Micro Geopolitics in the World of Standards: Docking Tech Between China and Kenya as Everyday Diplomacy

Technical standards have become central to contemporary geopolitics, yet research remains overwhelmingly focused on elite actors and formal standard-setting arenas, treating standard-setting and implementation as separate stages. This paper examines how interoperability is actually produced under conditions of geopolitical rivalry through the everyday diplomatic work of mobile technology entrepreneurs operating between China and Kenya. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted across Kenya and Shenzhen between 2023 and 2024, we analyse how Chinese battery and mobile phone entrepreneurs navigate competing US, European, and Chinese standards regimes within Kenya’s strategically poly-aligned context. We develop an analytical framework identifying three overlapping modes of everyday diplomatic work: constructing technical authority through standards literacy and testing expertise, leveraging positional networks across regulatory and commercial spaces, and building affective infrastructure through trust and recognition. Together, these modes enable what we term ‘docking’ - forms of partial compatibility that allow contradictory technical systems to coexist without requiring formal convergence or explicit geopolitical alignment. Rather than consolidating technological zones, these entrepreneurial practices generate ‘atomized territory’: a fragmented spatial order where governance, authority, and technical control are dispersed across discrete sites, objects, and everyday practices rather than consolidated within bounded zones. This reconceptualisation of interoperability as diplomatic labour reveals how geopolitical ordering emerges through mundane technical work, demonstrating that transnational commercial actors perform crucial diplomatic functions in an era of intensifying technological rivalry.