Claiming Digital Collective Rights Against Data Dispossession. How Digital Technologies Reproduce Settler-Colonial Relations and How Collective Rights Can Disrupt Them

This thesis analyses contemporary digital technologies as central tools for the reconfiguration of settler-colonial relations. From a decolonial perspective, it argues that current privacy and data protection regimes tend to reduce exploitation primarily to an economic issue, failing to address collective harms and the substitution logic inherent to digital settler colonialism. Revisiting the theoretical debate on land dispossession, this thesis develops a conceptual analogy between land and data, introducing the concept of data dispossession to illustrate how digital technologies operate through recursive processes that replace social relations, identities, and cosmologies with a universalising, fragmented computational order. To counter these dynamics, it proposes the recognition of collective digital rights as a mechanism to resist data dispossession. Finally, Indigenous Data Sovereignty Initiatives (IDSov) in CANZUS countries are analysed as case-studies, with particular attention to the First Nations Information Governance Centre in Canada and Māori Data Sovereignty institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand.