The DemTech initiative operates under the aegis of the STG Transnational Democracy Programme (TDP) and advances interdisciplinary research, teaching, and evidence-based policy on the convergence between democratic innovation and technological innovation. Building on the Programme’s work on transnational democratic innovations, as well as planetary and embodied politics, DemTech examines how digital technologies, artificial intelligence, data infrastructures, and platform systems are reshaping the conditions under which democratic communities decide, while holding power accountable and resolving conflicts with prosocial solutions.
At a time when digital platforms and algorithmic curation increasingly mediate public life, DemTech asks how technology can be governed democratically, and how democracy itself can be renewed through responsible tech design. The initiative recognises that neither democracy nor technology is static: digital transformation creates new possibilities for public reasoning through collective intelligence, but it also generates new risks of concentration of power and gatekeeping knowledge. Digital and AI systems cannot be understood as neutral tools, since they reflect institutional choices, social values, economic incentives, and political assumptions. For this reason, DemTech treats technological transformation as a field of democratising the questions around socio-legal design. As this entails tackling the big transformational questions of our times, the focus is on a translocal-to-global scale that can facilitate the advent of planetary politics.
Rather than proposing a single model of “digital democracy,” DemTech positions democratic technology as an analytical and practical framework for understanding how political authority, legitimacy, participation, and accountability can be organised in digitally mediated societies. It connects the TDP’s expertise in democratic innovations with research on AI governance, platform governance, data politics, digital public spheres, distributed institutions, and peace-oriented technologies.
Within this framework, several thematic initiatives contribute to the intellectual scaffolding of DemTech. A first strand focuses on distributed governance, platforms, and transnational democratic innovation. This includes a research agenda focusing on platform governance, digital public spaces, politically smart cities, digital twins, and new forms of translocal democratic coordination. It also draws on the European Union’s experience as a complex political order where legitimacy, accountability, and shared authority are organised beyond the nation-state. DemTech applies these insights to tech governance, asking how digital systems can be designed for interoperability and pluralism across multi-level forms of collective decision-making.
A second strand focuses on AI, democracy, data, and algorithmic governance, investigating how intelligent systems affect democratic agency, mediate public knowledge, shape political judgement, shrink or expand representation, fosters humanism in public administration and enables institutional accountability. This work examines the democratic implications of AI-mediated decision-making, as we ask where data-driven tools can improve responsiveness, inclusion, and institutional capacity. DemTech approaches AI not as a replacement for democratic politics but as a set of systems whose legitimacy depends on transparency, explainability and citizens’ ability to understand and challenge the technologies that shape decisions affecting them. This strand is developed in collaboration with the AI&DEM team of the Florence School of Transnational Governance.
A third strand developed a Global PeaceTech Hub, which explores how technology can support peacebuilding, mediation, conflict prevention, dialogue, and social cohesion while remaining attentive to the inherent risks of capture and non-human-centred developments. The Global PeaceTech Hub, based at the EUI School of Transnational Governance, brings together researchers and peacebuilders, technology actors and changemakers, to investigate the role of technology in building peace across borders. DemTech connects this agenda to democratic innovation by examining how AI and digital tools can support trust-building, inclusion, early warning, conflict analysis, and deliberative facilitation that are embedded in responsible, human-centred, and democratically accountable frameworks.
Together, these strands support the EUI’s broader effort to position Florence as a laboratory for democratic and technological innovation. Through research programmes, executive education, policy dialogues, experimental partnerships, and collaboration with European and international organisations, DemTech seeks to strengthen the analytical tools, institutional capacities, and public conversations needed to govern technological transformation democratically. Its central ambition is to ensure that emerging technologies do not merely disrupt democratic life, but become objects of democratic choice and instruments for deepening participation.
Publications
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Advancing ‘prosocial tech design’ and shaping the EU's platform design governance
This policy brief is the outcome of the workshop “Prosocial Tech Design Governance: Exploring Policy Innovations”. Co-organised by the Global PeaceTech Hub at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG), this two-day event has brought together worldwide experts to discuss the Blueprint on Prosocial Tech Design Governance developed by the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion.
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Advancing ‘prosocial tech design’ and shaping the EU's platform design governance
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Global PeaceTech : unlocking the better angels of our techne
The double-edged nature of technology pervades human history. Today, the potential for peace offered by the internet, social networks, mobile devices, digital identities, AI, blockchain, big data, geospatial information, is matched by the risks of disinformation, polarisation, online violence, surveillance, data privacy, cyber-attacks, and power concentration.
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Global PeaceTech : unlocking the better angels of our techne
Research team
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![Portrait picture of Kalypso Nicolaidis]()
Kalypso Nicolaidis
Full-time Professor
Florence School of Transnational Governance
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![Portrait picture of Andrea Gaiba]()
Andrea Gaiba
Research Associate
Florence School of Transnational Governance