online first, open access, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/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.

The paper is open access. Please read it, teach with it, and pass it along.

The paper repositions digital nomads not as stateless figures of freedom but as central actors in evolving regimes of mobility governance. Moving beyond the lifestyle framing, we ask how race, class, and passport privilege shape differentiated access to mobility infrastructures that states and platforms now co-produce, and how nomads navigate and produce topological formations of territory through platforms, co-living hubs, e-residency schemes, and blockchain-supported e-diasporas. Our argument is that digital nomadism is both a symptom and a catalyst of a liquified sovereignty that governs through circulation rather than enclosure.

Two lines of inquiry: Differentiated access to mobility infrastructures shaped by race, class, and passport privilege. Topological formations of territory through platforms, co-living hubs, and e-residency regimes.

Networked digital enclaves. Alternative technological infrastructures that rearrange sovereignty from territorially-anchored to algorithmically-governed protocol sovereignty. Blockchain wallets, data cooperatives, and decentralized autonomous organisations enable forms of community governance across dispersed geographies. Nomads in these enclaves do not simply traverse state jurisdictions, they co-produce alternative territorial logics that run parallel to and occasionally in tension with nation-state systems.

Cloud states. The decoupling of governance services from territorial presence. Tax collection, business registration, identity verification, and even democratic participation can now be administered through distributed digital infrastructures that sustain governance relationships irrespective of physical location. Services that appear fluid and borderless are underpinned by dense data extraction and behavioural modification. The nomad functions simultaneously as subject and object of cloud-state governance.

Drawing on Deleuzian deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, feminist geopolitics, critical diaspora studies, and a necropolitical reading of nomadic privilege maintained at the expense of others' stasis, the paper calls for scholarship that theorises sovereignty beyond fixed borders and nomadism beyond neoliberal individualism.

China's wanghong (网红) economy is typically read through performance, aspiration, and algorithmically-mediated self-branding. What tends to fall out of the frame is the asymmetric power assemblage it sits inside, shaped simultaneously by patriarchy, neoliberalisation, algorithmic governance, and politics of ethnicity and region. Drawing on ethnographic and digital ethnographic fieldwork with Uyghur wanghongs along Xinjiang's digital food supply chain, we argue that influencer practices are best understood as atmospheric assemblages that organise attention and affect at the interface of platform, body, and state.

Three dimensions of the affective atmosphere of captivation: Sensory and bodily engagement. Spatio-temporal organisation of attention. Ruling with algorithms and geo-technologies.

Affective atmosphere of captivation. We develop this concept to name the apparatus in which sensory experience, attention, and state power co-constitute one another through platform infrastructure. The concept extends MacCannell's staged authenticity, Anderson's affective atmospheres, and Ash's technologies of captivation. The algorithm is not neutral mediation. It is a technology of rule that shapes which bodies, which foods, and which stories become legible and circulable. At the same time, the affective pull of intimacy, recognition, and authenticity is not a cynical performance. It is the real material force through which creators and audiences become entangled.

Two modes of performative authenticity. Ethnographically we identify two modes. Exotic spectacle, where cultural distance and visual difference become the draw, a legibility of Uyghurness through otherness. Domestic familiarity, where authenticity anchors in everyday maternal experience, intergenerational foodways, and the felt textures of Uyghur sociality. Creators navigate between these modes. Often they must perform both at once, threading the needle between state-sanctioned ethnic representation and the lived complexity of Uyghur food and kin.

The piece speaks to autonomist debates on immaterial labour and the social factory, to influencer and platform studies, and to critical scholarship on frontier development, ethnic representation, and state-platform entanglement.

Much of the platform-labour scholarship treats precarity as a universal condition and gig-worker agency as evenly distributed. Our paper pushes against both moves. Uyghur gig workers in Xinjiang's food delivery sector navigate two very different platform ecologies, each with its own organisational structure, linguistic infrastructure, and temporal horizon. Kamil, a locally developed platform operating in the Uyghur language. Meituan, the Mandarin platform originating in Han-majority regions and spreading into Xinjiang. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews in Urumqi and Kumul, we argue that the work of making a living across these systems is not a single condition of precarity. It is a graduated and dynamic mode of participation shaped by linguistic infrastructure, economic precarity, and affective dislocation.

Three dimensions of graduated suspension: Temporal suspension. Cultural suspension. Interactive suspension.

Graduated suspension. We develop this concept in conversation with the "suspension" and "hyper-precarity" literatures. Suspension in platform labour is not homogeneous. It is graded, dynamic, and reshaped by ethnic and linguistic infrastructures. Workers are in but not of the platform economy. Graduated suspension reads that liminal incorporation as a positive analytic object, foregrounding how workers exercise strategic agency within constrained choices.

Cultural suspension. The paper's sharpest contribution. We conceptualise cultural suspension as a condition produced at the intersection of linguistic infrastructures, economic precarity, and affective dislocation. Uyghur workers are folded into the platform economy through Kamil's Uyghur-language interfaces and Meituan's Mandarin architecture, yet held at an interpretive and affective distance from it. Cultural suspension is liminal incorporation, and it names a specifically ethnic-linguistic register of platform labour too often collapsed into generic accounts of precarity.

The piece speaks to autonomist debates on immaterial labour and the social factory, to platform labour and hyper-precarity literatures, and to critical China studies on ethnic governance.

1. https://doi.org/doi 10.1215/00382876-9443336

2. T his essay attempts to explore the three currents of user-generated content (UGC) platform development in China, including one full of improvised endeavors by the public after Web 2.0 opened the door of cultural production to amateurs in illiberal China, one that features affective laboring and networking by prosumers on platforms with algorithm-conditioned visibility, and one that features with regulatory attempts through collaborations of platforms and authorities to introduce a new “creator economy” and subsequently redefine the milieu of capital accumulation (Lefebvre 1991). The three currents have prominent social forces and logics, each of which is prominent at a particular time but is always entangled with others, in a sometimes conflictual yet reciprocal way. 

This essay focuses on platforms that produce, share, and disseminate cultural content across a wide range, from online literature to video-sharing, to trace the evolving process of three currents from amateur creativity to creator economy. Our study of UGC platforms looks at the multifaceted role of networking that unfolds among producers, users, prosumers, and platforms, which establishes internal cohesion of a variety of communities and forms multiple territorial clusters (Barns 2019; June Wang 2021), which also constructs relational hierarchies of prosumers and platforms. Thus, this essay endeavors to continue other investigations of the networks and hierarchies in crowd-based capitalism (Sundararajan 2016; Van Dijck 2013). By adopting the spatial parameters metaphorically, we aim to illustrate the power relationship of different actors involved in this process of platform development, which is not viewed as an arena for a fraction of the society and the economy but is more concerned with its role in transforming the organization of production and consumption and the society’s relational structure.

1. https://doi.org/Artn 0308518x19899428 10.1177/0308518x19899428

2. Recent debates on the ‘global urbanism’ paradigm have had the merit of questioning longaccepted geographies of centrality, peripherality and marginality in the field of critical urban studies. However, these discussions have rarely interrogated the changing realities of global capitalism (Peck, 2015), particularly after the so-called ‘tech boom 2.0’ of the late 2000s and the 2010s. With the emergence and accelerated development of online platforms, the smartphone, artificial intelligence and other ‘networked digital information technologies’ that have reshaped everyday life in unprecedented ways (Greenfield, 2017), urban environments have become increasingly more attractive for profit-driven economic activity, as vast and heterogeneous concentrations of consumers, knowledge and social relations. This increased profitability of urban environments has led to the rise of a new wave of urban entrepreneurialism across the world, which is under scrutiny here.