This chapter begins with the sombre matter of world destruction. Almost by definition, the fully artificial worlds described in this book are ontologically fragile. They can be pulled apart or undone, as easily or more easily than they were put together. Whether they are replaced by a natural world of power politics involving different ethnic groups or whether no more than chaos and disorder can be expected in such a scenario is no doubt an important question, but it does not affect the real possibility of world destruction. This chapter argues for an alternative to hegemonic wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation, an alternative to be sought in the dynamics of world building. Today competition between the superpowers is organised around the capacity to build new technological worlds; those unable to compete must eventually become elements in a world built by others. The emergence of these artificial worlds opens up possibilities for state actors to change the global power distribution without the risks arising from direct action against their rivals. In Ukraine, while Russia seems determined to bring the current world order tumbling down, it also has to face the full brunt of that world order’s power in a succession of system wars ranging from a new form of technological warfare to the uses and abuses of the global energy, financial and trade systems.

This chapter examines how the Council of Europe sought to promote the rule of law in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s ambition to construct a “common European home,” to be pursued in concert with European states and international organizations, was advanced by Russian president Boris Yeltsin and, at least initially, by his successor as president, Vladimir Putin. But after roughly a decade of concrete reforms, that effort foundered, reversed, and then collapsed. Russia descended again into authoritarianism and, shortly after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe. Thus, this story now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This chapter explores that story and how the dynamics of Russia’s pursuit and rocky course of membership in the Council of Europe affected both the Russian state and the international organization that sought to admit it to membership.

The rise and the survival of the Ottoman Empire for six centuries is one of the most important event of the European and Middle Eastern histories. At the apex of the Ottoman conquests in the mid-1500s, Süleyman the Magnificent pushed deep into Hungary and Mesopotamia, as well as making the empire the master of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Later sultans advanced into southern Russia, Caucasia, Persia and north Africa. In concert with these military successes, the empire transformed itself into a sophisticated administrative entity of great strength, which encouraged diversity, culture, learning and religious activity. The Ottoman high tide reached the gates of Vienna in 1683, only to fail because of faulty command decisions and internal deficiencies. While the Ottomans were trying to counter the military reverses, the forces of the socio-economic revolutions in the West and rapidly evolving market economies added new stresses to it. A new generation of sultans and members of the governing elite evolved, who were convinced of the need for modernisation and westernisation (both terms have been used synonymously and interchangeably) and were committed to change in order to keep the empire intact. They did achieve some results but they failed to stop the interventions and machinations of the Great Powers, which sought to benefit from the empire’s collapse. The Ottoman Empire gained notoriety as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ and additionally became a target for the forces of ethnic nationalism that fought to dismember it. The First World War became the swan song of the empire. For the first time since the 1680s, the Ottoman Army consistently defeated its European enemies. But it was too late. The empire, bankrupt and blockaded, could not match the resources of its enemies and surrendered.

Chapter 18 considers how, in general, Russian law does not provide a definition of digital (or electronic) evidence or any particular rules in that respect. However, various laws in the spheres of telecommunications, information technologies and personal data list specific categories of natural and legal persons, empowered to work with data in a digital form, including content data. Russian legal provisions are not always precise, and an important role in their interpretation belongs to both courts and executive bodies (e.g. the Roskomnadzor). Information dissemination managers and many other categories of personal data processors are obliged to use Russian information systems or databases to store data and cooperate with LEAs that are involved in criminal investigation and operative-search activities. Threats to data subjects’ rights especially increase during the latter, because it is almost impossible to find out that certain pieces of data have been transferred to LEAs. Other problems are grounded in the 24-hour access of specific bodies to certain information systems and the low efficiency of judicial orders as a mechanism of human rights protection.

This chapter offers three case studies to illustrate the main theoretical claim of this book. The rise of ISIS was animated by a narrative of historical humiliation of Sunnis by “apostates.” This narrative featured key elements of our account of humiliation in international affairs – from dismissal of past promises to contempt towards cultural and geographical realities. Russia’s foreign policy in the last two decades is also deeply tied with a sense of national humiliation, both reflected and manufactured by Vladimir Putin, according to which Russia has been displaced and discarded as a serious world power by the United States and its NATO allies. Finally, we look at the 1973 Middle East war as an example of a conflict fueled by a need to reverse an earlier humiliation. Egypt’s primary aim in this war was to erase or counteract the humiliation it suffered in the 1967 war with Israel. Interestingly, in this case, the officials who negotiated the war’s conclusion took the sentiment’s potency into account as they designed the terms of the ceasefire and armistice.

This chapter explores how the Indian state asserts its digital sovereignty through digital public goods, including the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), which is overseen by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an entity governed by the Reserve Bank of India. This chapter demonstrates how, as part of the “India Stack,” indigenous digital payment design, architecture, and governance mechanisms allow for accessible, secure, and interoperable transactions in a mobile-first, open API-based payment network. This significantly reduces India’s dependence on foreign financial systems and protects it from shocks that could result from foreign sanctions (e.g., US economic sanctions of Russia in 2014 impacting MasterCard and Visa users in Russia). However, such a system is not without potential drawbacks, some of which include the dominance of foreign entities (e.g., Google Pay) on UPI as well as state-sanctioned monopolies that may minimize civil society participation and market competition. Besides interoperability and risk mitigation, the authors also advocate a multi-stakeholder governance model for the national digital payment system to bolster public ownership and institutional checks and balances.

This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the book by disentangling the myriad discourses and interpretations of digital sovereignty from the perspective of the Global South and emerging power alliances. It argues that BRICS countries symbolize the “rise of the rest” in an increasingly multipolar world, their digital policies critical to the future shape of global internet, and digital governance. In this book, the idea of digital sovereignty itself is viewed as a site of power contestation and knowledge production. Specifically, the chapter identify seven major perspectives on digital sovereignty in a complex discursive field: state digital sovereignty, supranational digital sovereignty, network digital sovereignty, corporate digital sovereignty, personal digital sovereignty, postcolonial digital sovereignty, and commons digital sovereignty. The chapter highlights the affinities and overlaps as well as tensions and contradictions between these perspectives on digital sovereignty with brief illustrative examples from BRICS countries and beyond. While a state-centric perspective on digital sovereignty is traditionally more salient especially in BRICS contexts, increasing public concern over user privacy, state surveillance, corporate abuse, and digital colonialism has given ascendance to an array of alternative perspectives on digital sovereignty that emphasize individual autonomy, indigenous rights, community well-being, and sustainability.

From 2018 to 2022, the ResisTIC (Criticism and circumvention of digital borders in Russia) project team has endeavored to analyze how different actors of the Russian Internet (RuNet) resist and adapt to the recent wave of authoritarian and centralizing regulations by the Russian state, with a particular focus on online resistance that reveals so far lesser-known social practices and techniques for circumventing online constraints. The chapter undertakes an infrastructure-based sociology of the RuNet, focusing on the technical devices and assets involved in surveillance and censorship, and on the strategies of resistance and circumvention “by infrastructure” that follow. The empirical core of the chapter will provide an overview of a number of studies undertaken by the ResisTIC project team in the past few years. While the presentation of the case studies will by necessity be relatively brief, presenting them together will allow to draw some general conclusions about the state of infrastructure-based digital sovereignization in Russia.

In the last ten years, secondary sanctions have played an important role for European regulators as well as for compliance officers working for economic operators. Even though such European practitioners are looking for guidance and experience from their interlocutors from the other side of the Atlantic, including from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, secondary sanctions do not act in the leading role but are one of many risk factors to be considered by economic operators. Instead, prohibitive policies of European economic operators, including financial institutions, against certain governments, such as Iran and to a lesser degree Russia, are mostly based on risks unrelated to secondary sanctions. On this premise, the chapter will briefly describe the relevant regulatory framework and will then explain how the regulations are operationally implemented in international financial institutions. In doing this, the chapter will also touch on practical challenges for sanctions compliance officers, such as extraterritoriality and the EU Blocking Regulation.

This chapter explores how the imposition of unprecedented sanctions against Russia following the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the constant cat-and-mouse game of enforcement and evasion that ensued have altered the secondary sanctions landscape. More specifically, it examines to what extent, notwithstanding its longstanding and entrenched opposition to far-reaching US secondary sanctions, the European Union has gradually moved towards adding a ‘secondary’ layer to its own sanctions toolbox. The chapter first exposes the EU’s ambiguity towards extraterritoriality, both within and without the sanctions domain. It subsequently zooms in on a number of specific EU measures, namely the imposition of the so-called ‘price cap’ on Russian oil, the adoption of far-reaching import and export restrictions, including the prohibition to import certain Russian products even after these are located or have already been processed in third countries, and the threat of financial sanctions against, and criminal prosecution of, non-EU persons that facilitate the circumvention of EU sanctions against Russia. It then offers some concluding observations.