Geopolitics, online first, open access

https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2026.2659596

Everyday Diplomacy in the World of Standards

Technical standards have become a central terrain of contemporary geopolitics. In domains running from 5G to batteries, from AI governance to data infrastructures, the contest is rarely about who possesses the most advanced technology. It is about whose standards travel, whose certification counts, and whose interoperability sets the conditions under which incompatible systems are allowed to meet. Much of the existing writing on this terrain stays at the level of formal arenas. Standards bodies. Alliance politics. Export controls. The Brussels Effect. BIS controls. The Clean Network programme. What remains harder to see is the work that makes any of this actually function on the ground, and the actors who perform it.

Our new open access paper in Geopolitics, co-authored with Sami Moisio at Helsinki, takes on this gap from a different angle. The paper follows Chinese battery and mobile phone entrepreneurs operating between Shenzhen and Nairobi, drawing on multi-sited fieldwork we conducted across three periods in 2023 and 2024. The paper is available without paywall at https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2026.2659596.

The puzzle

Kenya is strategically poly-aligned. Its military, security, and administrative architecture remain anchored in Western frameworks inherited from the colonial and Cold War period. Its infrastructural build-out, though, runs increasingly through Chinese finance, firms, and technical systems. Mobile and energy devices circulate under regulatory regimes that carry US, European, and Chinese traces simultaneously, each with its own certification pathway and its own security logic. At the level of high politics, Kenya refuses to choose. At the level of the port, the lab, and the kiosk, incompatibility has to be worked out daily. Somebody has to do the work of making a Chinese battery pass a Kenya Bureau of Standards test, or a Transsion phone recognise a dark-skinned face, or a Chinese-made server talk to a procurement pipeline shaped by British colonial templates.

That work, we argue, is diplomatic. Not in the sense of representing states, but in the sense of making heterogeneous technical, regulatory, and political systems function together without forcing explicit geopolitical choice.

Everyday diplomacy in a standards register

We combine the "personal turn" in diplomatic studies (Constantinou, Cornago, McConnell, Dittmer) with Andrew Barry's technological zones and Dittmer's interoperability-as-assemblage. Our move is to foreground the technical-material dimensions of diplomacy. Engineering, testing, certification, repair, and commercial problem-solving perform diplomatic functions when they enable coordination under conditions of structural incompatibility. The paper identifies three overlapping modes of everyday diplomatic work.

Constructing technical authority.

Leveraging positional networks.

Building affective infrastructure.

Docking

From these three modes we derive a concept that sharpens the vocabulary available for thinking about standards under geopolitical rivalry. *Docking* is coordination without consolidation. It allows contradictory technical systems to coexist without formal convergence and without explicit geopolitical alignment. Golden Lion docks via procedural accommodation inside an existing regulatory institution, which preserves strategic ambiguity at the state level. Transsion docks via objects. Each phone is a mobile micro-zone of compatibility, maintained by repair networks, service centres, and user practices rather than by regulatory certification.

Docking is not a weaker form of zonal integration. It is a qualitatively distinct mechanism suited to an era in which geopolitical rivalry makes wholesale alignment risky while economic pressures make exclusion untenable.

Atomised territory

The spatial outcome is what we name *atomised territory*. Where Barry's technological zones point toward integration through qualification and infrastructural coherence, atomised territory disperses authority across laboratories, inspection routines, shipping timelines, committee memberships, devices, and service counters. Territory is not redefined at the level of national regulation. It is overlaid with dispersed and mobile fragments of infrastructural order, aggregated rather than consolidated. The political risk of alignment is displaced downward onto the bodies of liminal entrepreneurs, who assume responsibility for sustaining interoperability across fragmented regulatory sites, allowing the state to avoid overt alignment.

Atomised territory is not a residual or incomplete form of territorialisation. It is a distinct spatial outcome of contemporary geopolitical constraints, a form through which rivalry is managed rather than resolved.

Why it matters

A few implications worth naming.

First, the paper continues a Deleuzian-inflected line of argument in my own work on how digital and infrastructural assemblages reshape territory and the organisation of production. Atomised territory is a companion concept to assembled positionalities (Wang 2024) and to the social-factory readings I have been developing with collaborators on platform labour and mass entrepreneurship in China.

Second, it rethinks diaspora diplomacy in a standards key. The ex-Xinhua entrepreneur, the overseas Chinese federation, and the Kenyan technician at the Carlcare counter all perform transprofessional diplomatic work that the state cannot perform directly without diplomatic cost.

Third, it is a contribution to China-Africa debates that refuses both the "new colonialism" framing and the "mutual development" framing. Interoperability is political because it redistributes regulatory authority in atomised form. It is also banal. It moves through discharge curves, battery capacity, facial recognition algorithms, and the geography of repair.