Semantic Sovereignty and Non-Domination: Toward an Offline, Governable Knowledge Infrastructure

Modern knowledge and governance infrastructures increasingly rely on opaque digital systems that can impose subtle forms of domination on users and communities. This article argues that freedom as non-domination – in the republican sense of independence from unchecked, arbitrary power – should guide the design of knowledge architectures. It introduces semantic sovereignty as a principle ensuring communities retain control over the creation and interpretation of shared knowledge, rather than being subject to unaccountable algorithmic or corporate authorities. We diagnose how current digital platforms and AI-driven services often engender dependency, opacity, and lack of recourse, undermining epistemic agency and civic legitimacy. In response, we outline a framework of minimal design-ethical norms for just and governable epistemic infrastructures: offline-capable execution, fail-closed integrity safeguards, rigorous auditability, transparency, and inclusive multilingual support. These principles are illustrated through experimental systems (e.g. Konnaxion and its modules EkoH and Smart Vote) that embed non-domination values by design – for example, weighting expertise in decision-making without centralizing power, and enabling local verification of all knowledge artifacts. We conclude that combining republican political theory with information architecture yields actionable criteria for building autonomous, accountable, and equitable knowledge infrastructures that bolster democratic sovereignty in the digital age.