-
DIESL Summer Seminar 2025
The Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL) wrapped up the academic year with its Summer Seminar on 26 June 2025 at Aalto University, in Espoo, Finland. The event brought together DIESL researchers from the Aalto and Oxford Universities, featuring short research presentations on topics including the geography of cloud compute, platform interoperability, the emergent frameworks for…
-
Open position: Postdoctoral researcher, ERC GEOCLOUD project
Location: Aalto University, Helsinki area, Finland Start date: Autumn 2025 Post duration: 3 years in the first instance, with a 1-year extension negotiable Applications evaluated on a rolling basis The Digital Economic Security Lab is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher with a background in politics, law, economics, or related disciplines to work on GEOCLOUD: The Geopolitics of…
-
New article: How economics and security shape global reach of US and Chinese clouds
A new article titled “Weaponised interdependence in a bipolar world: how economic forces and security interests shape the global reach of US and Chinese cloud data centres” by Vili Lehdonvirta, Boxi Wu, and Zoe Hawkins has just been published by the Review of International Political Economy, a leading journal in the IPE field. Abstract United States…
-
Boxi Wu wins OII thesis prize
Boxi Wu, a member of the Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL) has won the Oxford Internet Institute’s 2024 MSc Thesis Prize for the MSc in Social Science of the Internet. The thesis prize recognises outstanding work and contributions to the field. Boxi’s thesis titled “Frictions in the Cloud: An Ethnographic Case Study of Local Data Centre Contestation…
-
Digital Economic Security Seminar – Spring 2025 Programme
Organisers/Hosts: Vili Lehdonvirta, Philipp Riederle Sessions: Tuesdays, 12pm–1pm (UK time), during Oxford term time, via Zoom Participation: Open to researchers and students from any university or research institution. Please apply here if you would like to join the seminar sessions. Spring/Trinity Term 2025 About the Oxford-Aalto Digital Economic Security Seminar Today’s economies are critically dependent…
-
What Meta’s plan to build the world’s longest undersea cable means for digital infrastructure and geopolitics
Meta recently announced project Waterworth, the company’s plan to build the world’s longest submarine cable system. In this blog post, OII’s Professor Vili Lehdonvirta and DPhil candidate Anniki Mikelsaar ask what geopolitical and economic significance this massive new infrastructure project may have. Key findings How big tech is rewiring the world When data moves between…
Digital Economic Security Lab
Professor Vili Lehdonvirta
Aalto University and University of Oxford