Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Sajjad Omidoiur

Ph, Department of Political Science (Political Sociology), Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Introduction
The state, as the central institution organizing collective life, fundamentally possesses a monopoly on legitimate authority and territorial sovereignty within a defined realm. This concept rests on three pillars: sovereignty as the exclusive right to legislate and make final decisions, legitimacy based on the consent of the governed, and the capacity to wield organized force to ensure social order. Historically, the state has dynamically evolved in response to changing human needs, from pre-modern foundations in metaphysical and theological doctrines to the modern secular state grounded in popular sovereignty, rational bureaucracy, and social contract theory.
Today, the emergence of the digital paradigm poses unprecedented challenges to these classical foundations. Digital governance signifies not merely the adoption of electronic tools but a paradigmatic shift in the very nature of power, sovereignty, and citizenship. It transforms traditional notions of territorial control into the management of data flows, recasts the citizen from a legal subject into a data source, and reduces policy-making to algorithmic processes focused on social engineering. This shift places the politics of the human body at the center of contemporary political theory and practice. The body is no longer solely a subject of discipline but has become a vital data infrastructure, a strategic economic resource, and an ideological battleground. Consequently, this research seeks to investigate how digital governance, through redefining the relationship between the state and the body, shapes the contemporary crisis of sovereignty across four distinct political systems: China, Germany, Singapore, and Russia.
Materials and Methods
This research employs a comparative case study design to analyze the logics of digital governance across four distinct political systems: China, Germany, Singapore, and Russia. These cases were selected as representative ideal types along the intersecting spectra of political centralization and the nature of the state-digital body relationship. The methodological approach is qualitative, relying on documentary analysis and thematic coding to construct a nuanced, interpretive understanding of how sovereignty is reconfigured in the digital age. The core analytical strategy involves a structured, focused comparison, where each case is examined through the lens of the same theoretical framework to identify unique patterns of convergence and divergence.
Data collection was conducted through the triangulation of three primary document types to ensure robustness. First, primary policy documents, including national laws, formal state strategies, and official government reports, provided the foundational legal and discursive framework. Second, pre-existing interviews with experts, former officials, and activists, published by reputable media and research institutions, were analyzed as secondary textual sources to capture stakeholder perspectives. Third, technical reports and public interface analyses of relevant digital governance platforms offered insights into functional implementation. The collected data was subjected to a rigorous thematic analysis using a three-stage coding process—open, axial, and selective—to systematically identify, connect, and synthesize core categories into the four overarching governance models.
Results and Discussion
The analysis reveals four distinct models of digital governance, each forging a unique relationship between the state and the digitized body. In China, the body is constructed as a national data resource, harnessed through integrated systems like the Social Credit System to produce a disciplined "algorithmic subject." Germany exemplifies a model of bodily autonomy and privacy, legally constituting the body as a protected digital sphere and fostering a "multi-layered sovereign subject" through strict regulations like the GDPR. Singapore presents a hybrid neo-liberal efficiency model, treating the body as a transactional commodity where health data is exchanged for services, crafting a "computational-commercial subject." Conversely, Russia’s securitized authoritarianism frames the body as a political threat, weaponizing biometric data for surveillance and producing a "securitized subject."
These findings demonstrate that digital technology does not drive a uniform political outcome but is instead shaped by dominant ideological frameworks into tools of either emancipation, control, or commodification. This divergence generates specific sovereignty crises. China exports its infrastructural power, creating extraterritorial bio-dependency, while Germany’s regulatory hegemony can inadvertently stifle local technological development. Singapore’s market logic leads to a loss of national bio-sovereignty through data commodification, and Russia extends its security apparatus transnationally. Collectively, these models signify a fundamental reconfiguration of state power, where sovereignty is increasingly exercised not over physical territory but through the management of datafied life, challenging the very foundations of the Westphalian nation-state system.
Conclusion
This study demonstrates that digital governance represents a fundamental transformation in the nature of political power, where the management of the datafied body has become the new frontier of sovereignty. The comparative analysis of China, Germany, Singapore, and Russia reveals that identical technologies are molded into radically different instruments of power by the dominant ideological and political logic of each system. There is no singular "digital state," but rather competing paradigms: the techno-security totalitarian model, the rights-based democratic model, the neoliberal efficiency model, and the securitized authoritarian model.
The core finding is that the crisis of the modern nation-state is amplified, not resolved, by digitalization. Sovereignty is fragmented, distributed among transnational corporations and algorithmic systems, and exercised through the continuous extraction and analysis of biological and behavioral data. The resulting reconfiguration—from sovereignty over territory to sovereignty through data—poses profound challenges to foundational concepts of legitimacy, autonomy, and collective rights. Ultimately, navigating this new terrain requires moving beyond simplistic views of technology as either a neutral tool or an unstoppable force, and toward a critical, context-sensitive understanding of its embeddedness in perpetual struggles for power and freedom.

Keywords

• Digital Governance
• Crisis of Sovereignty
• Bio-technique
• Nation-State
• Algorithmic Subject

Main Subjects

• Political Science