數位天下與專制慾望

Week 1 Introduction: Authoritarian Resurgence in the 21st Century and Digital Tianxia Instructor’s lecture: Digital Tianxia and Authoritarian Desire Readings 1. Instructor paper: Digital Tianxia and Authoritarian Desire 2. Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy (selection) Summary: The course concludes by synthesizing the themes of authoritarian desire, governing techniques, and infrastructural power into the concept of Digital Tianxia. Discussion Questions: 1. What is Tianxia? 2. Can digital infrastructure enable new forms of imperial governance? 3. Does the concept of Digital Tianxia help explain emerging global power structures? 4. What does Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy teach us about our research projects?

Week 2 The Digital Silk Road: Infrastructure, Data Governance, and Geopolitical Order Readings: 1. E. Oreglia, “The Digital Silk Road between National Rhetoric and Provincial Ambitions,” The China Quarterly（2025） 2. Matthew S. Erie and Thomas Streinz, “The Beijing Effect: China’s ‘Digital Silk Road’ as Transnational Data Governance,” NYU Journal of International Law and Politics 54, no. 1（2021）: 1–92. [Introduction, Parts II–III, Conclusion] 3. Rebecca Arcesati and Jacob Gunter, “‘The Digital Silk Road’: A Growing Priority for Beijing as Its Tech Champions Expand Overseas,” MERICS China Global Competition Tracker, no. 1（2024） Extended Readings: 1. Rolland, Nadège. 2021. “A New World Order According to Beijing.” 2. Hillman, Jonathan E. 2021. The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future. Introduction. Summary: These readings approach China’s Digital Silk Road not as a coherent strategy imposed by a unitary state, but as a heterogeneous infrastructural assemblage produced through interactions among central policy narratives, provincial ambitions, state-supported enterprises, private technology companies, and host-country governments. By supplying telecommunications networks, submarine cables, data centres, cloud services, artificial intelligence, and digital platforms, Chinese actors do more than extend material connectivity: they participate in reorganizing data flows, regulatory authority, technological standards, and the capacity of states to render populations and territories digitally governable. The Digital Silk Road therefore constitutes a strategic site where commercial expansion, developmental aspirations, data sovereignty, and competing visions of global digital order converge. Discussion Questions: 1. How do central policies, provincial ambitions, corporate strategies, and host-country demands interact in the making of the Digital Silk Road? 2. How does control over digital infrastructure translate into geopolitical power and regulatory influence? 3. What governance models travel with infrastructure, and how are they modified by recipient countries? 4. Does the Digital Silk Road produce technological dependence, developmental capacity, digital coloniality—or some combination of all three?

Week 3 Imperial Governance: Frontier, Knowledge, and Coloniality Readings: 1. Peter C. Perdue, “Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective: Frontier Administration in Eighteenth-Century China,” Journal of Early Modern History 5, no. 4 (2001): 282–304. 2. Hostetler, Laura. “Qing Connections to the Early Modern World: Ethnography and Cartography in Eighteenth-Century China.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 623–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/313143. 3. Millward, James A. 2024. “How ‘Chinese Dynasties’ Periodization Works with the ‘Tribute System’ and ‘Sinicization’ to Erase Diversity and Euphemize Colonialism in Historiography of China,” The Historical Journal 67: 151-160 Extended Readings: 1. Bijia Chen, Cameron Campbell, Yuxue Ren, and James Lee, “Big Data for the Study of Qing Officialdom: The China Government Employee Database–Qing (CGED-Q),” Journal of Chinese History 4, no. 2 (2020): 431–460. 2. Peter C. Perdue, “Introduction,” Ch. 6 & 7. China Marches West 中國西征 (NYCU Library: DS754 P 47 2005) 3. Hostetler, Laura. 2001. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (NYCU Library: GN635.C5 H 67 2001) 4. Philip A. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (chapter) (NYCU Library: DS754.17 K 8413 2002) |孔恩 中国现代国家的起源 (571.12 1260) Summary: These readings examine Qing imperial governance as a differentiated and knowledge-intensive system of rule. Rather than treating the Qing simply as another “Chinese dynasty,” they analyze how the empire administered heterogeneous frontiers, rendered territories and populations legible through cartography and ethnography, and incorporated diverse peoples through differentiated institutions. They also question how the historiographical categories of “dynasty,” “Sinicization,” and the “tribute system” have obscured military conquest, colonial expansion, and the multiethnic character of the Qing Empire. Discussion Questions: 1. How did the Qing govern different territories and populations without incorporating them into a uniform administrative system? 2. How did cartography and ethnography render imperial territories and populations legible and governable? 3. In what sense can Qing expansion and frontier administration be understood as colonial? 4. How do the categories of “Chinese dynasty,” “Sinicization,” and the “tribute system” shape—or distort—our understanding of empire? 5. What are the continuities and differences between imperial practices of legibility and contemporary data-driven governance?

Week 4 — State Capacity and Qing Governance: Fiscal Extraction, Bureaucracy, and the Low-Tax State Readings 1. Ma, Debin. 2013. “State Capacity and Great Divergence: The Case of Qing China (1644–1911).” Eurasian Geography and Economics 54 (5–6): 484–499. 2. Ma, Debin, and Jared Rubin. 2019. “The Paradox of Power: Principal-Agent Problems and Fiscal Capacity in Absolutist Regimes.” Journal of Comparative Economics 47 (3): 563–578. 3. von Glahn, Richard. 2020. “Modalities of the Fiscal State in Imperial China.” Journal of Chinese History 4 (1): 1–29. Extended Readings 1. Sng, Tuan-Hwee. 2014. “Size and Dynastic Decline: The Principal-Agent Problem in Late Imperial China, 1700–1850.” Explorations in Economic History 54: 107–127. 2. Guan, Hanhui, Debin Ma, and Runzhuo Zhai. 2023. “State Capacity in Imperial China: Quantifying a Millennium.” Working paper. 3. Zelin, Madeleine. 1984. The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch’ing China. Selected chapter. Summary These readings examine the fiscal and administrative foundations of Qing state capacity. Despite centralized political authority, the Qing state maintained low formal taxation, a small bureaucracy, and limited fiscal penetration into local society. The readings explain this paradox through information asymmetries, principal–agent problems, informal taxation, and the difficulties of governing a vast empire. They also question whether the European fiscal-military state should provide the universal standard for evaluating state capacity. Qing governance thus appears as a distinctive combination of centralized sovereignty, limited infrastructural reach, delegated local administration, and negotiated extraction. Discussion Questions 1. Why did centralized political authority not produce greater fiscal capacity in Qing China? 2. How did principal–agent problems and informal taxation shape Qing governance? 3. In what respects was the Qing state strong, and in what respects was its infrastructural reach limited? 4. Should the European fiscal-military state serve as the universal standard for evaluating Qing state capacity?

Week 5 From Empire to Sovereignty: Territory, International Law, and the Making of Modern China Readings 1. Duara, Prasenjit. 2016. “Empire in the Age of Nationalism.” In The Imperial Challenge: Southeast Asia and Japan in the Larger Context, 15–24. 2. Li, Andy Hanlun. 2022. “From Alien Land to Inalienable Parts of China: How Qing Imperial Possessions Became the Chinese Frontiers.” European Journal of International Relations 28 (2): 237–262. 3. Carrai, Maria Adele. 2017. “Learning Western Techniques of Empire: Republican China and the New Legal Framework for Managing Tibet.” Leiden Journal of International Law 30 (4): 801–824. Extended Readings 1. Duara, Prasenjit. 2003. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Introduction or Chapter 1. 2. Perdue, Peter C. 2005. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Introduction or Conclusion. 3. Kuzuoglu, Ulug. 2025. “Wireless Nation: Infrastructural Politics of Tibetan and Mongolian Morse Codes in China.” Modern Asian Studies. Summary These readings explore how the differentiated and overlapping spaces of the Qing Empire were transformed into the bounded territory of modern China. They examine how national authenticity, cartography, international law, and infrastructure converted imperial possessions into supposedly inalienable national territory. Modern sovereignty thus did not simply replace empire; it preserved and reconfigured imperial space through the legal and political languages of national unity, territorial integrity, and exclusive jurisdiction. Discussion Questions 1. How does imperial sovereignty differ from the uniform and exclusive territorial sovereignty of the modern nation-state? 2. How were Qing imperial possessions transformed into supposedly inalienable parts of China? 3. Did modern sovereignty dismantle empire, or did it preserve imperial space in a new legal and political form? 4. How did international law, cartography, and infrastructure contribute to the territorialization of China?

Week 6 Territory, Population, and Security: Colonialism, Biopower, and State Racism Readings 1. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Lectures of 11, 18, and 25 January 1978, pp. 1–86. 2. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Lectures of 28 January and 17 March 1976, pp. 65–85 and 239–263. 3. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Introduction or Chapter 1. Extended Readings 1. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population. Lecture of 1 February 1978, pp. 87–114. 2. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”. Lectures of 21 January and 4 February 1976. 3. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. 4. Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. Selected chapter. Summary These readings examine the interconnected production of territory, population, and security through conquest, classification, circulation, and regulation. Territory is approached not merely as sovereign possession but as a space produced through military incorporation, settlement, partition, and infrastructure. Population is constituted through registration, racialized classification, demographic intervention, and the differentiation of assimilable from unassimilable subjects. Security operates through the continuous identification, anticipation, and stabilization of threats. Bringing Security, Territory, Population into conversation with Society Must Be Defended reveals how colonial conquest and state racism divide populations between lives to be fostered and lives exposed to displacement, abandonment, or death. Discussion Questions 1. How are territory, population, and security produced through conquest, circulation, classification, and regulation? 2. How do colonial rule and state racism divide populations between lives to be fostered and lives exposed to displacement, abandonment, or death? 3. Is colonialism an application of modern governmentality, or one of its constitutive historical conditions? 4. How might territorial incorporation, population registration, and racialized security be reassembled under contemporary digital governance?

Week 7 — Authoritarian Resurgence: Democratic Backsliding, Autocratic Legalism, and Authoritarian Desire Readings 1. Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27 (1): 5–19. 2. Scheppele, Kim Lane. 2018. “Autocratic Legalism.” University of Chicago Law Review 85 (2): 545–584. 3. Brown, Wendy. 2018. “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First-Century ‘Democracies’.” Critical Times 1 (1): 60–79. Extended Readings 1. Wunsch, Natasha, et al. 2025. “The Demand Side of Democratic Backsliding: How Divergent Understandings of Democracy Shape Political Choice.” British Journal of Political Science. 2. Ekiert, Grzegorz. 2023. “Democracy and Authoritarianism in the 21st Century: A Sketch.” 3. Osborne, Danny, et al. 2023. “The Psychological Causes and Societal Consequences of Authoritarianism.” Nature Reviews Psychology 2: 220–232. Summary Authoritarian resurgence unfolds not only through the destruction of democratic institutions but through their gradual legal and affective transformation. These readings examine democratic backsliding, the use of law to consolidate executive authority, and the popular desires that sustain authoritarian politics. Resentment, wounded entitlement, and fantasies of restored order can lead subjects to demand freedom from democratic restraint while authorizing coercion against racialized, political, and social others. Discussion Questions 1. What distinguishes contemporary democratic backsliding from classical authoritarian takeover? 2. How can law and constitutional reform become technologies for dismantling democracy? 3. What forms of resentment, wounded entitlement, and desire sustain popular support for authoritarian politics? 4. How can demands for freedom coexist with support for coercion, exclusion, and punitive sovereignty?

Week 8 — Competitive Authoritarianism in Comparative Perspective Readings 1. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “Elections Without Democracy: The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 51–65. 2. Milan W. Svolik, “Polarization versus Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 3 (2019): 20–32. 3. Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New About It?” Democratization 26, no. 7 (2019): 1095–1113. Extended Reading and Comparative Resource Marina Nord, Ana Good God, and Staffan I. Lindberg, Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? V-Dem Institute, 2026. Students should consult the country profile and relevant indicators for a country or region of their choice. Summary This week examines competitive authoritarianism as both a regime type and a comparative problem. The readings analyze how formally democratic institutions can coexist with systematic incumbent advantages, and how polarization may lead citizens to tolerate authoritarian practices for partisan or group interests. Through student-selected cases, the seminar considers how these mechanisms vary across different historical and regional contexts, including the effects of colonialism, state formation, military power, social divisions, and international relations. Discussion Questions 1. What distinguishes competitive authoritarianism from electoral democracy and closed authoritarianism? 2. Which political arenas are most consequential in the country or region you know best? 3. How does polarization encourage citizens to trade democratic principles for partisan or group interests? 4. Does the concept of competitive authoritarianism travel successfully across regions? What histories or institutions does it overlook? 5. What evidence would demonstrate authoritarian consolidation, democratic resilience, or democratic recovery?

Week 9 — Desiring Authority: Mass Psychology, Cultural Backlash, and the Affective Life of Authoritarianism Readings 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 118–137. 2. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, “The Cultural Backlash Theory,” in Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 32–64. 3. Danny Osborne, Thomas H. Costello, John Duckitt, and Chris G. Sibley, “The Psychological Causes and Societal Consequences of Authoritarianism,” Nature Reviews Psychology 2 (2023): 220–232. Extended Reading Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Chapters I, VII and XIX. Summary This week examines authoritarianism as an object of desire, identification, and affective investment. The readings connect the psychological mechanisms of submission, aggression, and identification with broader transformations in culture, political economy, and social hierarchy. Rather than treating authoritarianism as a fixed personality disorder, the seminar asks how authoritarian dispositions are produced and activated under historically specific conditions, and how these processes vary across societies shaped by colonialism, racialization, religion, gender, economic insecurity, and political violence. Discussion Questions 1. Why might people desire authority rather than merely submit to it? 2. How does identification with a leader transform insecurity into collective belonging and aggression? 3. Are authoritarian attitudes stable personality traits, or are they activated by politically constructed threats? 4. Does the cultural-backlash thesis travel successfully across different regions and histories? 5. How do colonialism, racialization, religion, caste and gender shape locally specific forms of authoritarian desire? 6. What are the limitations of explaining authoritarian politics through individual psychology?

Week 10 — Who Are “the People”? Populism, Representation, and Democratic Institutions Readings 1. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Introduction and Chapter 1, pp. 1–40. 2. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Paul Taggart, “Populism and Democracy: The Road Ahead,” PS: Political Science & Politics 58, no. 1 (2025): 96–100. 3. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “Subverting Democracy,” in How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), Chapter 4. Extended Readings 1. International IDEA, “Conditions and Consequences of Populism and Democratic Backsliding” (2019). 2. Daniel F. Wajner, Sandra Destradi, and Michael Zürn, “The Effects of Global Populism: Assessing the Populist Impact on International Affairs,” International Affairs 100, no. 5 (2024): 1819–1833. Summary This week examines the contested relationship between populism, popular sovereignty, and democratic institutions. The readings analyze how populist leaders claim exclusive representation of the “real people,” how such claims can legitimize the weakening of institutional constraints, and how failures of representation and elite enabling contribute to populist mobilization. Through comparative cases, the seminar considers when appeals to the people expand democratic participation and when they produce exclusion, executive concentration, and authoritarian transformation. Discussion Questions 1. What distinguishes populism from popular politics, nationalism, majoritarianism and authoritarianism? 2. Who constitutes “the real people” in a populist project, and who is excluded? 3. Is populism inherently antidemocratic, or can it expose and correct failures of democratic representation? 4. How do populist governments transform courts, elections, media and public administration? 5. Why do some democratic institutions withstand populist pressure while others collapse? 6. How does populism take different forms across colonial, racial, religious and regional histories?

Week 11 — Algorithmic Governmentality: Prediction, Subjectivation, and Digital Regimes of Truth Readings 1. Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation: Disparateness as a Precondition for Individuation through Relationships?” Réseaux 177, no. 1 (2013): 163–196. 2. Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler, “The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law,” La Deleuziana 3 (2016): 6–29. 3. Paola Ricaurte, Edgar Gómez-Cruz, and Ignacio Siles, “Algorithmic Governmentality in Latin America: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Neocolonial Soft Power, and Authoritarianism,” Big Data & Society 11, no. 1 (2024). Extended Reading Alexandra James et al., “From Access and Transparency to Refusal: Three Responses to Algorithmic Governance,” Internet Policy Review 12, no. 2 (2023). Summary This week examines algorithmic governmentality as a mode of power operating through datafication, correlation, profiling, and the pre-emption of possible behaviour. Algorithmic systems construct data doubles and intervene upon inferred propensities rather than addressing individuals primarily as speaking and reflexive subjects. The readings explore how algorithmic calculation transforms regimes of truth, legal judgment, political contestation, and processes of subjectivation. They also situate algorithmic governance within colonial histories, global technological dependencies, corporate infrastructures, and existing structures of racial and social inequality. Discussion Questions 1. How does algorithmic knowledge transform the relationship between truth, knowledge, and power? 2. What are the political consequences of governing people according to predicted rather than actual behaviour? 3. Does algorithmic governmentality produce subjects, or attempt to bypass subjectivity? 4. How do algorithmic systems redistribute legal judgment and political responsibility? 5. How do colonial histories and technological dependencies shape algorithmic governance across different regions? 6. Are transparency and human oversight adequate responses, or do some systems require refusal?

Week 12 — Surveillance Capitalism: Data Extraction, Platform Power, and the State Readings 1. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89. 2. Jathan Sadowski, “When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction,” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (2019): 1–12. 3. Yvonne Jooste, “Surveillance Capitalism as White World-Making,” Acta Academica 53, no. 1 (2021). Extended Readings 1. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015), Chapters 1–2. 2. Sarah Brayne, “Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 5 (2017): 977–1008. Summary This week examines surveillance capitalism as a political-economic regime in which human experience is rendered as data, accumulated as an asset, and processed for prediction, intervention, and profit. The readings analyze behavioural surplus, data extraction, platform power, and the racialized and colonial histories of surveillance. The seminar also investigates how data, technologies, and infrastructures circulate between corporations and states, producing hybrid arrangements of commercial exploitation, public administration, policing, and population control. Discussion Questions 1. Is data a commodity, an asset, or a form of capital? 2. What is extracted and accumulated under surveillance capitalism? 3. Is surveillance capitalism historically unprecedented, or does it extend colonial and racialized forms of extraction? 4. Through which institutions and infrastructures are corporate and state surveillance connected? 5. Why are different populations subjected to different intensities and forms of surveillance? 6. Are privacy, consent, and data ownership adequate responses to surveillance capitalism?

Week 13 — Logistical and Computational Infrastructures: Territory, Circulation, and Sovereignty Readings 1. Deborah Cowen, “From National Borders to Global Seams: The Rise of Supply Chain Security,” in The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (2014), 53–90. 2. Benjamin H. Bratton, “The Stack: Platform and Sovereignty,” in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2016). Alternatively, “The Black Stack” (2014), open PDF. 3. Charmaine Chua, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cowen, and Laleh Khalili, “Introduction: Turbulent Circulation—Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 4 (2018): 617–629. Extended Readings 1. Martin Danyluk, “Seizing the Means of Circulation: Choke Points and Logistical Resistance in Coco Solo, Panama,” Antipode 55, no. 5 (2023): 1368–1389. 2. Benjamin H. Bratton, “Computation in Motion: From the Personal to the Planetary” (2026). Summary This week examines logistical and computational infrastructures as forms of political and geopolitical power. The readings analyze how supply chains, ports, corridors, cloud platforms, and planetary-scale computation reorganize territory, jurisdiction, security, and labour. Rather than treating infrastructure as a neutral system that connects pre-existing spaces, the seminar investigates how infrastructures actively produce new political geographies, distribute mobility and immobility, and acquire functions conventionally associated with sovereignty. Discussion Questions 1. How do infrastructures produce rather than merely connect political territories? 2. Why does the pursuit of frictionless circulation generate new borders and security regimes? 3. Under what conditions do infrastructures acquire, share, or displace sovereign functions? 4. How does platform sovereignty differ from territorial state sovereignty? 5. Whose labour sustains logistical and computational infrastructures? 6. Can chokepoints and infrastructural breakdowns become sites of political resistance?

Week 14 — From Empire to Data Colonialism: Infrastructure, Governmentality, and Resistance Readings 1. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject,” Television & New Media 20, no. 4 (2019): 336–349. 2. Abeba Birhane, “Algorithmic Colonization of Africa,” SCRIPTed 17, no. 2 (2020): 389–409. 3. Benedetta Brevini et al., “Critiques of Data Colonialism,” in Dialogues in Data Power: Shifting Response-abilities in a Datafied World (2024), 120–137. Extended Readings 1. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, “The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology Research: What Is at Stake and Where Is It Heading?” Information, Communication & Society 26, no. 4 (2023): 786–802. 2. Antoinette Rouvroy, “Algorithmic Governmentality and the Death of Politics” (2020). Summary This concluding week brings together the course’s central concerns with empire, sovereignty, governmentality, authoritarianism, capital, logistics, and digital infrastructure. Data colonialism is examined as a contested framework for understanding how human life and social relations are rendered available for extraction, classification, prediction, and governance. The readings connect contemporary data practices to histories of colonialism while also questioning analogies that obscure material violence, labour, ecological extraction, and regionally specific experiences. Rather than assuming either direct historical continuity or complete technological novelty, the seminar develops a critical genealogy of how governmental logics are translated and reassembled under new infrastructural conditions. It concludes by examining regulation, refusal, local knowledge, collective ownership, infrastructural struggle, and technological plurality as possible forms of resistance. Discussion Questions 1. What is gained and obscured by describing data extraction as colonialism? 2. Is data colonialism an analogy, a continuity, or a rearticulation of colonial power? 3. How are territory, population, security, and sovereignty reorganized through digital infrastructures? 4. How do capitalism, authoritarian desire, and coloniality intersect in contemporary data governance? 5. Does national digital sovereignty challenge colonial dependency, or can it strengthen domestic authoritarianism? 6. What would decolonizing data and digital infrastructure require beyond representation, transparency, and local data ownership? 7. Where can resistance occur: in law, design, labour, community knowledge, refusal, or infrastructural disruption?

Week 15 Preparation for final paper

Week 16 Final Paper Presentation