Dr Stanislav Budnitsky

• Internet governance
• Media globalization
• Nationalism
• Strategic narratives
• Russian foreign policy
• Socio-technical imaginaries
• Popular geopolitics

• International Communication Association
• Association for the Study of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Dr Stanislav Budnitsky joined the research group 'Legitimation and Delegitimation in Global Cooperation' in August 2021 and will be a Postdoc Research Fellow at the Centre until July 2022.

Russia's Digital Sovereignty: National Identity and Global Internet Governance

In the twenty-first century, global internet governance—the design and management of the global internet’s critical resources and standards—has become one of the most contentious geopolitical domains. What prevents deeper global cooperation on internet governance among nation-states? Adding to the materialist and legal analyses of global internet politics, this project explores how states’ diverse national identity constructions inform their often-conflicting approaches to global internet governance.

Russia and Estonia are among the leaders of opposing internet governance camps and serve as the project’s primary and secondary case studies, respectively. Estonia supports the existing governance model, in which US-based non-governmental organizations have been setting internet standards and managing its critical resources since the 1980s-90s. Meanwhile, Russia is challenging the perceived US digital hegemony and instead advocates a state-based internet governance model under the UN auspices.

Russia and Estonia promote strategic narratives that seek to legitimize their preferred model and delegitimize their opponents. Russia claims that the current US-based model is undemocratic because it imposes a single-country dominion over a universal resource that belongs to the humanity; only multilateral governance over the internet, Russia argues, will give a voice to all countries and allow elected governments to protect their citizens’ data from exploitation by the US tech giants. In turn, Estonia argues that state-based global internet governance, particularly through the UN bureaucracy, is antithetical to the internet’s purportedly innovative, borderless, and egalitarian nature.  

Employing a cultural lens, I demonstrate that Estonia’s and Russia’s global internet governance agendas reflect their competing identity-based conceptions of the world order. As a self-identified great power, Russia opposes US-led unipolarity and advances an ideal of a multipolar world governed through traditional multilateral institutions, including in internet governance. By contrast, Estonia’s support for the US-based internet governance is rooted in its broader national identity project of “returning to Europe” after the Soviet rule. Estonia thus has been an ardent supporter of maintaining the post-Cold War US-led status quo.

A multi-method study, the project relies on critical intertextual analysis of Russia’s and Estonia’s official discourses, interviews with high-profile internet and media experts and practitioners, and participatory observation at internet and foreign policy fora across five countries, including Estonia and Russia. Ultimately, the project reveals the enduring significance of nationalism in the digital age.