Epistemic guardianship in EU Digital regulation

• Department of Law

This event features a discussion with Dr. Vigjilenca Abazi (King’s College London).

The central claim of this talk is that the effective governance of the digital public sphere requires not only obligations imposed on platforms, but also the active recognition of civic actors as co-constitutive of accountability because of their epistemic capacity. Civic actors generate, validate, and mobilise knowledge that regulators cannot access under conditions of opacity and systemic risk. This is not a supportive function. It is a structural condition for accountability to operate within EU digital regulation.

Speaker: Vigjilenca Abazi is Lecturer in Law at King’s College London. Her research focuses on law and technology, EU law and governance, and whistleblowing law. She holds a PhD and an LLM from the University of Amsterdam, as well as an LLM from Yale Law School. Prior to joining King’s, she was Assistant Professor at Maastricht University and held fellowships at Yale Law School, NYU School of Law, and Columbia Law School. She is the author of Official Secrets and Oversight in the EU (OUP, 2019). Alongside her academic career, Vigjilenca is engaged in public interest work. She co-founded the Stella Network to promote mentorship for girls and women in North Macedonia, is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the European Whistleblowing Institute, and served as an Obama Europe Leader (2024–2025). She is admitted to practise law in New York and has worked on First Amendment cases as part of a fellowship with the Government Accountability Project in Washington D.C.