In a world where digital development and policymaking are dominated by Silicon Valley tech giants, the BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - play an increasingly important role. With forty percent of the world's population and twenty-five percent of global GDP, these nat ... ions possess vast troves of personal data. Yet, their conceptions, narratives, and initiatives of digital sovereignty remain understudied. This volume is the first to explore digital sovereignty from a Global South perspective and offers a forward-looking take on what a world less dependent on Silicon Valley might look like. It brings together excellent analyses of BRICS digital sovereignty issues, from historical imaginaries to up-to-date conceptualizations, e-payment to smart cities, legal analysis to geopolitical assessment. By offering neglected perspectives from the Global South, this book makes important contributions to the digital sovereignty debate. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core more

"Cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain technology that underlies them, have attracted much attention over the last decade from scholars, tech communities, financial institutions, states and more. The extreme volatility of the cryptocurrency market has made some people very rich and cost others almost ... everything. Importantly, there are many indications that marginalized communities are especially attracted to this new technology while being more vulnerable to issues such as fraud and exploitation in this field. This paper reviews academic research –predominantly social scientific – on cryptocurrencies and financial blockchain to determine the extent to which they engage with the experiences, agencies, and knowledges of marginalized communities. Overall, the findings show that, bar a few important exceptions that take seriously marginalized communities, academic research has largely focused on traditionally dominant actors such as crypto evangelists, fintech developers, states, and banks. Furthermore, the knowledges of marginalized communities are almost entirely absent while research privileges already dominant theories and research methodologies. Such trends in academic research on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology reproduce existing knowledge hierarchies and lead to the further material marginalization of already vulnerable communities. In light of these findings, we conclude with some recommendations for further research that can challenge these problematic dynamics."(Abstract) more