On the evening of Thursday 23 April 2026, The Digital Statecraft Academy marked its formal launch with a reception at The British Academy in London — bringing together the inaugural DSA Cambridge Fellows alongside the Academy’s advisors, experts, mentors, and distinguished guests from government, academia, industry, and civil society.
Overlooking St James’s Park from Carlton House Terrace, The British Academy provided a fitting setting: a place where scholarship meets public life — precisely the intersection the DSA is designed to occupy. The reception followed four intensive days in Cambridge, where the inaugural cohort had convened in person for the first time. It marked both the close of that residency and the DSA’s first public moment.
A Moment Anchored in Purpose
The evening was shaped around two defining foundations: the publication of the DSA Founding Manifesto, and the formal welcome of the inaugural Cambridge Fellowship cohort. In the months preceding the residency, the 16 Fellows had articulated the scope of their fellowship projects, refining them through sustained collaboration with experts and institutions aligned to their areas of focus through the DSA. The reception marked a transition point, as this work moved from a largely private phase of development into a broader context of public engagement.
The evening opened with remarks from DSA Co-Founder Tim Gordon, who welcomed guests and reflected on the DSA’s purpose: to build digital statecraft as a field that is both rigorous and grounded in practice. This was followed by Hetan Shah, Chief Executive of The British Academy, who situated the Academy within a broader tradition of scholarship in service of public life — emphasising the importance of connecting research, policy, and societal impact.
The Secretary of State’s Address
The another keynote address was delivered by Rt Hon Liz Kendall MP, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, who opened by describing the Academy as “an important and timely initiative,” before turning to the scale and urgency of the transformation underway and the role of the state in shaping it.
“In Britain, we are determined that this government will not be a bystander. We have an active state, that is prepared to do things differently.”
“Our mission is to help people through the changes technology inevitably brings — and shape a future that works for all, not just a few at the top.”
Her address moved across themes central to the DSA’s work: the promise and risk of artificial intelligence, the importance of international collaboration, and the evolving meaning of digital sovereignty.
“Working with other countries does not diminish our sovereignty, it strengthens it.”
“If you want to shape an ambitious and responsible future for tech, especially AI, the UK is the place to be.”
Framing the scale of the shift ahead, she noted:
“We are on the cusp of great change: an Industrial Revolution in a decade. We will look back in 20 years barely able to fathom a world without AI.”
Her remarks underscored a central premise of the DSA: that technological change is not something governments can simply respond to — it must be actively shaped.
From Vision to Field
Following the keynote, Dr Zeynep Engin, Co-Founder of The Digital Statecraft Academy, reflected on the DSA’s vision and the work ahead — positioning the Fellowship as the beginning of a longer-term effort to build capability, community, and institutional pathways for governing the digital age.
She emphasised that the Founding Manifesto sets out an intellectual direction, but that it is through the work of the Fellows — and the broader network forming around the DSA — that this vision will take operational form.
The Purpose Behind the Moment
The DSA exists to make digital statecraft a genuine field of expertise — bringing together thinkers, practitioners, and institutions to build it as something rigorous, principled, and fit for the complexity of the moment. The Founding Manifesto sets out that vision in writing. The inaugural cohort begins to make it real.
The audience reflected the breadth of that ambition. Alongside the Fellows sat advisors, experts, and mentors who had contributed to the programme since its launch in January, together with guests from across government, the academy, the technology industry, and civil society. The reception was supported by founding partner organisations — the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), the University of Cambridge, Data for Policy CIC, Microsoft, the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure, and The GovLab — whose work sits at the heart of the digital statecraft agenda.
For the Fellows, the evening was a moment of public arrival for work that had been quietly underway since the start of the year. The questions they had spent months developing — how governments govern AI, what trustworthy digital infrastructure looks like, how institutions build genuine capacity in this space — are not technical footnotes. As the Secretary of State put it: we are on the cusp of an industrial revolution happening within a decade. The DSA’s answer is to build the expertise, the network, and the institutional imagination to meet it well. That work is now publicly underway.