Fellows 2017
STANISLAV BUDNITSKY
University of Pennsylvania
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship
Digital Nationalisms: Identity, Strategic Communications, and Global Internet Governance
ABSTRACT
Policy debates about the global internet’s legal and technological architecture, known as global internet governance, have become critical for the future of the democratic public sphere. This intergovernmental debate is between advocates of “internet freedom”, unfettered movement of information across national borders, and “internet sovereignty”, primacy of state sovereignty over global information flows. Estonia and Russia have emerged as leaders of respective camps. The study situates these countries’ internet discourse and policy within their post-1991 nation- and state-building efforts to show why and how their historically grounded national identities have informed their digital regimes. Stanislav argues that nationalism remains a crucial socio-political force in the age of digital globalization - with major consequences for rights and freedoms in Eastern Europe and beyond.
BIOGRAPHY
Stanislav Budnitsky is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, Stanislav received Ph.D. in Communication from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He holds Master’s degrees in Nationalism Studies from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and in Journalism from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. Stanislav was a fellow of the Media Policy Summer Institute at Oxford University, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and Stanford University’s U.S.-Russia Forum. Prior to graduate studies, he was a Moscow-based media producer and writer.
PUBLICATIONS
Budnitsky, Stanislav, and Lianrui Jia. 2018. “Branding Internet Sovereignty: Digital Media and the Chinese–Russian Cyberalliance.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 21 (5): 594–613
Aronczyk, Melissa, and Stanislav Budnitsky. 2017. “Nation Branding and Internet Governance: Framing Debates over Freedom and Sovereignty.” In The Net and the Nation-State: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Internet Governance, edited by Uta Kohl, 48–66. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Budnitsky, Stanislav. 2017. Review of Will the Internet Fragment? Sovereignty, Globalization, and Cyberspace, by Milton Mueller. International Journal of Communication 11 (November): 5
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