Towards European Digital Fairness and Sovereignty – From Just Price to AI Governance in Modern Europe

A One-Day CEMES-FIDMA Research Network Workshop on the Legal, Political and Intellectual Transformations of Market

Brief overview:

• Activity: Half-day interdisciplinary European research network workshop with researchers from Malmö University, Copenhagen University and FIDMA Network.
• Date: 4th December 2026, 9.00-15.00
• Venue: Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society
• To be a part of this exciting event please send an abstract to behrang.kianzad@mau.se no later than 15th September.

Summary

What does it mean to make digital fairness European? This halfday FIDMA-CEMES research workshop investigates how ideas of digital sovereignty, digital fairness, market order, consumer autonomy and democratic legitimacy have travelled through modern European political, legal and intellectual history and reappear today in EU digital regulation, AI governance and platform markets.
By bringing together researchers from law, history, political economy, philosophy, media studies and European studies, we hope this workshop will reposition digital sovereignty as a problem of modern European transformation rather than as a narrow technology-law issue.
This event is planned as a concentrated half-day research workshop hosted at Malmö University divided on a morning and an afternoon session with lunch break. Cost of travel and lodging will be provided for invited researchers.

Background

Fairness has returned to the centre of European public life. The Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the Data Act, the AI Act, GDPR and the renewed interest in Article 102 TFEU all mobilise vocabularies of fairness, contestability, transparency, autonomy, dependency and institutional accountability. Yet the meaning of fairness in Europe remains historically layered and politically contested. It cannot be understood only as a compliance term in current digital regulation. It belongs to a longer European story about just price, market order, social conflict, democratic legitimacy, ordoliberalism, consumer citizenship, welfare institutions and the changing relationship between public authority and private power.
This workshop therefore reframes digital fairness as a problem in modern European
studies. It asks how Europe’s intellectual, legal and political traditions have shaped the concept of fair market order, and how these traditions are now being reworked under conditions of platformisation, data extraction and AI-mediated decision-making. The central hypothesis is that contemporary EU digital regulation should be read not only as technical economic regulation, but as a new phase in Europe’s attempt to govern concentrated
private power through public norms of legitimacy.
This approach creates a stronger bridge between European studies and current digital market research. It links the history of European political economy, legal philosophy and market regulation to urgent contemporary questions: Who defines fairness in digital markets? How do European institutions transform moral and political
ideals into administrative rules? How do ideas of autonomy and citizenship survive when markets are organised through data, platform dependency and algorithmic infrastructures? And how does Europe’s regulatory self-understanding travel globally – through imitation, resistance, trade, standard-setting and geopolitical contestation?

Research questions

This workshop will connect scholars working on European legal history, competition and market regulation, political theory, philosophy, digital media, AI governance and global Europe.

1. How do EU digital market and AI laws reshape European ideas of sovereignty, autonomy, democracy, consumer citizenship and institutional legitimacy?
2. How do European fairness norms travel globally through regulation, standard-setting, corporate compliance and contestation by other regions?
3. Which interdisciplinary methods can make the study of digital fairness legible across history, law, politics, philosophy and media studies?
4. What is the interaction between digital sovereignty and digital fairness?

Programme

• Welcome address by CEMES & FIDMA
• Morning Panel: Digital fairness, digital sovereignty and the European regulatory state – DMA, DSA, AI Act, Data Act and GDPR as contemporary market-ordering projects and their interaction with consumer protection and consumer sovereignty
• Afternoon Panel: How to study digital sovereignty and digital fairness across law, history, philosophy, politics and media studies in the interface of law and policy
• Closing Roundtable

To be a part of this exciting event please send an abstract to behrang.kianzad@mau.se no later than 15th September.