The Digital Statecraft Academy has released a new working paper, Governing Well in the Algorithmic Age: The Foundations of Digital Statecraft, as a pre-print ahead of formal submission.
Written by Dr Zeynep Engin and Tim Gordon with fourteen co-authors (Viviana Bastidas, Tom Crick, Jon Crowcroft, Jean-Martin Denis, David J. Hand, Lauren Maffeo, Jakob Mökander, Irene Ng, Anastasija Nikiforova, Giulio Quaggiotto, David Uriel Socol de la Osa, Rhonda Syler, Philip Treleaven, Stefaan Verhulst) drawn from the DSA’s faculty, fellowship, and wider network, the paper proposes digital statecraft as an organising concept for effective and legitimate public governance in the algorithmic age.
Its starting point is that the digital substrate of states — data, algorithms, infrastructure, platforms, applications — is being governed without adequate conceptual foundations. What is missing, the authors argue, is not further regulation, platform policy, or technical standards, but a coherent account of who has the authority and ability to govern these systems, on what basis, and with what legitimacy.
The paper sets out two dimensions of the problem. Statecraft over digital systems concerns the authority and capacity of the state in relation to the digital substrate itself. Statecraft with digital systems concerns the deployment of algorithmic tools as instruments of governing authority. Both rest on two foundational requirements that are genuinely in tension: technical coherence and legitimate authority. As the authors put it, ability without legitimacy is authoritarian efficiency; legitimacy without ability is institutional impotence.
The ten principles of digital statecraft
From these foundations the paper derives ten principles, each naming a condition whose absence produces an identifiable and structural governance failure:
- Public Interest First
- Human-Machine Complementarity
- Governability by Design
- Systemic Coherence
- Hybrid Institutions
- Adaptive Governance
- Human Centricity and Civic Agency
- Accountable and Traceable Authority
- Judgment Across Time
- The Non-Delegable Core
The tenth principle carries the paper’s most distinctive claim. The Non-Delegable Core identifies a class of governing decisions — those determining fundamental rights, exercising coercive power, producing irreversible consequences, or requiring contextual moral judgment — that cannot be legitimately delegated to algorithmic systems regardless of technical capability. The argument does not rest on what algorithmic systems lack in output quality, but on the accountability structure such decisions require.
The paper takes the state as its starting point, on the grounds that it is the only current candidate for which the full set of legitimacy conditions — democratic mandate, constitutional accountability, legal continuity — is institutionally available. It nonetheless holds open a deeper question: whether the boundaries, scale, and affiliative basis of statehood itself are being reconstituted in ways no single state can govern alone.
A pre-print, and an invitation
The work draws on an extended process of collaborative development between August 2025 and July 2026, including wide-ranging conversations with DSA Fellows, faculty, and guest contributors, and a week of intensive exchange during the Cambridge residential in April 2026. The principles develop an earlier formulation published in the DSA Founding Manifesto.
The paper is shared as a pre-print in order to invite challenge, refinement, and contribution from researchers and practitioners alike. It closes with six lines of inquiry offered as the field’s first commissions — among them how the Non-Delegable Core boundary is identified in specific domains, what hybrid institutions look like in particular jurisdictions, and how the accumulated effects of algorithmic governance are made visible and correctable over time.
Readers who would like to share comments on the paper, or who are interested in contributing to this work, are warmly invited to write to office@digitalstatecraft.academy.
Read the working paper here.