Coping with digitalization in diplomacy: autonomy and discretion at the digital frontlines

Abstract

The advancement of digital technologies in the last decade has introduced new tools, workflows and stakeholders in diplomacy, creating significant information demands and a state of “digital stress.” To navigate these challenges, diplomats employ coping strategies that leverage their reflexivity and autonomy to manage demands, prioritize tasks, and mitigate overload. Beyond merely adapting traditional skills and engagement platforms to online settings, digital diplomacy has fostered new routines, norms, and practices, each accompanied by its own tensions and dilemmas. These challenges are addressed through discretionary decision-making and a relative independence from political authority, collectively shaping bureaucratic agency. This article examines digital stress in diplomacy by integrating insights from International Relations (IR) and international public administration scholarship. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with European diplomats conducted between 2016 and 2024, it explores the coping strategies required for the evolving landscape of “digital diplomacy.” Engaging with Lipsky’s work on the coping mechanisms of frontline practitioners in the context of e-government, this study reveals how these coping strategies as sources of bureaucratic agency, push back against top-down digitalization efforts while also exposing risks and tensions in diplomatic norms and practices arising from digital transformation.