| Abstract [eng] |
„Digital Sovereignty and Human Rights: A Comparative Analysis of Cyberspace Regulation in China and Russia“ Nowadays, cyberspace become one of the most important battlefields in international relations and diplomacy. Cyberspace governance is fragmented into many segments, forming a multi-polar network involving the state, private IT businesses, organizations, and internet users, all contributing to internet governance. Western countries such as the USA are implementing the free and liberal ideologies of the internet, while the authoritarian states China and Russia are creating digital sovereignty of cyberspace and influencing geopolitical fragmentation of the network. This campaign is the assessment of this thesis because it poses a twofold threat to the democratic paradigm: the human rights of the individual and the human right to free access to information dissemination on the internet. While talking about cyberspace, one of the most controversial topics is the human rights of every internet user. This paper aims to answer how China and Russia formulate the doctrine of cyber- sovereignty and put it into practice regarding the Western principles of human rights on the internet. To implement the research, this paper first analyses all leading international relations theories, from which it is found that international regime theory is the most suitable to analyze deep cyberspace topics, such as human rights. The main empirical objective is the Freedom House “Freedom on the Net" annual reports from 2015 year. Exactly at that year, China was the first country to bring "Digital Sovereignty" to the international relations discourse, and Russia, in those years, started to think about digital sovereignty in Russia's cyberspace. In conclusion, this paper finds that both China and Russia are actively pursuing cyber sovereignty, with their strategies often overlapping. The analysis reveals that the fragmentation of the internet, driven by differing state perspectives on data security and content censorship, poses significant challenges to the protection of human rights online. Both countries have implemented similar measures in internet governance, such as VPN regulation and content filtering. However, their approaches differ in key aspects. China focuses on internal state processes, while Russia's strategy includes occasional internet shutdowns during politically sensitive events. These actions, which compromise human rights, indicate that their digital sovereignty does not align with international human rights standards. Therefore, their shaping policies can be viewed as a regime doctrine, legitimizing authoritarian interests in cyberspace operations. |
