Digital Statecraft: From Principles to Practice
A combined research and practitioner track at Data for Policy 2026 leading to a special collection in Data & Policy (Cambridge University Press) and a companion edited volume.
The algorithmic age demands a new kind of public governance — and a new kind of public leader. Digital Statecraft is the field being built to meet that demand, sitting at the intersection of technology, institutions, and human agency. This track invites research papers, practitioner cases, and contested proposition debates across three contribution modes.
Submission deadline: 1 June 2026
About The Track
Digital Statecraft is the art, science and practice of designing, governing, and adapting public institutions – and the decisions they make – in a world increasingly defined by data, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. We use the term statecraft in its fullest sense — not simply the use of digital tools by the state, nor diplomacy conducted through technology, nor the regulation of AI systems from the outside. It concerns a more fundamental question: how public authority is exercised when the systems of governance are no longer entirely human.
States have always relied on technology; decision-making authority has always been delegated; rule-based governance is structurally algorithmic in its logic. What distinguishes the present moment is a specific configuration: algorithms operating as infrastructure rather than instruments, decisions made at machine tempo and scale, agency distributed across human and non-human actors in ways that existing accountability frameworks were not designed to handle, and coordination of exchange increasingly mediated by platforms that operate beyond the reach of any single state.
Governing the algorithmic age requires something that does not yet fully exist: institutional forms capable of operating at machine speed, technical architectures designed for legitimacy and accountability, and public leaders who can work across both. The gap between what the state currently is and what it needs to become is the terrain Digital Statecraft occupies.
The track is organised around a productive tension:
- What governance structures are technically coherent, capable of operating at algorithmic speed and complexity?
- What technical architectures are democratically legitimate, contestable, and answerable to public authority?
Together, these questions ask what “governing” actually requires — at the level of system architecture, institutional design, democratic legitimacy, and sovereign autonomy — for it to be more than procedural formality.
The Digital Statecraft Manifesto v1.0 provides a working hypothesis for this redesign. This track exists to test, challenge, and extend it: with formal rigour, empirical evidence, and lived experience.
We invite contributions from across disciplines and domains, including but not limited to political theory, public administration, law, computer science, systems design, institutional economics, and service innovation. We particularly welcome work that engages across these boundaries—linking technical architectures with institutional design, empirical cases with normative frameworks, or institutional economics and market coordination with questions of algorithmic governance.
Submissions may be conceptual, empirical, or practice-based, but should speak to the central problem of governing under conditions of algorithmic decision-making and distributed agency.
Contribution Modes
We welcome contributions across disciplines and domains — political theory, public administration, law, computer science, systems design — and particularly work that engages across these boundaries. Submissions may be conceptual, empirical, or practice-based.
Submissions to the Special Track are invited in the following three contribution modes.
MODE A: Research papers:
Peer-reviewed empirical, theoretical, or comparative work engaging Digital Statecraft as a new field of research. Full papers, extended abstracts, and panel proposals may be submitted.
Extended abstracts and panel session proposals to be submitted via EasyChair and full papers via ScholarOne managed by Cambridge University Press.
MODE B: Practitioner cases:
Structured practitioner cases, mapped to The 10 Principles of Digital Statecraft. A template for contributions is provided. Selected contributions will be invited to submit a full paper after the conference.
Extended abstracts to be submitted via EasyChair
MODE C: Contested propositions:
Individual or paired submissions arguing for and against a designated proposition. Debated live at the conference, with the option to develop the exchange into a joint publication in Data & Policy afterwards.
Extended abstracts to be submitted via EasyChair
MODE A: Research Papers
Peer-reviewed empirical, theoretical, computational, formal, or comparative work engaging the central questions of Digital Statecraft from any disciplinary or methodological tradition.
Extended abstracts and panel session proposals to be submitted via EasyChair and full papers via ScholarOne managed by Cambridge University Press. We accept submissions in all standard journal article categories for this mode. Please refer to conference submission guidelines for more details.
The following questions serve as generative entry points — each is deliberately open to technical, governance, legal, historical, and practitioner responses:
- The state’s digital systems — its infrastructure, its data, its algorithms, and its services — form an interdependent whole that no single institution governs and no single discipline fully understands. What frameworks, technical architectures, and institutional arrangements are needed to govern this system coherently, in the public interest, across its full complexity?
- What does it mean to design public systems in which human judgment, institutional authority, and algorithmic capacity are genuinely complementary — and what technical and organisational conditions make that complementarity achievable rather than aspirational?
- How is the non-delegable core of democratic authority defined, defended, and updated in practice? Who decides what AI systems are allowed to decide — and how do institutions hold that line as technical capabilities shift?
- What new institutional forms does algorithmic governance require — not adaptations of existing oversight bodies, but genuinely new architectures capable of operating at machine speed, governing emergent behaviour, and maintaining democratic contestability in multi-agent environments?
- What system architectures make governance traceable — who holds decision authority, how much autonomy the system exercises, and who is accountable for outcomes — and what design choices make these questions structurally unanswerable?
- Who benefits from the current governance gap — and who bears its costs? What are the distributional consequences of algorithmic governance across populations, and what does a politically realistic theory of change look like given entrenched interests and asymmetric power over digital infrastructure?
- How do the 10 Principles of Digital Statecraft hold — or require revision — across different political systems, resource contexts, legal traditions, and technological trajectories? What is genuinely universal and what is context-dependent?
MODE B: Practitioners Cases
Structured case submissions from practitioners testing their contexts against The 10 Principles of Digital Statecraft using the Practitioner Case Analysis Template.
Contributors include government officials, public sector practitioners, systems designers and developers, domain specialists, and institutional leaders with direct experience of governing, building, or advising on digital systems, data infrastructure, or AI in public contexts. Your experience is evidence that no academic research can substitute for. Mode B gives it a public home: a citable contribution to an emerging field, presented at an international conference, published in a prestigious journal, and considered for a companion edited volume.
Contributions need not be completed cases — prospective planning analyses, domain perspectives, and pattern-based contributions across multiple situations are equally welcome. Disclosure constraints are normal: anonymised institutions, composite cases, and partial accounts are all accepted provided the disclosure level is stated.
Mode B contributions are submitted via EasyChair and undergo expert editorial review. Selected contributions are invited to develop further for presentation at the conference and subsequent publication opportunities.
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THE 10 PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL STATECRAFT A working hypothesis — to be tested, challenged, and extended through this track 1. Steward the human–machine partnership 2. Preserve the non-delegable core 3. Dynamic and adaptive governance 4. Hybrid institutional innovation 5. Systemic integration by design 6. Governance-centred design over performance optimisation 7. Digital autonomy and openness 8. Public value first 9. International cooperation and standards alignment 10. Intergenerational stewardship The Digital Statecraft Manifesto v1.0 at digitalstatecraft.academy |
MODE C: Contested Propositions
A small set of deliberately provocative propositions derived from The 10 Principles of Digital Statecraft, for which we invite paired submissions: one arguing for, one arguing against. Each position is up to 2,000 words, submitted via EasyChair. These are debated live at the conference in a dedicated session format — a different intellectual encounter from standard paper presentations — with the option to develop the exchange into a structured dialogue for journal publication.
The five designated propositions are designed to be genuinely arguable from technical, governance, legal, and practitioner registers.
The most productive pairings will be cross-register — combining authors whose arguments are grounded in different forms of evidence and expertise. Authors may self-select a position and propose a counterpart, or respond to an open pairing invitation from the editors.
| “The non-delegable core cannot be defined in advance — it must be negotiated in real time as AI capabilities evolve.” |
| “Digital autonomy at the national level is structurally incompatible with the open standards required for interoperability.” |
| “Governance-centred design will consistently lose to performance optimisation under fiscal pressure — making it a principle without political traction.” |
| “International AI governance standards are more likely to entrench existing power asymmetries than to reduce them.” |
| “The accountability-capability paradox makes meaningful human oversight of advanced AI systems a structural fiction, not a safeguard.” |
- Authors wishing to propose a sixth proposition are invited to contact the track editors by 16 May 2026.
- Propositions must engage directly with the Digital Statecraft framework, and be submitted with a self-formed pairing.
Evaluation Criteria
Contributions are evaluated within their own mode and knowledge tradition — not against a single methodological standard. The common criteria across all modes are:
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Governance relevance Does the contribution illuminate the relationship between a technical, institutional, or political choice and a governance consequence? Does it advance understanding of what governing digital systems in the public interest actually requires? |
Evidential rigour Is the argument grounded in evidence appropriate to its knowledge tradition — whether empirical, formal, computational, legal, historical, or experiential? Each tradition is assessed by reviewers competent in it. |
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Intellectual depth and legibility Is the contribution substantive within its own register while remaining accessible to readers from other disciplines and backgrounds? This criterion applies in all directions — technical contributions should be legible to governance scholars and practitioners, and vice versa. |
Originality of contribution Does the contribution advance the field — whether by generating new evidence, developing new frameworks, contesting existing ones, or documenting governance experience that is otherwise unrecorded? |
Mode B practitioner contributions are not evaluated for literature engagement for conference presentation. They are assessed on the analytical clarity with which the situation is mapped against the 10 Principles, the honesty of the stress test, and the transferability of the lessons drawn.
Mode C contributions are assessed as paired units — the goal is not to select a winner but to ensure both positions are argued with sufficient rigour to constitute a genuine intellectual exchange.
A Note on Human Contribution
Intellectual Authorship and The Human-machine Partnership
This track takes seriously what it studies. The Digital Statecraft framework holds that the most consequential question in governance today is not whether human and machine cognition will work together — they already do — but how that partnership is governed, and what must remain irreducibly human within it. That question applies to scholarship as much as to the public sector.
AI tools may appropriately support the research and writing process. What cannot be delegated is the intellectual substance: the claim the author can defend, the evidence genuinely engaged with, the experience that grounds the argument. The test is whether the contribution advances the comprehension, knowledge, or practical capability that Digital Statecraft, as an emerging field, needs to develop — and whether there is a person behind it who has done that work. We expect submissions to reflect significant human effort and careful preparation. Reviewers give their time voluntarily — please respect that by submitting only work you believe is ready.
Presentation at the conference is a condition of publication for this reason. The work must be defensible by its author, in person, under scrutiny — the same standard the Digital Statecraft framework applies to governance itself.
Beyond the Special Collection
Companion Edited Volume
Selected contributions from the Mode B practitioner stream — and Mode A contributions with strong regional and comparative dimensions — will be invited to develop extended versions for a companion edited volume on the manifestation of the 10 Principles of Digital Statecraft across regions and governance contexts. The volume will provide the contextual richness and comparative architecture that the journal format cannot accommodate. Authors interested in being considered for the volume should indicate this in their cover note; no separate application is required at submission stage.
About The Special Track
This track is convened by The Digital Statecraft Academy (DSA) in partnership with Data for Policy CIC and Data & Policy journal (Cambridge University Press). It builds on The Digital Statecraft Manifesto v1.0 (Engin et al., 2025). The special collection will be introduced by a field-constituting editorial. The companion edited volume is in development; selected authors will be approached following the conference. Cross-disciplinary submissions — combining technically oriented and institutionally or legally oriented authors — are particularly encouraged.
Enquiries about fit, scope, Mode C pairings, and the companion volume are welcome in advance of submission: office@digitalstatecraft.academy
