Digital issues have gained much-needed attention lately, especially following growing contention between the US and EU, particularly in relation to sanctions posed against judges at the Hague International Court of Justice for investigating war crimes and “illegitimate targeting of Israel” following its attack on Gaza.
In-short judges at the international war-crimes court are being personally excluded from US tech, including electronic payments, email and software use. As a result, Europe has ramped up its actions to become independent from foreign tech solutions and cloud hosting.
This spring I‘m completing intensive ‘winter school‘ courses related to asymmetrical threats at 3 different Universities in European Digital Citizenship, Digital Sovereignty and Digital Resilience. As my area of expertise is considered new in Political Science, it has been difficult to find short ECTS credited courses on European Cyber-governance, but this year I‘m finally seeing an increase in course offerings.
First, I spent a week at Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci in the Czech Republic tackling Digital Citizenship as a Contested Space, reviewing proposed bans for teenagers from social media. The course concluded in a half-an-hour long TV show/podcast where I was happy to serve as one of the main experts in the field, pleasantly coming to the realization that I’ve accumulated extensive knowledge on the topic and European ICT legislation.
Here is Thora’s minute of expertise from the episode, but I was also grilled in-studio on the DSA and enforcement issues.
Here is the whole segment in full – all credit belongs to the Palacký University Olomouc
From Olomouc I went to UNU-CRIS’s (UN’s University on Comparative Regional Integration Studies) School on Internet Governance for an intensive week dedicated to Digital Sovereignty where we enjoyed interactive lectures with leaders in the field.
The course work included a daily workshop where we worked in groups simulating Multistakeholder Internet Governance to deal with a hypothetical geopolitical incident. Luck of the draw assigned me into the group of Governments where we decided to represent two governments with contrasting interests, serving both as the EU (yours truly chose to represent Ireland as the registered home-country for VLOPS in the EU) and the USA.
The exercise was great fun and very informative, including a lot of prep work to accurately represent the current legal and political landscape, and I must praise this US government for being very reasonable in its approach.
The exercise outlined extremely well why it is important to have a well-functioning multistakeholder approach for Internet Governance where the voices of technical experts, academia and civic society are represented and not just major tech corporations and governments.
A third course on Europe’s Digital Resilience is ongoing digitally, and I’ll be traveling to the University of Duisburg-Essen later this month for a jam-packed week of lectures and coursework.
