The Geopolitics of Cryptography: End-to-End Encryption at the Intersection of Technology, Security, and Sovereignty

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has become a central site of conflict among privacy rights, national security, and digital sovereignty. This paper integrates comparative policy analysis, technical feasibility assessment, and multi-stakeholder analysis to examine the international dynamics of E2EE regulation across twenty jurisdictions. It develops an original five-part typology—prohibitionist, conditional-access, permissive, hybrid, and network-shutdown-dependent—and argues that regulatory divergence is shaped less by technical constraints than by how digital sovereignty is conceptualized, the character of political regimes, and institutional linkages with the lawful-interception industry. The paper further demonstrates that backdoor demands have persisted for thirty years despite their technical infeasibility. This persistence is explained by a self-reinforcing cycle in which organizational reputation maintenance, security-industry interests, and political framing around child protection and counterterrorism mutually reinforce each other. Platform companies are repositioned as quasi-sovereign actors whose norm-making capacity over encrypted digital communications rivals that of states. These private entities exercise strategic resistance through technical architecture and cryptographic discourse, doing so selectively as a function of market scale and state coercive capacity. The paper incorporates events through May 2026, including the January 2025 UK Technical Capability Notice to Apple, the subsequent US-brokered withdrawal of that demand, and the April 2026 expiry of the EU CSAR 1.0 interim scanning regime. From this analysis it derives four principles of regulatory design: prior technical feasibility assessment, proportionality, international interoperability, and multi-stakeholder governance inclusive of the Global South.