As a research program, computational diplomacy brings complexity science and computational social science to bear on diplomacy, a practice that leaves abundant traces in speeches, votes, treaties, and institutional archives, and that has long resisted quantitative study for want of data rather than of substance. As a field of inquiry, its object is reciprocity itself. Diplomacy is increasingly conducted in an environment shaped by computation, from platform arenas and recommendation systems to the reshaping of decision-making. Computation has in turn become an object of diplomacy, illustrated by the rhetoric of an AI arms race that structures investment and regulation, and by the recent dispute over Chinese open-weight models entering the agenda of US-China trade negotiations.

While this reflects broader patterns in which anticipations of a technology become as consequential as its capabilities, it also opens an analytical opportunity: races are made rather than found, and the narratives that make them can themselves be measured and modeled. Ultimately, the lecture asks what it means to study a system from inside it, raising questions about evidence, agency and the governance of expectations.