Call for Contributions - Deadline: June 1st

Digital Statecraft: From Principles to Practice

Special Track at Data for Policy 2026, Barcelona, 8-10 September 2026

 

Track information: https://digitalstatecraft.academy/special-track-digital-statecraft-from-principles-to-practice/

 

The Digital Statecraft Academy invites research and practitioner contributions to this special track hosted at Data for Policy 2026  conference leading to a special collection in the Data & Policy journal published by Cambridge University Press and a companion edited volume.

 

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:

 

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.

 

We welcome submissions across three contribution modes:

 

• Mode A – Research Papers: Peer-reviewed empirical, theoretical, or comparative work engaging Digital Statecraft as a new field. Full papers, extended abstracts, and panel proposals accepted. 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 cases from practice, mapped to the 10 Principles of Digital Statecraft. A template is provided. Selected contributors will be invited to develop 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 after the conference. Extended abstracts to be submitted via Easychair

 

For more detailed information on submission types, the review process, and important dates, please see full Special Track and Conference information.

 

For any inquiries, please contact office@digitalstatecraft.academy

 

With kind regards,

The Digital Statecraft Academy and Data for Policy 2026 – Conference Committee