Symbiotic rivals? Writing state sovereignty through its contestation in the struggle between Australia and the digital giants

Abstract

Usual discussions of discursive sovereignty focus on public actors and their role in reproducing or changing the meaning of sovereignty. Meanwhile the role of non-state actors – and especially private corporations – remains understudied, and non-state challenges to state authority, together with the sovereign claims that public actors make in response, are seen as signs of a weakening sovereignty. This paper challenges this portrayal through the study of Google and Facebook’s resistance to Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code. The results show that private actors do contribute to the reinscription of discursive sovereignty even as they resist state policies, especially through the ways they perform their own identity in relation to that of the state. Furthermore, they show that the contestation of sovereignty by private actors is endogenous to the discourse of sovereignty, inherent in how the identities of actors both public and private are shaped by its discourse; and that said contestation can be extremely relevant to the reinscription of sovereignty as a hegemonic discourse, rather than signal its weakening. Therefore, I argue that contestation is symbiotic to sovereignty, and sovereignty claims are not the symptom of its weakness, but rather an inescapable phase of its constant reinscription.