Internet Diplomacy

Diplomatic efforts to ease tensions around the governance of transnational digital infrastructure is increasingly at the centre of global politics. However, the translation of this new dimension of diplomacy into a tangible concept is still limited and vague. For some, digital diplomacy is restricted to the use of digital means, especially social networks, by diplomats to practice a kind of “Public Diplomacy 2.0”. This collection approaches digital diplomacy beyond the instrumental use of digital technologies for diplomatic practices. It consider digital infrastructure generating new spaces of conflicts as such, where new diplomatic practices take space in order to facilitate the negotiations among parties about the governance, policy developments and technical solutions of the internet. The approach to digital diplomacy extends to foreign affairs and international relations, and with regard to all emerging international tensions clustered around digital environments, including cybersecurity and internet governance.

This collection unfolds the concept of digital diplomacy to understand and formalize digital diplomacy across all its dimensions and from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, and includes contributions addressing diplomacy around the international debate on the governance of the internet. A special emphasis is given to the role of the European Union, its member states and its neighborhood in a field historically dominated by US voices in the debate, due to its crucial role in the history of the internet but also because of the leading position of US internet giants in the global digital market. This book approaches the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective, by including contributions from leading scholars in the field of internet governance, approaching the topics from multiple backgrounds and disciplines, combining complementary novel theoretical approaches and empirically grounded research in the field of the governance of the internet as a diplomacy issue.