Digital Public Infrastructures or DPIs are the latest buzzword in global policy and governance circles, promoted by the United Nations, the World Bank, global philanthropies and governments across Global North and South. DPIs originated from the India Stack model to build meta, stackable digital infrastructures (for identity, payment and data) for seamless flows of public goods and services, where the state is responsible towards building public facing digital infrastructures and actual goods and service delivery are opened up to both public and private sectors. As per recent reports, there are more than 100 countries building DPI or DPI-like infrastructures. While their definition and meaning are fuzzy and contested, they offer new ways of thinking about infrastructures, governance and role of the state in times of crisis for state sovereignty and democratic institutions.

As infrastructures allow the state to translate its political power into everyday features of life and thereby represent its power to its citizens, it thus becomes important to unpack what power constellations DPIs are constituted of, how will they shift existing regulatory, bureaucratic and technical arrangements of governance, and what implication will they hold for state sovereignty and democratic institutions. To address some of these questions, we invite you to a panel discussion with:

Niels Ten Oever Assistant Professor in the European Studies department and co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam working on how invisible infrastructures shape the socio-technical ordering of information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and opportunities

Carolina Maurity Frossard Assistant Professor in the Political & Economic Geographies, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam examining how digital devices and infrastructures shape socio-spatial politics and inequalities at different scales

Nafis A. Hasan Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam studying impacts of digital technology on humans and organizations in the realm of public governance in South Asia

Bidisha Chaudhuri Assistant Professor of Government, Information Cultures and Digital Citizenship in the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, investigating the political economy of digital infrastructures and governance in the Global South