What are we trying to protect when we speak of sovereignty?
Sovereignty is not only about control. It is about preserving the capacity of communities to shape their own futures, sustain their cultural practices, and develop and share their forms of knowledge, in ways that respect human dignity, equality, and the fundamental rights. For the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), the question is therefore what sovereignty is for. What kind of freedom should it protect? What forms of collective life should it make possible? And what relationships between citizens, institutions and knowledge does it require?
Sovereignty and the temptation of closure
Sovereignty is often understood through the language of protection: protecting our data, infrastructures, technologies, institutions and knowledge from external dependencies. A system can become so concerned with protecting itself that it can begin to forget the very things that make it valuable. International collaboration, circulation of researchers, exchange of ideas and access to knowledge can all come to be perceived as vulnerabilities. The challenge is to strengthen sovereignty without undermining openness. This means enabling research communities and institutions to retain meaningful control over their knowledge, data, and infrastructures, while preserving the international cooperation, exchange, and circulation of knowledge on which science depends.
Knowledge is not simply an asset that can be secured and stored. It is produced through encounters, disagreement, interpretation and circulation. A sovereign knowledge system must therefore protect not only what it possesses, but also its capacity to question itself. A knowledge system that cannot critically examine its own foundations risks becoming captive to its established hierarchies, political interests, or technological choices. In this sense, openness is not simply a matter of access or circulation: it is also a condition for maintaining the capacity for collective self-examination, intellectual dissent, and transformation.
These aspects lies at the heart of many SSH traditions, from political theory and philosophy to sociology, history, anthropology and critical studies. What is new is the urgency of bringing this capacity to bear on today's debate about knowledge sovereignty.
Freedom and sovereignty as the two faces of the same coin
Modern political thought has often been structured around a tension between the individual and the collective. Yet democratic sovereignty introduces another possibility: popular sovereignty, in which collective self-government is grounded in the freedom of individuals.
The work of Serge Audier (2020) on democratic individualism offers a particularly useful lens here . In his engagement with Tocqueville and Claude Lefort, Audier explores the relationship between individual autonomy and democratic life. Democratic societies liberate individuals from inherited hierarchies and traditional forms of belonging, but this independence can also lead them to withdraw into private worlds, leaving public affairs increasingly to others.
Democracy therefore needs individuals who are autonomous without becoming isolated; capable of thinking for themselves while remaining capable of acting with others. This is particularly relevant to knowledge. As Martha Nussbaum (2011) argues, democratic societies depend on the ability of individuals to think critically, examine their own assumptions, and question established authority. Intellectual freedom requires researchers to exercise independent judgement, challenge institutions, and disagree with their peers without fear of reprisal. Yet research is never an entirely individual endeavour. Knowledge emerges through communities, infrastructures, languages, institutions, criticism, and exchange. The challenge, therefore, is to sustain collective systems of knowledge that enable individual freedom rather than constrain it. The democratic researcher is an individual who can remain autonomous while participating in a common world.
Trust: the missing dimension of sovereignty
This is where trust enters the picture. We trust institutions to apply rules, researchers to produce and scrutinise knowledge, peers to challenge one another in good faith, and infrastructures to preserve and provide access to knowledge. Yet trust is not the absence of scrutiny.
A healthy knowledge system does not ask us simply to believe. It creates the conditions under which claims can be examined, challenged and revised. Transparency, accountability, peer review, provenance, reproducibility and open debate are therefore not alternatives to trust, but mechanisms through which trust can be established, tested and renewed.
This matters greatly in an environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, disinformation and contested information ecosystems. The answer to declining trust cannot be blind confidence in institutions, nor the assumption that every individual must determine truth alone. Democratic societies need institutions precisely because they can organise collective processes of scrutiny, disagreement and correction, while making the production and validation of knowledge accountable to those who depend on it.
This brings us back to sovereignty. If trust depends on the conditions under which knowledge is produced, governed and shared, sovereignty cannot be reduced to ownership, control or independence from external actors. It also concerns the capacity of communities to shape these conditions and to maintain meaningful agency over the technologies, infrastructures and forms of knowledge on which they depend. In this sense, sovereignty may involve what Deleuze calls reterritorialisation: regaining a connection between practices, technologies and forms of knowledge that have become detached from the communities, contexts and purposes in which they matter (Deleuze et Guattari 1972, Théry 2008). Rather, it means restoring the capacity to decide how knowledge is produced, whose interests it serves, how it circulates, and how it connects to wider systems of cooperation.
Sovereignty and trust thus become inseparable. A knowledge system cannot be genuinely sovereign if its communities have lost the capacity to understand, question or influence how it operates; nor can it sustain trust if it shields its decisions from scrutiny in the name of autonomy. The challenge is to build systems that are sufficiently autonomous to remain answerable to their communities, and sufficiently open to remain accountable to others. This is perhaps the deeper meaning of sovereignty in science: the collective capacity to participate in it on terms that can be understood, questioned and negotiated.
What the SSH already bring to the sovereignty debate
Different SSH disciplines have long explored the questions now at the centre of Europe's sovereignty debate. Reducing the contribution of the SSH to adding a “human dimension” to questions that would otherwise be technical would be a serious mistake. Political, social, cultural, legal, economic and individual dimensions of sovereignty have been debated and studied in the SSH for decades. What technology does today is to give these questions new forms — through data, infrastructures, algorithms and platforms. Technological sovereignty is shaped by the ways societies organise knowledge, distribute power, establish trust and negotiate collective choices.
Towards a democratic conception of knowledge sovereignty
Sovereignty is often associated with independence. Yet no contemporary research ecosystem can be entirely independent: Researchers collaborate across borders, data circulate, infrastructures depend on one another, and knowledge is cumulative and shared. The objective is therefore to develop the capacity to choose, govern and negotiate our interdependencies. This is where sovereignty and responsibility meet.
So it might be worth to propose our conception of knowledge sovereignty: Far from being the ability to control data, infrastructures or technologies, knowledge sovereignty is the capacity of a community to produce, govern, question and share knowledge while retaining meaningful agency over the conditions under which this happens.
Such sovereignty requires autonomy and openness; security and freedom; institutions and the possibility of questioning them; and trust sustained by transparency, accountability and the possibility of dissent. The contribution of the SSH to the sovereignty debate is therefore not simply to provide another perspective alongside technological, economic or infrastructural approaches. Their deeper contribution may be to connect dimensions that are too often considered separately.
Ultimately knowledge sovereignty should be seen as retaining the collective capacity to produce it, question it, share it and decide what kind of world it should help us build. And individuals who remain free not by standing apart from a common world, but by participating in its creation, questioning its institutions and taking responsibility for its future.
References
Audier, S (2020), La cité écologique. Pour un éco-républicanisme, La Découverte, 2020.
Nussbaum, M (2011), Les Émotions démocratiques : comment former le citoyen du XXIe siècle, Flammarion.
Deleuze, G et F Guattari (1972). L’anti-œdipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Tome 1. Les éditions de minuit.
Théry, H (2008). « Mondialisation, déterritorialisation, reterritorialisation ». Bulletin de l'Association de Géographes Français année 2008, vol. 85–3, p. 324–331.
About the author
Suzanne Dumouchel heads the Open Science Department at GRICAD, a research infrastructure at CNRS, and is the director of the European Open Science Cloud Association. She is the author of Le journal littéraire en France au dix-huitième siècle : émergence d'une culture virtuelle. She also writes on strategy, governance and organisational ecology on Substack: The Hidden Ecology of Strategy, https://suzannedumouchel.substack.com/.