The Digital Statecraft Academy has published The Digital Statecraft Manifesto 2026, launched on 8 September at the Data for Policy 2026 conference in Barcelona. The Manifesto sets out Ten Principles intended to guide how the twenty-first-century state is designed, implemented and developed.
Its starting point is a mismatch. Algorithmic tools are reshaping what governments can do and how they do it, but the institutions holding them to account were built in the nineteenth century and were never designed to govern decisions made at this speed or scale. The digital infrastructure, data, platforms and applications that now mediate the relationship between people, businesses and the state have outgrown traditional models of governance.
The Manifesto’s argument rests on two conditions that must hold together: ability and legitimacy.
Ability without legitimacy, it argues, produces efficient authoritarianism — a state that can inspect, audit and enforce but cannot be challenged on how it does so. Legitimacy without ability produces accountable impotence — every democratic mandate in place, and no capacity to understand or act on the systems shaping citizens’ lives.
From those twin conditions, the DSA derives Ten Principles described as a design kernel: conditions that governing institutions must be able to exercise, and that those subject to them must be able to claim. Each names a requirement whose absence risks a specific, identifiable governance failure.
The Ten Principles of Digital Statecraft
- 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 Manifesto takes the state as its starting point on the grounds that no other actor currently holds the full set of legitimacy conditions — democratic mandates for consent, constitutional structures for accountability and revisability, and legal continuity to sustain judgment over time. Platforms, international bodies and civil society organisations each hold some, none holds all. The document leaves open a further question: whether governing well in the algorithmic age will ultimately require rethinking the state itself, its borders, its scale and who it is meant to serve.
The Manifesto is a living document, intended to evolve through collective engagement and real-world testing, as version 1.0 did before it. It distils arguments developed at greater length in the working paper Governing Well in the Algorithmic Age: The Foundations of Digital Statecraft.
We are now inviting endorsements from those responsible for governing, and from those who demand it be done ably and legitimately. Read and Endorse the Manifesto here.
Enquiries: office@digitalstatecraft.academy