Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations

Most multilateral negotiations today take place via the computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones of diplomats, whom distance may separate, but who negotiate 24/7. The logical question is: How does technology influence international negotiations?
REBECCA ADLER-NISSEN and ALENA DRIESCHOVA explore “track-change diplomacy,” that is, how diplomats use information and communication technology (ICT) to collaboratively edit and negotiate documents.
“But technological advances and the ubiquitous nature of ICT do more than just facilitate negotiations. They also push negotiations in a particular direction, sometimes with unexpected consequences.”
To analyze the widespread but understudied phenomenon of track-change diplomacy, the authors adopt a practice-oriented approach to technology, developing the concept of affordance: the way a tool or technology simultaneously enables and constrains the tasks users can possibly perform with it.
Their article, titled ‘Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations’ and published in International Studies Quarterly shows how digital ICT affords shareability, visualization, and immediacy of information, thus shaping the temporality and power dynamics of international negotiations.
These three affordances have significant consequences for how states construct and promote national interests; how diplomats reach compromises among a large number of states (as text edits in collective drafting exercises); and how power plays out in international negotiations, the authors contend.
Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation of negotiations between the European Union's member states, as well as in-depth interviews, the analysis casts new light on these negotiations, where documents become the site of both semantic and political struggle. “Rather than delivering on the technology's promise of keeping track and reinforcing national oversight in negotiations, we argue that track-change diplomacy can in fact lead to a loss of control, challenging existing understandings of diplomacy.”

Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Alena Drieschova, Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 3, September 2019, Pages 531–545, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz030