"Digital sovereignty" has become a prominent term across the EU and its candidate states since the notion of a single open Internet was disrupted at its origin, the US. The EU Commission has outlined several versions of its technological autonomy agenda since 2019, while aspiring members began adopting language from Brussels. Serbian and Albanian presidents, together with other leaders of the so-called Western Balkan region have framed digital sovereignty chiefly through data privacy, which they argue is most effectively ensured by constructing national data centers. The central research question of this study asks how the concept of digital sovereignty is implemented within Europe’s semi-periphery, or how cyber norms formed at political cores are transmitted further down the geopolitical hierarchy? The Western Balkans case serves to examine norm formation across legal, infrastructural, and narrative dimensions of digital governance. The key argument is that current policies reflect both policy inertia and recognized opportunities for political actors to promise a new phase of economic growth and developmental options. This paper contributes to international relations and cybersecurity scholarship by analyzing norm creation through the "Brussels effect" in the cyber domain. It further adds to democratization research by examining the (mis)use of emerging issues in countries already considered or nearing classification as "hybrid regimes".

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