Diversities and Developments in Asia Pacific Digital Diplomacy

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the practices and contexts of digital diplomacy in the Asia Pacific, a vast, diverse region with great disparities in wealth, size, geostrategic heft, demographics, and political systems. The Asia Pacific is shaped by legacies of history, ongoing great power rivalries, the omnipresence of global systems of trade and communication, and by contemporary issues such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. These conditions are the basis for any discussion of digital diplomacy in this dynamic, complex region. The chapter considers diplomacy in practice, and practices that affect and inform diplomacy; digital publics as participants in digital diplomacy and the techno-social and techno-political systems that shape digital diplomacy. It also considers practices that are emergent, such as coercive diplomacy and foreign interference, the increasing role of the system of digital networks that facilitate diplomacy, and the evolving information disorder which problematizes diplomatic practice.