Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Associate Professor, International Law Department, Faculty of Law and Political Science, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran.
2 Assistant Professor, Public and International Law Dept., Faculty of Law and Political Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran.
Abstract
Problem and Research Background
Modern state theory was built around a geography of power. Territory, population, institutions and enforceable law gave public authority a place from which it could be recognized, limited and challenged. This territorial grammar has not disappeared. States still legislate, tax, educate, register, police and adjudicate within borders. However, it no longer explains the whole field of public power. A growing part of authority now moves through data systems, digital infrastructures, platform design, cross-border cloud services, identity frameworks and algorithmic decision-making. The state may still make law in a territorial setting, while governance effects are produced in digital spaces that do not neatly correspond to territorial jurisdiction.
This transformation creates a difficulty for Public Law. Classical accounts of Sovereignty usually linked authority to a politically organized space. The state was imagined as the place where law, coercion, legitimacy and accountability came together. Digital Governance unsettles this image. Code, interfaces, databases, automated classifications and platform rules may shape the citizen's legal position before any court, ministry or official appears. The problem is therefore not merely technological. It concerns the legal meaning of statehood, the changing relationship between authority and place, and the position of the citizen in a world where Digital Space and physical territory coexist. Existing discussions of network governance, platform power and algorithmic regulation have identified parts of this transformation. However, they have not always offered a theory of the state capable of explaining how Sovereignty continues, weakens and reappears under these conditions.
Research Objective
The article develops the concept of Dislocated Sovereignty as a public-law vocabulary for this evolving condition. The argument is not that territorial Sovereignty has ended, nor that private platforms have replaced the state. Those claims are too broad to capture legal reality. The stronger and more precise claim is that the state now works under a double condition. It remains territorial in form, jurisdiction, and constitutional imagination, but many of the mechanisms through which it governs data flows, platform architecture, algorithmic classification, digital identity systems, and infrastructural control operate across, beneath, or beyond territorial borders. Dislocated Sovereignty names this tension between the state's continuing territorial presence and the increasingly non-territorial settings in which public power is exercised.
Incorporate specific policy challenges and opportunities arising from 'Dislocated Sovereignty,' illustrating how this concept informs legal reforms and governance strategies, thereby engaging policymakers more directly.
Research Method
The research is analytical, conceptual and comparative. Its conceptual frame draws on Public Law theory, political sociology and selected debates in the philosophy of Sovereignty. Historical and conceptual accounts of the modern state are used to reconstruct the classical relation between territory and authority. Institutional and network theories help explain how power is distributed among public bodies, private actors, technical systems and human-machine arrangements. Genealogical and spatial approaches are also used to show why authority cannot be understood only by locating formal institutions. The comparative part of the article is selective rather than exhaustive. France, the European Union and Iran are not treated as equivalent cases. They are examined because each reveals a different legal response to the same underlying problem. France represents a republican effort to bring platform power back under public authority, especially through dignity-based regulation and child protection. The European Union shows how a non-classical legal order can construct a form of digital Sovereignty through data protection, fundamental rights and risk-based regulation of artificial intelligence. Iran illustrates a more difficult sovereignty gap: inherited territorial authority remains strong, but Digital Governance is still marked by coercive platform control, fragmented administrative systems and the absence of a fully developed theory of digital Public Law.
Research Findings
The article reaches five main findings. First, territory still matters, but it no longer exhausts the meaning of state authority. Borders continue to organize jurisdiction, institutional responsibility and political membership. At the same time, the actual routes of governance increasingly pass through technical, transnational infrastructures that are often privately designed or owned. This creates a gap between the legal locus of decision-making and the locus of its effects.
Second, law is losing part of its older visibility as the public language of authority. In digital environments, code, default settings, terms of service, access rules and automated classifications may influence behavior more directly than statutes or administrative regulations. This does not mean that law disappears. It means that Public Law must follow public power into databases, interfaces, portals, protocols and algorithmic systems.
Third, legitimacy is being displaced. In the classical model, legitimacy depended on constitutional authorization, representation, public reason and accountability. In platform environments, obedience often appears as user consent, interface dependence or infrastructural necessity. The user may seem to agree, but usually lacks any real capacity to negotiate the conditions of Digital Governance. This weak form of consent cannot replace public accountability.
Fourth, the citizen is increasingly positioned not only as a rights-holder, but also as a data subject, a platform user, and a digital addressee of public authority. This can improve access to services, but it can also lead to exclusion, opacity, and silent administrative harm when systems lack notice, human review, correction procedures, and effective remedies. Digital Citizenship therefore requires more than access to portals. It requires contestability, explanation, alternative routes and legal protection against system-based errors.
Fifth, comparative experience shows that Dislocated Sovereignty can be managed in different ways. France uses republican authority and dignity-based regulation to extend public values into platform environments. The European Union uses data protection, fundamental rights and market access to build a rights-based model of digital Sovereignty. Iran, by contrast, faces the unresolved task of transforming territorial command into accountable digital state capacity. Without such a transformation, the state risks being strong in formal authority but weak in trust, legitimacy and digital public law.
Conclusion
Dislocated Sovereignty is not a technological slogan. It is a public-law problem. It does not ask us to abandon the territorial state. It asks us to rethink the legal imagination of the state so that authority, accountability and dignity can survive when public power operates through Digital Space, data systems and algorithmic infrastructures. The state in the digital age cannot be only a machine of command, filtering or surveillance. It must be able to explain algorithmic decisions, protect the dignity of citizens' data, supervise platform power, provide remedies for digital exclusion, and preserve public reason in environments built for speed, prediction, and extraction.
For Iran, this problem is especially urgent. A state that lacks a coherent theory of digital Public Law may move between ineffective coercion and passive dependence on platforms. Dislocated Sovereignty offers a way out of that false choice. It invites a reconstruction of statehood around trust, legality, transparency, accountability, and Digital Citizenship. In this sense, the future of the state will not be secured by repeating inherited formulas of Sovereignty, but by building public-law institutions capable of governing non-territorial spaces without losing the public character of authority.
Keywords
- Authority Theory
- Digital Citizenship
- Digital Governance
- Digital Space
- Dislocated Sovereignty
- Public Law
- State
Main Subjects
)