Sebastian Berg

About

Sebastian Berg is a political theorist in the research group "Technology, Power, and Domination" and a member of the research group "Politics of Digitalization" at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He studied Political Science and Public Law and has conducted research and taught at FU Berlin, Helmut Schmidt University / University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, and Princeton University.

His current research is devoted to a critical theory of digital statehood: he examines how, in the course of administrative digitalization and the growing penetration of state structures by private actors, digital infrastructures as well as political institutions are subjected to a profound transformation – and what shifts in political relations of domination ensue, reverberating in contested concepts such as digital sovereignty and democratic self-determination.

He further pursues research on theories and approaches to digital democracy, democratic representation, and political phenomenology. In his dissertation Operations at the Site of Power. A Critique of the Political in the Digital Constellation, he draws on the work of Claude Lefort to develop a critical-phenomenological perspective on the principle of operativity – at once a generative core principle of digital technology and an emergent political and social ordering principle – interrogating it with regard to its implications for democratic theory.

Research Group: Technology, Power, and Domination