Digital Constitutionalism Network › view all

Together with colleagues, BIGSSS PhD fellow and SOCIUM member Dennis Redeker has been provided with three grants to continue a working group on "Digital Constitutionalism" at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The grants help to continue and extend a work program started in 2019 as part of the working group Digital Constitutionalism: Promoting Public Values in Digital Technologies. Together with Mauro Santaniello (Università degli Studi di Salerno) and Claudia Padovani (Università degli Studi di Padova), Dennis assembled an interdisciplinary group of international scholars to study how basic rights and fundamental values can best be protected in the digital age. The working group will conduct a hybrid or all-online kick-off workshop in Bochum in late October 2020. 

                  (Picture: CAIS-Workshop on Digital Constitutionalism 2019)

Digital constitutionalism describes the political process of entrenching rights and principles into the global governance of digital technologies, specifically the Internet. Digital constitutionalism does not describe actual legal constitutions but normative conversations about which rights and principles should govern the Internet – locally, nationally and globally. Documents of digital constitutionalism have been proposed by different kinds of actors - including civil society, business, governments, national parliaments, political parties, international organizations - and have emerged from a national level or transnationally. 

The Digital Constitutionalism Network aims to systematically study the political, social, and legal processes involved in this field. The Network was created in late 2019 from a working group on digital constitutionalism supported by the Bochum-based Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS). As of October 2020, the Network is composed of members located at fifteen universities in Africa, Australia, North and South America and Europe. As part of the activities of the Network, a number of its members have engaged in a teaching partnership that features common teaching activities that cover topics from our common research agenda. At Universität Bremen, the BA Politikwissenschaften seminar "Global Governance of Digital Technologies" (SoSe 2020) has been part of the teaching partnership. 

The recent grants will support the work of the Digital Constitutionalism Network for then next year. They fund the development of a digital resource to systematically disseminate research outputs, particularly datasets, of the network, and a small international conference being held in Bochum in the fall of 2021.  

If you are interested in joining the network, please contact Dennis at redeker@uni-bremen.de.