The Science Diplomacy Playbook

Science Diplomacy has moved from a niche practice to the operating environment for great power competition, industrial strategy, and technology governance.

The Science Diplomacy Playbook: 2026 Edition is a structured field guide for practitioners who work at the intersection of science, technology, and global affairs. Designed for those shaping policy, markets, and international partnerships in an era defined by science and technology.

This is not a theory. It is an operating manual. Across ten chapters, the Playbook covers the full architecture of the field: how bilateral agreements are built and managed; how multilateral institutions are being supplemented by minilateral coalitions; how AI governance fragmentation is reshaping international cooperation; how critical minerals have become the new currency of geopolitical leverage; and how African resource sovereignty is rewriting the terms of global partnership.

Each chapter includes Put It to Work sections that translate analysis directly into action.

Written for policy advisors and national security professionals, science attachés, research institutions and universities, industry strategy leaders, and investors at the science-policy interface.

Daniella Sussman works at the intersection of science, innovation, and global diplomacy. She is the founder of The Global Lens: Science Diplomacy in Focus and the GLSD.AI intelligence platform, editor of Global Signals, host of the Global Lens podcast, and a board member of the Global Network for Science and Diplomacy.