Sezgin Soenmez: The India Stack – Between Networked Growth and Territorial Control. [Abstract]

In recent years, India’s digital economy has developed into a global player for Internet services and is considered a key growth market for international technology companies. As a basis for its digital leadership claims, India is pursuing its own approach to digital infrastructure with the India Stack, the largest biometric data and instant payment system in the world, which is related to historical digital sovereignty claims and imaginations of space, infrastructure, and privacy. This article aims to reconstruct the conflictual multistakeholder Internet governance discourse in India regarding the India Stack and to examine it against the background of a spatial sociological perspective of the global changes of the Internet under the term of refiguration (1). After a brief review of the emergence of the Internet in India against the backdrop of the digital network economy (2), the text looks at the discourses and spatial imaginaries associated with the India Stack, which are centered around the concepts of access, empowerment, and privacy (3). This reveals the specific regional figuration of India’s infrastructure logics, which are shaped between territorial and digital sovereignty claims and dependencies on globalized network economies (4).

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