From Diplomacy About Technology to Diplomacy Through Technology: A Three-Dimensional Framework for Tech Diplomacy

Ayumi Moore Aoki
EDBA Doctoral Candidate, Ecole des Ponts Business School
March 2026

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19254226

Keywords: tech diplomacy, digital diplomacy, digital statecraft, data embassy, tech ambassador, AI governance, digital sovereignty, science diplomacy

Introduction

Tech diplomacy has moved from an emerging label to an institutional reality, yet its conceptual boundaries remain unsettled. No universally agreed definition exists, and the term continues to overlap with adjacent concepts such as digital diplomacy, cyber diplomacy, science diplomacy, and economic diplomacy. Practice, however, has consistently moved ahead of theory. Denmark appointed the world’s first Tech Ambassador in 2017, not to a country or an international organization but to an industry, establishing an unprecedented office in San Francisco’s Bay Area to engage directly with private technology companies. By 2023, approximately twenty formal or acting tech envoys were operating in that region alone. The question is no longer whether tech diplomacy exists; it is how best to define what it encompasses.

These definitions are complementary rather than competing. Together, they highlight the two dimensions that already characterize the field: tech diplomacy as the governance of digital and emerging technologies, and tech diplomacy as direct engagement with powerful private technology actors. Both were present from the outset. When Denmark opened its office in San Francisco in 2017, it did so precisely because the concentration of global tech power in Silicon Valley had created an entirely new diplomatic terrain: one requiring direct, sustained engagement with industry rather than traditional state-to-state channels. That office has since moved back to Copenhagen, and the logic it established, that tech firms are legitimate and necessary interlocutors for states, has shaped the entire field’s development.

The more pressing question now is whether a third dimension deserves systematic recognition and theorization: diplomacy through technology. This article argues that it does. Beyond governing technology and engaging the firms that build it, states increasingly deploy infrastructure, standards, digital public infrastructure, innovation ecosystems, and technological capacity as instruments of diplomatic influence, trust creation, resilience, and geopolitical positioning. In short, tech diplomacy is not only diplomacy about technology. It is increasingly diplomacy through technology.

One of the field’s most influential definitions comes from Eugenio V. Garcia, currently Brazil’s Tech Ambassador and one of the foremost practitioners in the field, who describes tech diplomacy as “the conduct and practice of international relations, dialogue, and negotiations on global digital policy and emerging technological issues among states, the private sector, civil society, and other groups” (Garcia, 2022). This formulation remains a strong point of reference because it is explicitly diplomatic, multistakeholder, and broader than narrower conceptions of digital diplomacy that limit it to the use of online tools or to internet-related policy. The evolution of the field now invites us to build on it further.

Grottola (2026) offers a complementary definition rooted in empirical case study analysis, characterizing tech diplomacy as “an innovative diplomatic practice by which states engage with private intermediaries in innovation hotspots”, situating it as a sub-category of Internet governance that captures new modes of state interaction with the private tech sector. Her comparative study of Denmark and Switzerland elaborates this as a form of global experimentalist governance: open-ended, adaptive, and shaped by a “tech diplomacy playground” in which states experiment with different approaches in the absence of any unified practice or agreed goal.

What the Literature Already Establishes: Governance, Engagement, and Beyond

Recent scholarship has pushed the field toward a more structured and ambitious conceptualization. Bjola and Kornprobst (2025) define tech diplomacy as both dynamic and polylateral: dynamic because it must continually adapt to technological acceleration; polylateral because it involves not only states but firms, civil society, international organizations, and expert communities. Their analytical triangle of technology, agency, and order situates tech diplomacy not merely as a policy niche but as a window onto how technology redistributes power, reorganizes actors, and reshapes international order.

Ilan Manor develops this further by identifying three meanings of tech diplomacy: proactive digitalization within foreign ministries; diplomatic management of technology-related issues; and a “Tech First” approach in which technology-based negotiations become stepping stones toward broader diplomatic engagement (Manor, 2025). This last dimension already gestures toward technology as a diplomatic medium rather than merely a policy topic, though it remains more suggestive than fully elaborated, leaving space for a more explicit account of diplomacy through technology.

Grottola’s empirical work is especially important here because it confirms that engagement with the wider ecosystem of non-state tech actors, above all major technology companies, was not grafted onto tech diplomacy as a later extension; it was one of its founding rationales. Denmark’s original TechPlomacy initiative was motivated precisely by the unprecedented influence of major technology companies over internet governance, democratic processes, and regulatory outcomes. The simultaneous emergence of governance objectives and industry engagement objectives, both present from the moment Denmark established its San Francisco office, means that any serious conceptual framework must begin by acknowledging both dimensions as established features of the field rather than competing definitions of it.

The contribution of this article lies elsewhere: in identifying and theorizing a third dimension that remains implicit, scattered, or folded into other categories in the existing literature.

Power Beyond the State: The Case for Engaging Private Tech Actors

The reason direct engagement with private technology companies emerged as a defining feature of tech diplomacy from the outset is structural: technological power is no longer located exclusively within states. Large technology firms are not sovereign actors, but in specific domains they exercise economic, informational, and infrastructural power that can exceed that of many sovereign states. This does not mean firms have replaced states; it means diplomacy can no longer proceed as if states don’t reshape the landscape of power.

Cotroneo and Csernatoni (2025) sharpen this point by characterizing tech firms as interlocutors, agenda-setters, and holders of infrastructural power, particularly through data centers, information systems, and near-monopoly positions across key digital domains. This framing locates the engagement dimension of tech diplomacy more precisely; i.e., the engagement with concentrated tech power: major platforms, cloud providers, AI laboratories, telecom vendors, semiconductor ecosystems, and investors whose decisions shape access, standards, security, and governance across borders.

This reality is most visible in the United States and China, where many of the world’s most powerful technology firms are based and where corporate and geopolitical power are deeply entangled. The proliferation of tech envoys in Silicon Valley reflects this reality clearly. States send diplomats to the Bay Area not merely to observe innovation but because platform firms, venture networks, and technology ecosystems had become indispensable sites of engagement on issues ranging from content regulation and security to human rights and international standard-setting.

Yet a framework centered solely on these firms would be analytically too narrow and geographically too skewed, rendering tech diplomacy relevant mainly to Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Silicon Valley. This is precisely why the third dimension matters. It restores conceptual visibility to smaller states, middle powers, and countries in the Global South that lack dominant technology firms but are nonetheless developing sophisticated and consequential tech diplomacy practices.

Three Dimensions of Tech Diplomacy

Governance: Shaping the Rules of the Digital World
The first and most established dimension is tech diplomacy as governance. It encompasses the negotiation of rules, norms, safeguards, standards, and policy frameworks for digital and emerging technologies: AI governance, cyber norms, cross-border data flows, digital rights, platform regulation, and the broader international governance of technological systems. Garcia’s definition is most directly anchored here, as is the bulk of existing academic and practitioner discussion. It remains the conceptual core of the field.

Engagement: Diplomacy with a Multistakeholder Tech Ecosystem
The second dimension refers to diplomatic interaction with a broad multistakeholder ecosystem: major technology firms, platforms, AI laboratories, investors, cloud providers, and telecom vendors, as well as civil society organisations, expert communities, and international technical bodies whose cross-border influence shapes governance, information flows, market access, and security. As Grottola’s comparative account demonstrates, this dimension was built into tech diplomacy from the start (Grottola, 2026). Its simultaneous emergence alongside governance objectives reflects the structural reality that influence over technological development and its implications has migrated, at least partly, from states to a diverse range of non-state actors, a shift that states like Denmark recognized early and responded to with institutional innovation.

Strategic Technological Statecraft: Diplomacy Through Technology
The third dimension, and this article’s central contribution, refers to the deployment of infrastructure, standards, digital public infrastructure, technological hosting arrangements, innovation hubs, regulatory environments, and digital capacity as instruments of diplomatic influence, alliance-building, trust creation, resilience, and geopolitical positioning. Here, technology is neither merely governed nor simply concentrated in powerful firms. It is strategically used by states as a medium of diplomacy itself.
What makes this dimension analytically distinct is that it cannot be reduced to digital diplomacy in the classical sense of using technological tools to communicate, nor to the engagementof Big Tech. It captures a form of statecraft in which digital infrastructure and capability function as core diplomatic assets. This is most precisely described as diplomacy through technology.

Why Diplomacy Through Technology Is the New Contribution

The originality of this dimension lies not in claiming that no prior work has ever gestured toward this idea. Rather, its contribution is to systematically isolate and theorize a practice that has remained implicit, scattered, or absorbed into other categories. Grottola’s framework, for example, organizes diplomacy’s relationship with technology into three registers: technology as a tool of diplomacy, technology as a topic on policy agendas, and technology as a variable reshaping the environment of diplomacy (Grottola, 2026). This is an important analytical structure, but identifying technology’s role in the diplomatic environment is not the same as establishing a distinct dimension in which states actively use infrastructure, standards, or digital capacity as instruments of diplomatic leverage. That distinction changes what counts as tech diplomacy and, critically, who can practice it.

The three-dimensional structure proposed here finds a direct point of comparison in the science diplomacy literature, and recent scholarship has already begun drawing that connection explicitly. Balme (2025) provides an authoritative account of the science diplomacy triangle as formalised in the 2010 Royal Society and AAAS report New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy: science in diplomacy (SinD), science for diplomacy (S4D), and diplomacy for science (D4S). She traces how that framework has since been reshaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of post-truth politics, intensifying geopolitical competition, and the shifting geography of knowledge production. Crucially for the present argument, Balme observes that tech diplomacy has moved beyond being a subfield of science diplomacy to become a central pillar of it, one that demands its own distinct conceptual vocabulary.

The three-dimensional framework proposed in this article responds precisely to that demand. What the field is developing, whether or not it has named it explicitly, maps onto an analogous triangle: diplomacy for tech (using diplomatic channels to shape the conditions under which technology is governed and deployed, corresponding to the governance dimension); tech in diplomacy (embedding technology companies, expert communities, and civil society within diplomatic processes as necessary and legitimate interlocutors, corresponding to the engagement dimension); and tech for diplomacy (deploying technological infrastructure, standards, and digital capacity as instruments of diplomatic influence and trust-building, corresponding to this article’s third dimension and central contribution). Two clarifications are worth making here. First, invoking this parallel situates the framework within a recognised scholarly tradition and sharpens what is genuinely new: unlike science diplomacy, which operated largely between states with science as a shared medium, tech diplomacy must account for the fact that the “tech” in question is predominantly owned, governed, and deployed by private actors with geopolitical weight of their own. The triangle is recognisable; the terrain it maps is substantially different. Second, Balme’s own reframing is explicitly normative: she calls for tech diplomacy to shift from a corporate-driven model toward one grounded in accountability, democratic norms, and the protection of fundamental rights. The three-dimensional framework offered here is analytical rather than prescriptive: it describes what tech diplomacy is and does, not what it ought to become, and it is fully compatible with that normative ambition. Understanding the third dimension as a distinct analytical category is, in fact, a precondition for the kind of accountable and rights-grounded tech diplomacy Balme envisions.

If the field is defined only through governance and engagement with tech giants and other non-state actors, it risks remaining overly centered on great powers and global platform firms. If diplomacy through technology is incorporated as a distinct dimension, smaller states and middle powers become visible as agents in their own right, even without hosting Meta, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Huawei, or Alibaba. Such states may still exercise diplomatic influence through trusted infrastructure, regulatory credibility, interoperability standards, digital public infrastructure, cloud hosting arrangements, data governance regimes, or resilient digital partnerships.

Smaller States, the Global South, and the Growing Relevance of This Framework

The third dimension carries particular analytical weight for countries outside the main centers of concentrated corporate tech power, and recent appointments suggest the field is evolving rapidly in this direction. In March 2026, Cabo Verde became a striking example of this trend when H.E. Olavo Correia was appointed as the country’s Tech Ambassador in Praia. The appointment is notable on several counts. Correia simultaneously holds the portfolios of Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Digital Economy, a concentration of ministerial authority that signals the seriousness with which Cabo Verde is integrating technology into its core governance and diplomatic strategy, rather than treating it as a standalone portfolio.

Cabo Verde’s positioning is also geographically and strategically significant. Cabo Verde is deliberately investing in infrastructure that could make it a digital hub for West Africa, connecting the region to Europe, Brazil, and beyond. TechPark CV, supported by the African Development Bank, provides data centre capacity, business incubation, and a growing platform for regional tech collaboration. NOSi (Núcleo Operacional para a Sociedade de Informação), the state’s long-standing digital governance agency, has built the e-government foundations on which such regional ambitions can rest. The country is also set to host the first Web Summit Africa in December 2026. None of this, in itself, constitutes tech diplomacy. What it represents is the deliberate construction of the conditions (infrastructure, institutional capacity, connectivity, and visibility) from which diplomatic leverage through technology can be exercised. Cabo Verde’s case is better understood as an emerging illustration of a state positioning itself for diplomacy through technology: laying the infrastructural, institutional, and reputational groundwork from which genuine digital statecraft may in time be exercised.

The concept of a “digital sovereignty stack”, which distinguishes among infrastructure, services, data, and knowledge as distinct layers of digital power, is instructive here. It suggests that infrastructure sovereignty can be a meaningful source of diplomatic leverage even when states do not dominate the services layer. For many states, the strategic question is therefore not whether they can build the world’s leading AI laboratory or social media platform. It is whether they can become trusted hosts, standard-setters, interoperable partners, or providers of resilient public digital systems. That is the terrain on which diplomacy through technology is conducted.

Data Embassies as a Paradigmatic Case of Diplomacy Through Technology

Few examples illustrate the third dimension more concretely than the data embassy. A data embassy consists of servers located in a receiving state that store the data of a sending state while remaining under the sending state’s jurisdiction. Estonia’s initiative, developed in the aftermath of the 2007 cyberattacks and formalized through a bilateral agreement with Luxembourg signed on 20 June 2017, was designed to ensure state continuity and digital resilience. The agreement itself is legally notable: concluded explicitly “in the spirit of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations” while acknowledging that the Convention “is not sufficient to set a legal framework for the hosting of data and information systems” (Republic of Estonia & Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, 2017), it established a novel regime of inviolability, immunity, and jurisdictional protection — something entirely new under international law. Monaco established a comparable arrangement with Luxembourg in 2021.

The Estonia–Luxembourg case is widely recognized as the world’s first data embassy and required a novel bilateral agreement to grant immunity and guarantee digital continuity beyond Estonia’s own territory. What makes data embassies so compelling as an example is that they are not primarily about governing technology in the abstract, nor about managing powerful private firms. They use technological infrastructure and legal design to produce trust, resilience, jurisdictional protection, and bilateral alignment. They are, in the most direct sense, diplomatic infrastructures: institutions in which technology is the medium through which diplomatic relationships are built and secured.

Tech Hubs, Innovation Branding, and Diplomatic Positioning

This third dimension also clarifies a recurring question: can a country’s effort to position itself as a technology hub constitute tech diplomacy? The answer is yes, but only under specific conditions. If technological branding is merely promotional or investment-oriented, it is better categorized as nation branding or innovation policy. When states use technology hub status to signal reliability, attract strategic partners, anchor trusted ecosystems, host governance conversations, or enhance geopolitical relevance, however, technological positioning becomes diplomatically meaningful.

Research by Mashiah (2024a, 2024b) supports this distinction. Countries across different levels of innovative capacity deliberately deploy high-tech imagery and “innovation speak” to present themselves as modern, forward-looking, and globally relevant. The symbolic power of a technology identity can become a diplomatic asset when it is tied to cross-border influence and relationship-building rather than image management alone. The threshold is whether the activity shapes norms, access, leverage, trust, or geopolitical ordering, not simply reputation.

A Revised Definition

The three-dimensional model supports the following working definition:

Tech diplomacy is the conduct of international relations through the governance, negotiation, and strategic use of digital and emerging technologies, technological ecosystems, and innovation capacities by states and non-state actors to shape norms, build partnerships, advance interests, and influence international order.

This formulation preserves Garcia’s diplomatic and multistakeholder core, acknowledges the established reality of engagement with tech giants, civil society, and other non-state actors, and adds the article’s central claim: that diplomacy through technology warrants recognition as a distinct dimension of the field in its own right.

Conceptual discipline, however, remains essential. Not every technology-related activity should qualify as tech diplomacy. A practice merits that classification when technology is central rather than incidental, when the activity carries a cross-border diplomatic purpose or effect, when relevant diplomatic or strategic actors are involved, and when the outcome shapes norms, access, leverage, trust, or geopolitical ordering. This threshold is especially important for the third dimension, which risks becoming a catch-all category if applied without analytical care.

Conclusion

The most important corrective to current debates is this: tech diplomacy already encompasses governance and multistakeholder engagement (with tech giants, civil society, international organisations, and expert communities) simultaneously. These are not sequential layers or alternative definitions; they emerged together when Denmark established its San Francisco office in 2017 and have developed in parallel ever since (Grottola, 2026). A framework that treats them as separate phases or competing conceptions misreads the history of the field.

What remains undertheorized is a third dimension: tech diplomacy as strategic technological statecraft, or more precisely, diplomacy through technology. This is the dimension through which states deploy infrastructure, standards, digital public infrastructure, hosting arrangements, and technological capacity as instruments of alliance-building, trust creation, resilience, and geopolitical positioning. It is also the dimension that extends the concept’s global relevance, making tech diplomacy analytically meaningful for smaller states and middle powers that lack dominant technology firms but can still build diplomatic influence through trusted infrastructures, strategic positioning, and credible digital governance.

Cabo Verde’s appointment of H.E. Olavo Correia as Tech Ambassador in March 2026, combining that role with the portfolios of Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Digital Economy, is a vivid signal of where the field is heading. It is not the only such signal. Brazil’s own prominent presence in the field, embodied by Amb. Garcia’s definition and practice, similarly demonstrates that tech diplomacy is no longer the preserve of OECD countries or Silicon Valley-adjacent governments. The practice is globalizing, diversifying, and deepening simultaneously. The argument of this article, in its simplest form, is that the conceptual framework must keep pace: tech diplomacy is not only diplomacy about technology; it is increasingly diplomacy through technology, and the definition of the field should reflect that reality.

How to cite: Moore Aoki, A. (2026). From diplomacy about technology to diplomacy through technology: A three-dimensional framework for tech diplomacy. Tech Diplomacy Global Institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19254226

References

Balme, S. (2025). Evolving paradigms in science and tech diplomacy. Global Challenges, Issue no. 17. Geneva Graduate Institute. https://globalchallenges.ch/issue/17/

Bjola, C., & Kornprobst, M. (2025). Studying tech diplomacy — Introduction to the special issue on tech diplomacy. Global Policy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.70035

Cotroneo, C., & Csernatoni, R. (2025). Tech diplomacy 2.0: Examining the intersections between industry and governments in international relations. International Journal of Cyber Diplomacy. https://ijcd.ici.ro/documents/61/Art._C._Cotroneo_R._Csernatoni.pdf

Diplo. (n.d.). About tech diplomacy. https://www.diplomacy.edu/resource/tech-diplomacy-practice-in-the-san-francisco-bay-area/about-tech-diplomacy/

Diplo. (2025). Digital sovereignty: The end of the open Internet as we know it? (Part 1). https://www.diplomacy.edu/digital-sovereignty-the-end-of-the-open-internet-as-we-know-it-part-1/

Diplo. (2026). Digital sovereignty stack: Infrastructure, services, data, and AI knowledge. https://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/digital-sovereignty-stack-infrastructure-services-data-and-ai-knowledge/

Garcia, E. V. (2022, June 10). What is tech diplomacy? A very short definition. Medium. https://medium.com/@egarcia.virtual/what-is-tech-diplomacy-a-very-short-definition-9042afdc9ce4

Grottola, S. P. (2026). Tech diplomacy as experimentalist governance: A case study analysis of Denmark and Switzerland. Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-50660-5

Manor, I. (2025). A “Tech First” approach to foreign policy? The three meanings of tech diplomacy. Global Policy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.70023

Mashiah, I. (2024a). “We are a hub for tech, innovation, and entrepreneurship”: How places use tech-driven storytelling for nation branding. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-024-00341-w

Mashiah, I. (2024b). All we need is a Silicon Valley: Tech place as a strategic branding tool. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-024-00389-8

Munro, B. (2024). Tech diplomacy: What it is, and why it’s important. The Strategist. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/tech-diplomacy-what-it-is-and-why-its-important/

OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation. (n.d.). Establishing the first Data Embassy in the world. https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/establishing-the-first-data-embassy-in-the-world/

Rashica, V. (2025, March 6). Data embassies: Protecting nations in the cloud. Diplo. https://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/data-embassies-protecting-nations-in-the-cloud/

Republic of Estonia & Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. (2017, June 20). Agreement between the Republic of Estonia and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg on the hosting of data and information systems. https://www.riigiteataja.ee/aktilisa/2280/3201/8002/Lux_Info_Agreement.pdf

The Datasphere Initiative. (2025). How data embassies can promote data security for all. https://www.thedatasphere.org/news/how-data-embassies-promote-data-security-for-all/

World Economic Forum. (2023). What is tech diplomacy and why does it matter? Experts explain. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/02/what-is-tech-diplomacy-experts-explain/