Digital sovereignty as a political and economic struggle: the state and social movements in education

The concept of digital sovereignty is a key framework for analysing geopolitical, economic and ideological disputes over technological infrastructures in contemporary capitalism. From a critical perspective, digital sovereignty in education is a contested field where state, corporate and social-movement actors struggle to define how digital infrastructures should be governed, owned and operationalised. This article analyses two configurations of digital sovereignty in Spanish education policy: ALIA, a state-led public AI infrastructure within Spain’s national AI strategy, and Democratic Digitalisation (DD), a social-movement-driven platform alternative to Google’s dominance. Methodologically, the study combines Critical Discourse Analysis, Policy Network Analysis and Technographic Analysis to examine how digital sovereignty is articulated through policy discourse, governance relations and socio-technical configurations. Findings show that ALIA translates public autonomy into an AI project, but its operationalisation remains entangled with market-oriented agendas and public-private governance that limit state-led sovereignty. Meanwhile, DD advances technological sovereignty through open-source software, auditability, interoperability and community data control. However, through the lens of critical digital sovereignty in education, its transformative potential remains limited insofar as infrastructural autonomy is not fully connected to teachers’ labour, curricular democracy and collective participation in school governance.