Digital Diplomacy

Abstract

Digital diplomacy has no shortage of synonyms or terminology debates (digital diplomacy has been variously referred to, or described, as “e-Diplomacy,” “cyber Diplomacy,” “net diplomacy,” “#diplomacy,” “diplomacy 2.0,” “public diplomacy 2.0,” “networked diplomacy,” “real-time diplomacy,” “21st-century statecraft,” “diplomacy in the digital age,” “digitalization of diplomacy,” or “digidiplomacy”), yet each term shares a common perspective: the use of digital information communication technologies, such as the Internet, to achieve diplomatic objectives. While foreign ministries have used newly available technologies throughout their history for various purposes—including cable wire, radio transmissions, telephone, television, video conferencing, among others—the advent of the Internet ushered in an explosion both in the use of digital technologies in diplomacy and in scholarly interest in how those technologies may be changing the role of diplomacy in world politics (see Oxford Bibliographies article in International Relations “History of Diplomacy”). Digital diplomacy scholarship has developed through two fairly distinct phases, with different emphases and from two different, and distinct, vantage points. Early work in digital diplomacy attempted to answer broad theoretical questions about the activity itself: What is digital diplomacy? How is it different than traditional diplomacy (see Oxford Bibliographies article in International Relations “Face-to-Face Diplomacy”)? How does digital diplomacy affect traditional diplomacy, if at all? Subsequently, scholars have built upon these theoretical perspectives and asked specific methodological questions and interrogated critical issues of measuring causal effects: How can scholars empirically demonstrate the effect of digital diplomacy? What is the baseline upon which we can judge “successful” or “unsuccessful” digital diplomacy initiatives? What are the practical policy implications, and recommendations, that follow from these empirical perspectives? These two phases of development—theorization and measurement—have developed contemporaneously with two distinct substantive perspectives on the focus of digital diplomacy initiatives: projection and retrieval. Digital diplomacy projection refers to the ways in which states use information communication technologies to transmit information to statespersons, diplomats, or, as in the case of public diplomacy, foreign publics. Digital diplomacy retrieval refers to the ways in which states use these same technologies to gather information from these same actors, such as in the overlap between diplomacy and intelligence gathering. Some digital diplomacy endeavors accomplish both. The future of digital diplomacy study likely involves more refining of theoretical propositions regarding projection and retrieval, as well as development of more sophisticated, and precise, methodological tools to help study projection and retrieval empirically.