The digital reproduction of the state: Public diplomacy, digital entitativity, and strategic ontology

How do states engage in strategic ontology via digital diplomacy? Existing arguments about digital diplomacy focus on everyday practices, overlooking its ontological implications through reproducing states for lay people, whose use of social media forms part of their knowledge discourse about world politics. The author argues that states employ digital diplomacy to engage in strategic ontology to manage narratives about themselves. Such a strategy induces what the author calls ‘digital entitativity’ or people’s perceptions that a state is a whole with intentions via digital means. Using a hermeneutic approach to discourse analysis, the article analyzes the People’s Republic of China’s public diplomacy efforts on Twitter/X to present itself digitally to international audiences by producing and circulating summit-related content. The article identifies themes that disrupt and conform to normalized practices of digital diplomacy that suggest China’s perception of its place in the existing international order. This has implications for understanding how digital diplomacy could be a disruptive international practice as states use digital communication tools to produce and manage international narratives for strategic ontology purposes.