Further reading
References for the Five Layers of Sovereignty framework.
01
Economic
02
Technical
- Bratton, “The Black Stack” The layered-infrastructure account that makes “the cloud” a place with politics, not a metaphor.
- Gaia-X, response to the EU Cloud and AI Development Act Where Europe’s technical-sovereignty project actually stands now, after five years of being mocked for promising too much.
- Sovereign Tech Agency A government paying for open-source maintenance as public infrastructure: cultivation, not procurement.
- Swiss Government Cloud The Confederation running the same experiment your own IT department is being asked to run.
03
Legal
- Floridi, “The Fight for Digital Sovereignty” The argument that sovereignty is enforceable control, not paper ownership — the definitional stakes every clause below is trying to make real.
- US CLOUD Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2713 The extraterritorial reach itself, in the statute’s own words, not a law firm’s paraphrase.
- EU Data Act, Regulation 2023/2854 Chapter VI is where this layer stops being theory and becomes an enforceable switching right.
- European Data Protection Board, FAQ on Schrems II The regulator’s own reading of the ruling that separates “on EU soil” from “beyond US reach.”
- Federal Council, Digital Switzerland Strategy 2026 Switzerland isn’t in the EU’s framework; this is the closest thing it has to one.
04
Cognitive
- “Redefining Digital Sovereignty,” Technology and Regulation, 2026 The scholarship confirming that epistemic asymmetry, not infrastructure, is where the real argument now sits.
- EU AI Act, Regulation 2024/1689 (Art. 11–14) The moment auditability stops being a virtue and becomes a filed legal obligation.
- Cohen & Levinthal, “Absorptive Capacity” Why an organization can only take in the knowledge it’s already close to; you can’t buy your way to understanding.
- infed.org, “Michael Polanyi and Tacit Knowledge” The clearest short account of the know-how that resists documentation because it lives in people, not systems.
05
Cultural
- Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism The founding statement that technology carries the values of whoever built it.
- Ostrom, Nobel Prize Lecture The commons argument, from the person who won the Nobel proving it works, in her own words.
- Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” The 1980 essay behind the idea that a tool can encode a decision nobody voted on.
- EuroStack The deliberate-cultivation project the Cultural layer’s test question is actually asking about.
- Atlantic Council, “Digital sovereignty: Europe’s declaration of independence?” The one source here that isn’t cheering; read it for what the optimistic version leaves out.