critical infrastructure lab

Towards Critical Internet Governance: Centering Power and Struggles for Justice and Distribution

Special Issue Editors: Niels ten Oever, Fieke Jansen, Fernanda Rosa, Roxana Radu

TL;DR: Please submit a 750-word extended abstract outlining your research question, theoretical framework, methodology, and contribution to the field of critical internet governance by July 1 to submission@criticalinfralab.net . We will notify you by September 1 whether your abstract has been accepted, and will inform you of the target journal as soon as possible.

Over the past three decades, the Internet has shifted from an exploratory, experimental space to a densely financialised and highly consolidated infrastructure (Ortiz Freuler 2022). Where the “early Internet” was an unknown place that nonetheless felt like a home to a nascent community actively shaping its ecosystem, there were already many power structures at play (DeNardis 2009, Russell 2014, Carr 2015, Radu 2019). Today’s Internet is intimately familiar to billions, mostly as users and consumers, yet increasingly inhospitable and ungovernable to many (Bhat 2020). This transformation has profound implications for how Internet governance should be understood, practised, and studied.

Internet governance as a field emerged in a period when the Internet was widely perceived as a space for exploration in modes of connection and institutional experimentation, rather than extraction. In this zeitgeist, scholarly interest in the concentration of power in a distributed infrastructure focused primarily on theorizing about its technical coordination, regulatory design, and institutional arrangements. In doing so, scholars often omit to engage with other disciplines that situate these developments within histories of exploitation and extraction, such as decolonial, feminist, environmental, and broader social justice perspectives (Rosa 2022, Jansen 2025). 

The contemporary Internet, structured around platform capitalism, corporate concentration, and opaque infrastructural arrangements invites a transformation of Internet governance scholarship. The Internet’s significant social, economic, and environmental dependencies demand dialogue and engagement with a wider set of perspectives that offer critique and imagine “emancipatory alternatives to transcend the status quo” (Gunderson, 2020, p. 89; Ruha, 2024). This Special Issue takes up that challenge by asking: How do critical approaches to internet governance reveal the infrastructural and institutional foundations of power and ideology in the contemporary Internet, and in what ways can these insights generate alternative trajectories and pluriversal perspectives aimed at reconfiguring individual/collective rights, agency, and opportunity?

This Special Issue on Critical Internet Governance builds on a 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) pre-conference held at the University of Amsterdam in July 2024, and a satellite event at AOIR (Association of Internet Researchers) held in Rio de Janeiro in July 2025, where scholars from around the world convened to rethink what a critical field of Internet governance could be. Participants highlighted how crucial questions of power, materiality, environmental justice, disability, gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic inequalities, digital colonialism, and sovereignty, along with the role of non-human actors and ecologies, remain marginal in mainstream Internet governance debates, even as they are increasingly central to emerging work on infrastructures, platforms, and AI.

The Special Issue invites contributions that foreground the technopolitics of the Internet and its infrastructures through plural, critical, and situated approaches. We particularly welcome work that:

• Foregrounds the study of power in internet governance, including infrastructural consolidation, materiality, and political economy 
• Brings decolonial, Black, anti-racist, feminist, Indigenous, and anti-fascist perspectives to Internet governance institutions, practices, and standards 
• Connects Internet governance to environmental justice, resource extraction, and the materialities of digital infrastructures
• Reconsiders sovereignty, jurisdiction, and control in relation to transnational power asymmetries and global South perspectives 
• Examines how AI, platforms, and other “applications on top” of the Internet reconfigure governance, responsibility, and accountability
• Centers marginalized actors and “invisible” forms of governance, including community networks, and grassroots initiatives 
• Expands the unit of analysis beyond states and corporations to include non-human actors, ecologies, and long-durée historical, social, political, and economic  processes

By bringing together Internet governance scholars and researchers from adjacent and intersecting fields (including STS, critical data studies, media studies, communications, political economy, environmental humanities, decolonial, feminist and Indigenous studies, and law), this Special Issue aims to consolidate and amplify a critical turn in Internet governance. The goal is not only to broaden the conceptual and empirical scope of the field, but also to reimagine its sense of community: who counts as an Internet governance scholar, what infrastructures and practices are considered, and which futures of the Internet are rendered thinkable.

We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and positional contributions in the form of full journal articles that engage with Internet governance as a site of contestation over global digital media infrastructures and that propose alternative horizons for governing the Internet otherwise.

Please submit a 750-word extended abstract outlining your research question, theoretical framework, methodology, and contribution to the field of critical internet governance by July 1 to submission@criticalinfralab.net . We will notify you by September 1 whether your abstract has been accepted by the editors, and will inform you of the target journal as soon as possible.

References

Benjamin, Ruha. 2024. Imagination: A Manifesto ‎ W. W. Norton & Company

Bhat, R. (2020). The politics of internet infrastructure: Communication policy, governmentality and subjectivation in Chhattisgarh, India [PhD Thesis]. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Carr, M. (2015). Power Plays in Global Internet Governance. Millennium, 43(2), 640–659. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829814562655

DeNardis, Laura. Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance. MIT Press, 2009.

Jansen, F. (2025). From growth to scarcity: Can Internet Governance meet the ecological crisis? Critical Internet Governance: From Positions to a Field, 44. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15627726 

Gunderson T. (2020). Making the Familiar Strange: Sociology Contra Reification. Routledge.

Ortiz Freuler, J. (2022). The weaponization of private corporate infrastructure: Internet fragmentation and coercive diplomacy in the 21st century. Global Media and China, doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364221139729

Radu, R. (2019). Negotiating Internet Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rosa, F. R. (2022). From community networks to shared networks: The paths of Latin-Centric Indigenous networks to a pluriversal internet. Information, Communication & Society, 26(11), 2326-2344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085614 

Russell, A. L. (2014). Open Standards and the Digital Age. Cambridge University Press.

Truscello, M. (2023). The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet. South Atlantic Quarterly, 122(4), 811–826.