Digitalization of Diplomacy

Abstract This chapter discusses the impact of digitization of diplomacy for cities. The introduction explains the revived interest in cities as international actors. The second section argues that diplomacy is not the only process through which cities engage with audiences beyond the borders of their home countries, and puts forwards the idea of international activities of cities by merging city branding and city diplomacy. The third section discusses the role of digitization and situates it as a framework to study the aforementioned international activities. These theoretical sections are followed by the empirical part of the chapter that looks at four select cities—New York (USA), Izmir (Turkey), Victoria (Canada), and Akureyri (Iceland). The findings suggest that digitization is a spectrum, rather than a binary variable. Moreover, digitization also brings its own policy and communication challenges by blurring boundaries between audience segments as well as institutions.