Knowledge Reference

Digital Diplomacy Glossary

A working reference of terms, concepts, and frameworks used across digital diplomacy, tech diplomacy, AI governance, narrative resilience, and institutional digital capability. The glossary grows alongside the knowledge areas.

About this glossary

Shared vocabulary for foreign affairs in digital environments.

Diplomats, policy teams, and institutional readers increasingly work across overlapping fields — digital diplomacy, cyber and tech diplomacy, AI governance, platform governance, narrative resilience, and digital sovereignty. Each carries its own language, history, and contested meanings.

This glossary offers a working reference for ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, research institutions, and strategic partners who need a shared vocabulary across these domains. Each entry includes a short definition, why it matters for foreign affairs, where it appears in practice, and links to related terms and knowledge areas.

Entries are curated, not exhaustive. They are written from an institutional standpoint and refined as the knowledge base evolves.

Start with these pathways

Curated reading orders for common institutional questions.

Pathway

Understanding diplomacy

Start here for the institutions, roles, and practices through which states represent interests and manage international relationships.

Pathway

New to digital diplomacy

Start here if you are forming a first institutional view of what digital diplomacy actually is.

Pathway

Forms of modern diplomacy

Explore how diplomatic practice changes across relationships, institutions, policy fields, and levels of government.

Pathway

Working on AI in foreign affairs

A path for teams introducing AI tools, governance, assurance, and oversight into ministries and missions.

Pathway

Strengthening embassy capability

For heads of mission and headquarters teams improving how embassies and consulates serve, sense, coordinate, and continue operating.

Pathway

Preparing for digital crisis and narrative risk

For crisis units, missions, spokespeople, and policy teams preparing for fast-moving information and hybrid pressure.

Pathway

Retaining authority across technology dependencies

For institutions assessing whether digital and AI capability preserves meaningful control, continuity, and strategic choice.

Pathway

Building digital government foundations

A path through the shared infrastructure, governance, and stewardship required for trustworthy digital public capability.

Browse by theme

Eight thematic clusters across the glossary.

Digital Diplomacy Foundations

36 terms

Core concepts that frame how diplomacy operates in digital, networked, and public-facing environments.

AI & Foreign Affairs

26 terms

How artificial intelligence is reshaping diplomatic work, institutional governance, and the information environment.

Narrative, Trust & Influence

42 terms

Narratives, information integrity, public trust, and the contested space where diplomatic meaning is formed online.

Embassy & Mission Capability

25 terms

The practical capability of embassies, consulates, and permanent missions to operate effectively in digital environments.

Digital Sovereignty & Governance

40 terms

Sovereignty, governance, oversight, and accountability for the technologies that foreign affairs institutions depend on.

Crisis & Risk Readiness

27 terms

How ministries detect, communicate, and respond to crises, disinformation, and high-pressure narrative moments.

Innovation & Institutional Capacity

34 terms

Readiness, capability-building, and the institutional architecture that lets foreign ministries adapt over time.

Technology & Geopolitics

34 terms

Where technology, infrastructure, and standards become instruments of statecraft, alliance, and strategic autonomy.

155 entries

A16 entries

Agentic AI: Agentic AI is the broader design paradigm in which AI systems pursue goals, use tools, coordinate actions, and operate with varying autonomy. It may be implemented through one AI agent or through multiple agents and services. Its autonomy is bounded by technical, organizational, legal, and policy constraints that institutions must deliberately define and govern.
AI Agents: AI agents are AI systems designed to pursue goals, complete tasks, interact with digital tools, make decisions within defined limits, and operate with varying degrees of autonomy. In foreign affairs, AI agents may assist with research, monitoring, workflow support, drafting, translation, triage, or internal coordination.
AI Assurance: AI assurance is the structured use of evidence, testing, evaluation, documentation, governance, and ongoing monitoring to determine whether an AI system satisfies defined requirements for performance, safety, security, legality, accountability, fairness, and institutional use. Assurance supports justified confidence; it is not a blanket guarantee that an AI system is safe or correct.
AI Diplomacy: The diplomatic, institutional, and strategic implications of artificial intelligence for foreign affairs — including how states negotiate AI governance, how ministries use AI internally, and how AI shapes information environments.
AI Governance: The rules, institutions, standards, safeguards, policies, and decision-making processes that shape how artificial intelligence is developed, deployed, used, and controlled — including both international negotiations about AI and the internal governance needed for ministries and diplomatic institutions to use AI responsibly.
AI Governance Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement around how artificial intelligence is governed, developed, used, and coordinated across borders, with attention to safety, trust, accountability, sovereignty, and public interest.
AI Register: An AI register is a structured and maintained inventory of AI or algorithmic systems used, procured, developed, piloted, or authorized by an organization. It records information needed for governance, such as purpose, owner, provider, data, users, risk level, decision role, deployment status, safeguards, assurance evidence, review dates, and retirement or exit arrangements.
AI Response Cell: An AI response cell is a cross-functional team or working group responsible for helping an institution understand, govern, and respond to AI-related opportunities and risks. In a ministry of foreign affairs, it may bring together policy, digital, legal, cyber, communications, procurement, data, and regional expertise.
AI Sovereignty: AI sovereignty is the capacity of a state or institution to make meaningful, informed, and accountable choices about the models, data, compute, infrastructure, vendors, deployment arrangements, and exit options on which its use of AI depends. It does not require technological self-sufficiency. It requires enough capability, leverage, and control to choose, govern, verify, change, or leave those arrangements while protecting strategic choice and public authority.
AI-Augmented Diplomacy: AI-augmented diplomacy refers to the use of artificial intelligence to support, accelerate, or improve diplomatic work while keeping human judgment and responsibility at the center. It may assist with analysis, translation, drafting, monitoring, scenario planning, knowledge management, and operational coordination.
Algorithmic Influence: The way digital platforms, recommendation systems, search engines, feeds, and automated ranking mechanisms shape what people see, notice, believe, and discuss online.
Algorithmic Public Diplomacy: The practice of understanding how platform algorithms shape visibility, audience segmentation, narrative spread, and public engagement in diplomatic communication.
Algorithmic Transparency: Algorithmic transparency is the practice of making accessible and intelligible information available about where, why, and how algorithmic or AI systems are used, what role they play in decisions, which data and safeguards are involved, who is accountable, and what limitations or routes for review exist. It does not always require public disclosure of source code.
Ambassador: An ambassador is a state's highest-ranking diplomatic representative accredited to another state or, in a different institutional form, to an international organization. An ambassador normally leads an embassy or permanent mission, represents the sending state's positions, and acts under the authority and instructions of the sending government.
Auditability: Auditability is the degree to which a system, process, or decision can be independently examined and reconstructed using reliable records of inputs, outputs, actions, changes, identities, approvals, rules, and relevant context. Auditability enables accountability and learning, but it requires records that are complete, protected, interpretable, and accessible to authorized reviewers.
Automation Bias: Automation bias is the tendency to give excessive weight to outputs or recommendations from automated systems, leading people to overlook contradictory evidence, fail to notice system errors, or accept a machine-supported conclusion without sufficient independent judgment. It can occur even when a human formally remains responsible for the decision.

B2 entries

Bilateral Diplomacy: Bilateral diplomacy is diplomatic engagement conducted primarily between two states to manage their relationship, address disagreements, negotiate cooperation, exchange information, and advance respective or shared interests. It operates through leaders, foreign ministries, embassies, special envoys, official visits, working groups, agreements, and continuing formal or informal contact.
Briefing Layer: A structured layer of analysis that turns fragmented information into clear, decision-ready insight for diplomats, institutions, and strategic teams.

C15 entries

Capability Framework: A structured model used to assess, design, and strengthen institutional capacities in areas such as digital diplomacy, crisis communication, narrative response, and coordination.
City Diplomacy: City diplomacy is the international engagement conducted by cities and other local governments to advance cooperation, learning, investment, cultural exchange, climate action, innovation, resilience, or local interests within their legal authority. It is a form of subnational or paradiplomatic activity and does not replace the constitutional foreign-policy role of the state.
Climate Diplomacy: Climate diplomacy is the use of diplomatic engagement to negotiate, coordinate, and advance international responses to climate change and its political, economic, security, development, and humanitarian consequences. It includes mitigation, adaptation, climate finance, loss and damage, energy transition, technology cooperation, resilience, and implementation of international climate commitments.
Cognitive Warfare: Cognitive warfare is an evolving and contested security concept describing coordinated activity intended to influence, disrupt, degrade, or control how people or institutions perceive, interpret, decide, and behave. It may combine information operations, psychological methods, cyber capabilities, data, technology, and other instruments to exploit cognitive and social vulnerabilities for strategic advantage.
Consular Communication: Consular communication refers to the way foreign ministries and missions provide timely, accurate, accessible, and trusted information to citizens abroad. It includes travel advisories, emergency alerts, service updates, evacuation instructions, appointment guidance, crisis information, and direct communication through official digital and offline channels.
Consular Digital Readiness: The capacity of a foreign ministry or mission network to provide secure, accessible, and resilient digital services to citizens abroad, especially during emergencies or fast-moving crises.
Consular Digital Services: The use of digital tools, platforms, and secure service systems to support citizens abroad, manage requests, communicate during crises, and improve access to consular support.
Consulate: A consulate is an official post through which a state performs consular functions in another country, often outside the capital. It commonly assists citizens, processes visas or travel documents, supports emergency response, facilitates legitimate economic and cultural connections, and performs other functions permitted by international law and the receiving state.
Content Provenance: Content provenance is the recorded history of a digital asset—such as an image, video, audio recording, or document—from its creation through subsequent modification, publication, or use. Provenance information may describe who or what created the asset, which tools were used, when changes occurred, and how the content evolved.
Crisis Communication: The structured way an institution communicates before, during, and after a crisis — in foreign affairs, including public statements, embassy alerts, consular information, media engagement, internal coordination, social media updates, and leadership messaging during moments of uncertainty, risk, or public pressure.
Crisis Response Ecosystem: The people, processes, tools, narratives, and coordination mechanisms an institution uses to respond to fast-moving crises in digital and public environments.
Cross-Border Interoperability: Cross-border interoperability is the ability of systems, institutions, credentials, and governance arrangements in different jurisdictions to exchange and use information or deliver connected services reliably across national boundaries. It requires alignment across technical, semantic, organizational, legal, identity, security, and trust layers—not only compatible software.
Cultural Diplomacy: Cultural diplomacy is the use of culture, heritage, language, education, arts, ideas, creative industries, and people-to-people exchange to build understanding, trust, and long-term relationships between societies. It is one of the most durable forms of public diplomacy because it works through meaning, identity, memory, and mutual recognition.
Cyber Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement focused on cyberspace, including cybersecurity, cyber norms, cyber conflict prevention, confidence-building measures, and international cooperation on digital security.
Cyber Norms: Shared principles, expectations, or rules intended to guide responsible state behavior in cyberspace.

D38 entries

Data Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement around data governance, data flows, privacy, interoperability, access, security, and the political consequences of data infrastructure.
Data Governance: The rules, responsibilities, processes, and safeguards that determine how data is collected, stored, accessed, shared, protected, used, and reviewed — especially important in foreign affairs, where ministries and missions handle sensitive information involving citizens, diplomatic relationships, policy processes, security issues, and institutional decision-making.
Data Stewardship: Data stewardship is the accountable care of data across its lifecycle so that it remains accurate, secure, appropriately accessible, well-documented, responsibly shared and reused, retained for the right period, and aligned with legal obligations and institutional purpose. It connects day-to-day data decisions with the wider rules established through data governance.
Deepfake Exposure: Deepfake exposure refers to the level of vulnerability an institution, leader, diplomat, mission, or communication system has to synthetic impersonation, fabricated audio or video, manipulated images, or AI-generated media designed to mislead audiences or disrupt trust.
Diaspora Diplomacy: Diaspora diplomacy is the structured engagement of communities with ties to a country of origin or heritage as participants in international relationships, public diplomacy, cultural connection, knowledge exchange, investment, development, and crisis support. It should treat diaspora communities as diverse actors with their own rights and perspectives, not as uniform extensions of state policy.
Digital Capability: Digital capability is the practical ability of an institution to use digital tools, data, workflows, governance, skills, and communication systems effectively and responsibly. In foreign affairs, it means being able to listen, interpret, coordinate, communicate, respond, and learn in digital environments.
Digital Capacity Building: The process of strengthening the skills, systems, workflows, governance, and institutional habits needed to operate effectively in digital diplomatic environments.
Digital Cooperation: Digital cooperation refers to collaboration between states, institutions, international organizations, private sector actors, civil society, and technical communities to shape the development, governance, access, security, and responsible use of digital technologies.
Digital Crisis Response: Digital crisis response is the coordinated use of digital tools, communication channels, data, monitoring, verification, and workflows to detect, interpret, communicate, and act during a crisis. In foreign affairs, it connects crisis communication, consular support, mission coordination, and narrative awareness.
Digital Development Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement that uses digital infrastructure, skills, governance, platforms, and technology cooperation to support development, institutional capacity, and long-term international partnerships.
Digital Diplomacy: The use of digital technologies, platforms, data, and online communication environments to support the work of diplomacy — including public communication, crisis response, embassy engagement, digital listening, narrative analysis, stakeholder mapping, and institutional coordination across online spaces.
Digital Diplomacy Capability: The institutional ability to understand, coordinate, communicate, and act effectively across digital environments in support of diplomatic objectives.
Digital Diplomacy Posture: The way an institution is positioned, prepared, and perceived in digital diplomatic environments, including its readiness, credibility, narrative resilience, and coordination capacity.
Digital Governance: The rules, institutions, policies, norms, and coordination mechanisms that shape how digital technologies, platforms, data, AI, and online systems are governed.
Digital Identity: Digital identity refers to the digital representation, verification, and use of identity information for people, organizations, officials, systems, or services. In foreign affairs, it supports trusted access, secure communication, consular services, authentication, official credentials, and protection against impersonation.
Digital Influence: Digital influence refers to the ability to shape perception, attention, behavior, trust, or public interpretation through digital channels, platforms, content, networks, algorithms, communities, and online interactions. It can be legitimate, persuasive, manipulative, organic, or coordinated depending on intent and method.
Digital Infrastructure Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement around the infrastructure that enables digital societies, including connectivity, cloud systems, data centers, digital identity, payment systems, platforms, and smart-city technologies.
Digital Listening: Digital listening is the structured observation and interpretation of public digital signals in order to understand narratives, concerns, sentiment, questions, risks, and emerging issues. In foreign affairs, it is not surveillance of individuals; it is the institutional practice of understanding the public information environment responsibly and proportionately.
Digital Public Diplomacy: The use of digital channels, content, platforms, and communities to build public trust, communicate policy, and engage audiences beyond traditional state-to-state diplomacy.
Digital Public Goods: Digital public goods are open-source software, open data, open AI systems or models, open standards, and open content that follow applicable laws and recognized best practices, are designed to avoid harm, and contribute to sustainable development or public value. Formal recognition as a digital public good may require assessment against the Digital Public Goods Standard.
Digital Public Infrastructure: Digital public infrastructure, or DPI, is a set of shared, secure, interoperable, and reusable digital systems that enable public and private services at scale. Common components include digital identity, payments, data exchange, core registries, notifications, digital post, and service gateways, governed as long-term infrastructure rather than isolated technology projects.
Digital Public Sphere: The digital public sphere refers to the online spaces where publics discuss, interpret, contest, and form opinions about political, social, diplomatic, and international issues. It includes social platforms, search environments, online media, messaging apps, creator ecosystems, comment spaces, forums, and digital communities.
Digital Readiness: The extent to which an institution has the skills, workflows, tools, governance, and coordination capacity needed to operate effectively in digital environments.
Digital Readiness Audit: A digital readiness audit is a structured assessment of an institution's ability to operate effectively, safely, and coherently in digital environments. For foreign affairs institutions, it reviews people, processes, tools, governance, data practices, digital skills, crisis protocols, mission coordination, and technology dependencies.
Digital Sovereignty: The ability of a state or institution to make independent, secure, and accountable decisions about its digital infrastructure, data, technologies, standards, and dependencies.
Digital Sovereignty Spectrum: A framework for assessing how much control a state or institution has across key digital layers, including data, infrastructure, vendors, platforms, narratives, and operational processes.
Digital Statecraft: The use of digital technologies, data, platforms, infrastructure, cyber capabilities, standards, and information environments as instruments of national strategy and international influence.
Digital Trust: Digital trust is the confidence that people and institutions have in digital systems, identities, information, services, and communication channels. In foreign affairs, digital trust means that citizens, partners, publics, and officials can rely on official digital interactions as authentic, secure, accurate, and accountable.
Diplomacy: Diplomacy is the practice through which states and other international actors represent interests, communicate, negotiate, manage relationships, prevent or resolve disputes, and pursue cooperation without relying primarily on force. It includes formal state-to-state engagement as well as multilateral, public, economic, cultural, scientific, and digital forms of international engagement.
Diplomat: A diplomat is an official authorized to represent a state or, in some contexts, an international entity in the conduct of international relations. Diplomats analyze developments, communicate positions, negotiate, build relationships, protect interests, support citizens, and connect political objectives with the practical work of foreign affairs.
Diplomatic Immunity: Diplomatic immunity is the body of privileges and immunities granted under international law to diplomatic missions, diplomatic agents, and certain related persons so they can perform official functions independently and effectively. Its scope varies by status and circumstance, and it exists to protect the functioning of diplomacy—not to provide personal impunity.
Diplomatic Intelligence: The structured interpretation of signals, narratives, relationships, and contextual developments that help diplomatic actors make better strategic decisions.
Diplomatic Mission: A diplomatic mission is the official representation through which a state conducts diplomatic relations with another state or participates in an international organization. Depending on its mandate, it may take the form of an embassy, high commission, permanent mission, delegation, or another recognized diplomatic representation.
Diplomatic Operating System: A diplomatic operating system is a conceptual model for the core workflows, protocols, tools, data, decision processes, coordination routines, and trust mechanisms that allow a foreign affairs institution to operate coherently. It is not necessarily a single software platform; it is the institutional architecture through which diplomacy gets done.
Diplomatic Protocol: Diplomatic protocol is the system of rules, conventions, customs, and practices governing official interaction between states, diplomatic missions, international organizations, and public authorities. It covers matters such as accreditation, precedence, forms of address, ceremonies, official visits, flags, seating, credentials, and the formal handling of diplomatic communication.
Diplomatic Resilience: Diplomatic resilience is the ability of diplomatic institutions to continue operating, communicating, coordinating, and exercising judgment during disruption, pressure, uncertainty, or attack. It includes organizational, digital, narrative, crisis, and trust dimensions.
Diplomatic Technology: The technologies, platforms, tools, and infrastructures used by ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, and international institutions to support diplomatic work — including communication systems, secure messaging, knowledge management, analytics, AI tools, consular platforms, and digital coordination environments.
Disinformation: False, misleading, or manipulated information that is created or shared deliberately to deceive, confuse, influence, or cause harm — and which, in foreign affairs, can target states, leaders, institutions, diplomatic positions, alliances, elections, public trust, humanitarian operations, or crisis response.

E9 entries

E-Diplomacy: The internal digitization of diplomatic services and processes.
Economic Diplomacy: Economic diplomacy is the use of diplomatic relationships, negotiation, representation, and policy coordination to advance economic objectives and manage the international economic consequences of state action. It can include trade, investment, finance, development, sanctions, energy, supply chains, technology access, commercial advocacy, and economic security.
Embassy: An embassy is the principal diplomatic mission through which one state represents itself in another state, usually from the host country's capital and under the leadership of an ambassador. The word is also commonly used for the mission's premises, although the diplomatic mission is the institution and team, not only the building.
Embassy Digital Readiness: The capacity of an embassy or mission to monitor digital developments, communicate effectively, coordinate with headquarters, manage local narratives, and respond to digital risks.
Embassy Digital Transformation: The process through which embassies adapt their communication, coordination, public engagement, consular support, information monitoring, and reporting practices to operate effectively in digital environments.
Embassy Innovation: Embassy innovation refers to the practical improvement of how embassies work, communicate, engage, report, coordinate, and respond to local developments. It includes new tools, methods, partnerships, formats, services, and workflows that help missions become more effective and locally relevant.
Embassy Narrative Coordination: Embassy narrative coordination refers to the alignment of embassy communication, local interpretation, public diplomacy activity, and narrative reporting with headquarters and the wider mission network. It helps ministries understand how key issues are being received across different countries and ensures that missions communicate with coherence while adapting to local context.
Emerging Technology Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement around new and fast-developing technologies such as AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, semiconductors, digital identity, and advanced connectivity.
Exit Capacity: Exit capacity is the institutional ability to leave or replace a system, technology, platform, AI model, or provider while preserving data, operational continuity, knowledge, security, legal compliance, and authority. An exit plan is documentary; exit capacity must be operational, adequately resourced, and testable.

F4 entries

Foreign Affairs Innovation: Foreign affairs innovation refers to the practical redesign of tools, processes, capabilities, partnerships, and operating models used by ministries of foreign affairs and diplomatic institutions. It is not innovation for its own sake; it is the adaptation of foreign affairs institutions to new diplomatic realities.
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI): Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, or FIMI, is a pattern of intentional and coordinated behavior in the information environment, linked to foreign actors or their proxies, that manipulates information, audiences, or distribution systems in ways that threaten political processes, security, public debate, or trust. It is broader than false content alone.
Foreign Policy: Foreign policy is the set of objectives, priorities, choices, and actions through which a state manages its external relations and pursues its interests and responsibilities internationally. Diplomacy is one of the principal means through which foreign policy is developed, communicated, negotiated, and implemented, but the two terms are not synonymous.
Fragmentation: A condition in which diplomatic teams, missions, departments, or systems operate with disconnected tools, narratives, workflows, or strategic approaches.

G3 entries

Generative AI: Generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence systems that produces new content—such as text, images, audio, video, code, or structured data—by learning patterns from training data and responding to prompts or other inputs. Its outputs can be useful and convincing while still being inaccurate, fabricated, biased, insecure, or inappropriate for the intended context.
Geopolitical Technology: Geopolitical technology refers to technologies whose development, control, standards, supply chains, infrastructure, or use have significant implications for power, security, sovereignty, economic leverage, and international influence. It includes AI, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, cyber capabilities, digital identity, data systems, satellites, quantum technologies, and critical platforms.
GovTech: GovTech is a whole-of-government approach to public-sector modernization that uses technology, data, institutional reform, and new delivery methods to improve government operations, public services, transparency, citizen engagement, and governance. It is broader than purchasing digital tools and should be assessed through public value, capability, trust, and sustainable institutional change.

H6 entries

Health Diplomacy: Health diplomacy is the use of communication, negotiation, consensus-building, and international cooperation to shape and manage policy issues affecting health across borders. It brings together foreign policy, public health, development, trade, security, science, and humanitarian actors around health challenges that no state or technical institution can manage alone.
Hidden Coping Dependency: A Diplomats.Digital working concept describing an institutional condition in which critical work continues because staff rely on undocumented workarounds, selective engagement, informal coordination or individual judgment that is unevenly available and may not survive staff rotation, platform change or crisis pressure.
Human Oversight: Human oversight refers to the meaningful ability of people to understand, review, question, approve, intervene in, or stop the use of automated or AI-supported systems. In foreign affairs, it ensures that technology supports diplomatic judgment rather than replacing responsibility.
Human-Centric AI Governance: An approach to AI governance that prioritizes human rights, safety, accountability, transparency, inclusion, trust, and public interest.
Human-in-the-Loop: Human-in-the-loop is a workflow design in which a designated person must review, approve, correct, classify, or otherwise intervene before an AI-supported output or action can progress. It is narrower than human oversight, which covers the broader ability to understand, govern, monitor, question, intervene in, or stop an AI system.
Hybrid Threats: Hybrid threats combine military and non-military, overt and covert, conventional and unconventional instruments to pressure, destabilize, coerce, or weaken a target. They may involve cyber operations, disinformation, economic pressure, political interference, proxies, sabotage, coercive diplomacy, or military activity, coordinated to exploit vulnerabilities and blur conventional distinctions between peace, crisis, and conflict.

I11 entries

Identity Assurance: Identity assurance refers to the level of confidence that a person, organization, system, or communication source is who or what it claims to be. In foreign affairs, identity assurance supports secure communication, trusted services, consular access, official messaging, and protection against impersonation.
Influence Network: A distributed system of actors, institutions, communities, media channels, and digital platforms through which narratives, trust, and perception move.
Influence Operations: Coordinated efforts to shape perceptions, behaviors, decisions, or public debate in support of a strategic objective — conducted by states, proxies, networks, political actors, private entities, or non-state groups, using overt, covert, digital, cultural, media, economic, or diplomatic tools.
Information Ecosystem: The information ecosystem is the full environment through which information is created, distributed, amplified, interpreted, trusted, contested, or manipulated. It includes media, platforms, algorithms, institutions, influencers, communities, messaging apps, search systems, state actors, non-state actors, and public audiences.
Information Integrity: The reliability, accuracy, authenticity, and trustworthiness of the information environment — and how institutions protect public understanding, reduce confusion, identify manipulation, and communicate responsibly when information is contested or distorted.
Institutional Adaptation: Institutional adaptation is the ability of an organization to adjust its structures, processes, skills, culture, and operating model in response to changing conditions. In foreign affairs, it describes how ministries evolve when diplomacy is reshaped by digital technologies, AI, public pressure, geopolitical competition, and crisis speed.
Institutional Alignment: The process of ensuring that headquarters, missions, leadership, communication teams, and operational units act from a shared strategic understanding.
Institutional Conversion Deficit: The gap between the information available to a foreign ministry and its ability to consistently transform that information into verified insight, coordinated judgment, timely action, and retained institutional learning.
Institutional Readiness: The ability of an organization to understand, prepare for, and respond effectively to emerging pressures, risks, and operational changes — in foreign affairs, whether a ministry, embassy network, or diplomatic institution has the structures, skills, processes, and judgment needed to operate in a changing diplomatic environment.
Institutional Sensemaking: The ability of an institution to interpret complex developments, identify what matters, and convert uncertainty into strategic clarity.
Interoperability: The ability of systems, institutions, platforms, or frameworks to work together across technical, organizational, or policy environments.

M8 entries

Malinformation: Malinformation is information that is based wholly or partly on reality but is used, framed, disclosed, or distributed in a way intended to mislead, manipulate, or cause harm. It can involve genuine material presented without essential context, selectively edited content, doxxing, strategic leaks, or authentic information amplified to produce a deceptive interpretation.
Media and Information Literacy: Media and information literacy, or MIL, is the set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes people need to access, evaluate, understand, create, and use information and media critically, ethically, and effectively. It includes recognizing sources, evidence, context, incentives, manipulation, platform effects, and the rights and responsibilities involved in communication.
Misinformation: False or inaccurate information that spreads regardless of intent and can still damage public understanding, institutional trust, or crisis response.
Mission Alignment: The coordination of diplomatic missions around shared priorities, narratives, messaging, tools, and strategic objectives.
Mission Capability: Mission capability refers to the practical ability of an embassy, consulate, permanent mission, or diplomatic post to fulfill its role effectively in a specific political, social, security, and information environment. It includes people, tools, knowledge, relationships, local insight, communication capacity, crisis readiness, and coordination with headquarters.
Mission Communication Matrix: A structured model for coordinating communication across headquarters, embassies, consular teams, regional accounts, thematic channels, and crisis-response functions.
Mission Coordination: The ability of a ministry of foreign affairs to align headquarters, embassies, consulates, permanent missions, regional offices, and relevant teams around shared priorities, messages, processes, and situational awareness — a core operational capability for coherent diplomacy.
Multilateral Diplomacy: Multilateral diplomacy is diplomatic engagement involving three or more states, usually through international organizations, conferences, coalitions, treaty processes, or other structured forums. It enables participants to negotiate shared rules, coordinate action, manage collective problems, and build legitimacy around outcomes that no single bilateral relationship can produce alone.

N5 entries

Narrative Competition: Narrative competition refers to the contest between different interpretations of events, policies, identities, legitimacy, responsibility, or future direction. In foreign affairs, it describes how states, institutions, media, publics, and non-state actors compete to shape what an issue means.
Narrative Infrastructure: The strategic system through which an institution develops, coordinates, distributes, monitors, and adapts its narratives across digital and offline environments.
Narrative Resilience: The capacity of an institution, society, or state to withstand, interpret, and respond to pressure in the information environment without losing coherence, credibility, or strategic judgment.
Narrative Risk Mapping: Narrative risk mapping is the process of identifying, organizing, and assessing narratives that could create misunderstanding, escalation, reputational damage, public confusion, or diplomatic pressure. It helps institutions understand not only what is being said, but why it matters, who is affected, and how the narrative may evolve.
Note Verbale: A note verbale is a formalized form of diplomatic correspondence written in the third person and exchanged between a foreign ministry, diplomatic mission, international organization, or other authorized official entity. Despite its name, it is a written communication and is generally less formal than a signed first-person note but more formal than an aide-mémoire.

O2 entries

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT): Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, is intelligence produced through the lawful collection, verification, analysis, and interpretation of publicly available information. Sources may include official records, news, websites, social platforms, commercial data, satellite imagery, academic research, public databases, and other material accessible without clandestine collection.
Operational Continuity: Operational continuity is the capability to sustain or restore essential functions at an acceptable level during and after disruption. It depends on identified critical services, clear authority, resilient people and processes, alternative communication and delivery methods, protected information, tested recovery arrangements, and the ability to operate when normal systems or locations are unavailable.

P12 entries

Peace Infrastructure: The systems, capabilities, relationships, and communication mechanisms that help institutions prevent escalation, sustain dialogue, and support long-term stability.
Permanent Mission: A permanent mission is a state's continuing diplomatic representation to an international organization. It is normally led by a permanent representative and enables the state to participate in the organization's deliberations, negotiations, decisions, committees, coalitions, and institutional processes.
Persona Non Grata: Persona non grata is the formal designation by which a receiving state declares that a diplomatic agent is no longer acceptable. The receiving state may make the declaration without explaining its decision, after which the sending state is expected to recall the person or end that person's functions with the mission.
Platform Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement with, through, or about major technology platforms whose rules, algorithms, infrastructures, and governance choices influence public discourse and international affairs.
Platform Governance: The rules, policies, moderation systems, algorithmic choices, and accountability mechanisms that shape how digital platforms influence public discourse, information flows, and institutional communication.
Prebunking: Prebunking is a preventive communication approach that prepares people to recognize manipulation before they encounter it, usually by explaining common misleading techniques, warning about likely false narratives, or providing verified context in advance. It aims to build resistance to manipulation rather than waiting to correct a falsehood after it has spread.
Preventive Diplomacy: Preventive diplomacy is diplomatic action intended to stop disputes from arising, prevent existing tensions from escalating into conflict, limit the spread of conflict, or create space for peaceful settlement. It may involve early engagement, good offices, mediation, confidence-building, fact-finding, quiet dialogue, or support for regional and local prevention mechanisms.
Procurement-Safe AI: Procurement-safe AI refers to the acquisition and use of AI tools through processes that protect legal compliance, data security, accountability, auditability, human oversight, institutional autonomy, and public trust. It means AI is not only purchased for capability, but assessed for risk and fit.
Public Diplomacy: The way states and foreign affairs institutions engage foreign publics, communities, media, civil society, and non-governmental audiences to build understanding, trust, influence, and long-term relationships — including cultural diplomacy, educational exchange, public communication, diaspora engagement, media relations, digital outreach, and narrative-building.
Public Narrative: Public narrative refers to the way an issue, institution, country, leader, or event is understood and discussed by public audiences. It is shaped by official communication, media coverage, social platforms, cultural context, lived experience, influencers, communities, and competing interpretations.
Public Trust Layer: The visible and invisible mechanisms through which institutions build credibility, consistency, and confidence with public audiences.
Public-Sector AI Procurement: Public-sector AI procurement is the process through which a public institution defines, evaluates, contracts, acquires, deploys, and governs AI-enabled products or services. It extends beyond price and functionality to include data rights, security, performance evidence, transparency, human oversight, legal compliance, audit access, vendor dependency, change control, continuity, and exit.

R2 entries

Responsible AI: The design, deployment, and governance of artificial intelligence systems in ways that support safety, accountability, fairness, transparency, and human oversight.
Retained Authority: Retained authority is Diplomats.Digital's institutional test for whether an organization that uses AI or digital systems remains able to define objectives, set boundaries, authenticate actors, approve consequential action, verify outputs, intervene or override, trace decisions, maintain continuity, and exit dependencies. Authority is retained only when these powers remain operationally executable, not merely stated in policy or contract.

S11 entries

Science Diplomacy: Science diplomacy is the interaction between scientific knowledge, international research cooperation, and diplomatic practice. It includes using scientific evidence to inform foreign policy, using diplomacy to enable scientific collaboration, and using shared scientific work to build relationships, trust, and cooperation between states and societies.
Sensemaking: The process of interpreting complex information, identifying patterns, and understanding what developments mean for strategy, diplomacy, or institutional response.
Situational Awareness: Situational awareness is the continuously updated understanding of a relevant operating environment produced by collecting, validating, contextualizing, and sharing information about what is happening, why it matters, what may happen next, and which decisions may be required. It is not simply access to more data or real-time monitoring.
Soft Power: Soft power is the ability of a state or institution to influence others through attraction, credibility, values, culture, policy reputation, and legitimacy rather than coercion or payment. In diplomacy, soft power shapes how foreign publics, partners, and institutions perceive a country's role, intentions, and trustworthiness.
Sovereign Digital Capacity: Sovereign digital capacity is the ability of a state or institution to understand, govern, procure, operate, secure, and adapt digital systems in ways that protect autonomy, public interest, data control, and strategic choice. It is the capability side of digital sovereignty.
Sovereignty-Safe AI: Deprecated DD terminology, retained as a record. It described the use of artificial intelligence in ways that protect institutional autonomy, sensitive data, national interests, legal obligations, and human decision-making. Diplomats.Digital now describes this as AI use designed to preserve institutional control and retained authority.
Sovereignty-Safe Implementation: Deprecated DD terminology, retained as a record. It described a model of digital transformation or capability-building that allowed institutions to strengthen their systems without compromising national sovereignty, data control, operational autonomy, or institutional culture. Diplomats.Digital now uses institutionally controlled implementation.
Strategic Communication: The coordinated use of messaging, timing, channels, evidence, and audience understanding to support institutional objectives — connecting policy, public diplomacy, media engagement, crisis response, digital communication, and leadership messaging into a coherent approach.
Strategic Foresight: The structured exploration of future risks, scenarios, signals, and opportunities to support long-term decision-making and institutional preparedness.
Strategic Narrative: A strategic narrative is a coherent story that explains how an institution, state, or policy understands the world, defines its role, and communicates its direction over time. In foreign affairs, strategic narratives help connect policy decisions to meaning, legitimacy, values, and long-term positioning.
Synthetic Media: Synthetic media refers to images, audio, video, text, or digital content created or altered using artificial intelligence or other computational methods. It can be used creatively and legitimately, but it can also be used to deceive, impersonate, manipulate, or create false evidence.

T9 entries

Tech Diplomacy: Diplomacy focused on technology as a geopolitical, economic, regulatory, and strategic domain, including AI, cybersecurity, semiconductors, digital infrastructure, standards, and technology companies.
Technology Access Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement focused on ensuring that states, institutions, and societies can access critical technologies, skills, infrastructure, and governance capacity without deepening dependency or exclusion.
Technology Governance: Technology governance refers to the rules, responsibilities, standards, decision processes, and oversight mechanisms that shape how technologies are selected, deployed, used, audited, and controlled. In foreign affairs, it helps ministries manage technology adoption in ways that protect security, sovereignty, accountability, public trust, and institutional judgment.
Technology Standards Diplomacy: Diplomatic engagement around the technical standards, protocols, norms, and governance frameworks that shape how technologies are designed, adopted, connected, and regulated globally.
Track II Diplomacy: Track II diplomacy is unofficial, non-governmental dialogue involving individuals such as experts, former officials, academics, civil-society leaders, or other influential participants who engage across conflict or political divides. It can explore ideas, clarify perceptions, build relationships, and create options that may support formal diplomacy without carrying official negotiating authority.
Trust Architecture: The design of systems, behaviors, narratives, and communication practices that help build, maintain, or restore trust between institutions and their audiences.
Trust Infrastructure: The systems, practices, standards, relationships, and institutional capabilities that allow people, organizations, and governments to rely on information, identity, communication, and decision-making processes — supporting credibility, verification, secure coordination, public confidence, and institutional continuity in foreign affairs.
Trusted Channel Protocol: A trusted channel protocol is a set of agreed rules for which communication channels are official, how messages are verified, who can authorize sensitive communication, and how institutions respond when authenticity is uncertain. It protects communication integrity during normal operations and crises.
Twiplomacy: Diplomatic engagement conducted primarily on social platforms — a narrower subset of digital diplomacy.

V2 entries

Vendor Dependency: Vendor dependency refers to the risk that an institution becomes overly reliant on external technology providers, platforms, systems, consultants, or proprietary infrastructure in ways that limit autonomy, flexibility, security, or negotiating power.
Vendor Lock-in: Vendor lock-in is a condition in which switching barriers make changing or leaving a provider unusually costly, risky, slow, or operationally difficult. These barriers may arise from proprietary formats, closed interfaces, restrictive contracts, concentrated expertise, data-transfer obstacles, integrated dependencies, or a lack of viable alternatives. Vendor lock-in is therefore more restrictive than ordinary vendor dependency, which is reliance on an external provider.