Digital capabilities are poised to revolutionise business processes due to an explosion of data, further reshaping global data governance. The modern digital economy relies on the use of big data, which is becoming the primary driver of wealth creation and transforming the world. This project delves into the intersection of EU, US, and China, and Africa data governance frameworks, particularly focusing on cross-border data flows and their implications for data centre strategy and data security. These cutting-edge challenges are embedded in three competing paradigms: the Brussels Effect, the Washington Consensus, and the Beijing Model. Their governance models will play a crucial role in determining how each jurisdiction deals with democracy, the rule of law and the transformation of digital economies. As such, it is essential to examine both the divergences and convergences of the approaches taken by these selected jurisdictions, considering their social, cultural, political, and legal contexts.
As a ground-breaking endeavour, the project aims to challenge theoretical assumptions that portray Africa as an outlier in global data governance regimes. More significantly, it will make an original contribution by critically interpreting ‘African Agency’ under the Agenda 2063 of the African Union. Amidst these initiatives, global consensus on data-related challenges remains elusive, with critical debates over rules governing data centre strategies and cross-border data transfers. This joint research seeks to articulate a strategic vision for the reshaping of global data governance. A theoretical account of Digital State Capitalism (DSC), as an ideologically ‘invisible’ framework, will explain how China is increasingly influencing the process.
Qingxiu Bu is Reader in Global Law at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. He has published widely in a variety of areas of law, many of which are themed around law and global challenges, with a particular focus on the development of legal infrastructures in transnational law and global governance. He has previously been a lecturer in law at Cardiff Law School of Cardiff University and the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast (UK), during which he taught transnational business law at the Centre of Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS), Georgetown University (USA) as Adjunct Professor. Qingxiu Bu was appointed as Li Kashing Professor of Practice at the Faculty of Law, McGill University (Canada) in 2019. He has held visiting posts at various institutions, including Lund University (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel) and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Germany.
Thomas Feldhoff is Professor of Human Geography at the Faculty of Geography and Geosciences, Ruhr University Bochum. After graduating from East Asian Studies with a regional focus on Japan, he received his PhD in Geography at the University of Duisburg in 1999. He habilitated at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2004 with a thesis on the institutional foundations of construction lobbyism in Japan. He received the 2006 JaDe Award of the Association for the Promotion of Japanese German Cultural Relations (JaDe) and a Book Prize of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) in 2008 for his publication Bau-Lobbyismus in Japan.
Before joining Ruhr University Bochum in April 2016, Thomas Feldhoff held senior faculty positions at universities in Germany, the UK and Japan. His research and teaching today focuses on the nexus of georesources, sustainability and geopolitics with regard to sociotechnical transitions. It is based on a relational, multi-scalar, comparative perspective that looks into the ties to wider politics of territoriality, state, economy, science, and nature.
Thomas Feldhoff is Coordinator and Co-Director of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Redesigning the Post-Industrial City (EMJM RePIC), an inter-university, multidisciplinary study programme run by eight partners of the European University Alliance UNIC – The European University of Cities in Post-Industrial Transition.