Standard results from non-abelian cohomology theory specialize to a theory of torsors and stacks for cosimplicial groupoids. The space of global sections of the stack completion of a cosimplicial groupoid $G$ is weakly equivalent to the Bousfield–Kan total complex of $BG$ for all cosimplicial groupoids $G$. The $k$-invariants for the Postnikov tower of a cosimplicial space $X$ are naturally elements of stack cohomology for the stack associated to the fundamental groupoid ${\it\pi}(X)$ of $X$. Cocycle-theoretic ideas and techniques are used throughout the paper.

The main difficulty in the theory of non-abelian cohomology is that for cosimplicial groups only zero-th and first dimensional cohomotopy are known. In this article we introduce a new class of cosimplicial groups, called centralised cosimplicial groups, for which we are able to define a second cohomotopy, with all expected properties. The main examples of such cosimplicial groups come from 2-categories.

Using non-abelian cohomology we introduce new obstructions to the Hasse principle. In particular, we generalize the classical descent formalism to principal homogeneous spaces under noncommutative algebraic groups and give explicit examples of application.