Despite state power, the RuNet of Russia routinely faces grassroots resistance with individual and collective expressions of digital sovereignty.

By incorporating perspectives from the Global South, the book enriches the ongoing debate on how best to navigate the complexities of the digital age. The lessons from the BRICS countries serve as a vital reference point for scholars, policymakers, and advocates worldwide, offering a blueprint for a more inclusive and balanced digital future.

Digital Sovereignty in the BRICS Countries: A Global South Perspective

Edited by: Min Jiang