Data Localization, AI Governance, and Digital Sovereignty in Emerging Economies

This chapter addresses that analytical fragmentation by developing a comparative framework through which localization rules, AI governance instruments, and sovereignty claims are examined as mutually conditioning layers of digital statecraft rather than as isolated legal categories. A structured review of an uploaded Scopus corpus, which contained 139 records, was combined with a comparative analysis of India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Brazil, alongside official instruments issued by the African Union, UNESCO, the OECD, and NIST. The analysis demonstrates that broad territorial restrictions on data do not by themselves produce operational digital sovereignty; durable sovereignty is achieved when selective localization is aligned with data classification, compute and cloud capacity, risk-based AI governance, and interoperable cross-border transfer mechanisms.