"Diplomacy’s lingua franca in the 19th century was French; in the 20th it was English. The lingua franca of diplomacy in the 21st century is the mastery of digital tools and platforms. We have witnessed an exponential rise in the multiplicity of non-state actors that today play a major role in domestic and international politics.

The growing international activism of subnational authorities--whether state or local--and of civil society as a whole has marked the global interaction of our times. While the nation state remains the central player of international relations it has also lost its monopoly on international power and information and is no longer the sole entity that determines how countries and societies relate to one another on the world stage."

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