Current Volume (19)
Issue 1: Advancing a New Research Agenda on Digital Disruption in Diplomacy
Special issue edited by Karin Aggestam and Constance Duncombe
Issue 1 at Brill.comKarin Aggestam and Constance Duncombe
Abstract
This article introduces the special issue on digital disruption in diplomacy. We propose a new research agenda, advancing novel conceptualisations and empirical insights into the hybrid nature of contemporary diplomatic practices in a broad range of areas such as peace-making, inter-state signalling, domestic politics, digital communication, public diplomacy and popular culture. Emphasising the major impact of new technologies and the convergence of offline and online diplomatic space, we address the transformative influence at both the micro level of individual actors and the macro level of diplomatic processes and structures. By taking stock of the existing digital diplomacy literature and exploring emerging digital technologies, diplomatic signalling and digital disinformation, we show how new research on digital disruption in diplomacy may be advanced by focusing on agency-structure, method and data collection. Finally, we provide an overview of contributions that collectively propel the development of a new explorative research agenda on digital disruption in diplomacy.
Annika Bergman Rosamond and Katharine A.M. Wright
Abstract
The 2020 UN Security Council (SC) elections concluded during a historical period defined by the global COVID-19 pandemic. As officials scrambled to organise a socially distanced election, the final stage of the campaigns was forced into the digital realm. To bolster candidate states’ chances of being elected to the SC, digital diplomacy became the primary mode of communication. Here we focus on the SC campaigns of Canada, Ireland and Kenya, which were defined by ‘digital celebrity diplomacy’. U2 and Celine Dion supported the national campaigns of Ireland and Canada, while Kenya drew on the recognition of a number of celebrity athletes to bolster its campaign’s national brand. Thus, we explore the convergence of celebrity and digital diplomacy in these SC campaigns, contributing to new understandings of the use of celebrity in transforming the projection and reception of strategic narratives when integrated with digital diplomacy during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
James Pamment, Alicia Fjällhed and Martina Smedberg
Abstract
A decade ago, Matt Armstrong noted that the War on Terror set the scene for US public diplomacy (PD) to be heavily focused on security. Other countries have focused their PD on image promotion, relationship-building or cultural relations. As digital media practices have slowly been adopted by the majority of foreign ministries, the logics governing social and digital media have also been increasingly internalised into diplomatic practice. Lacking in current PD research is a theory of the ‘logics’ that drive and motivate public diplomacy. This article explores the application of ‘PD logics’ as a theoretical framework for interpreting the ways in which foreign policy priorities, such as securitisation, trade promotion and strategic partnerships, shape PD practices. With a particular focus on the most recent wave of social and digital media adoption practices, this article establishes a theory of ‘PD logics’ that could provide new avenues for developing theories of public diplomacy.
Karin Aggestam and Elsa Hedling
Abstract
This article focuses on the quest for digitalisation in peace mediation and to the extent to which digital disruption is reshaping its practices. While digitalisation in the wider field of diplomacy has seen dramatic changes in its practices, peace mediation is a ‘latecomer’. The article explores the constitutive effects on specific norms and practices of peace mediation and identifies opportunities as well as the restraining and even counterproductive effects of digitalisation. Digital technologies, tools and social media platforms are mapped to assess their roles and impact on key practices and to critically analyse the digitalisation of peace mediation. Moreover, a content analysis of international strategic policy documents and central frameworks relevant for international peacebuilding operations is conducted, which shows that digitalisation has taken place gradually and cautiously. Since there are few theoretical and empirical studies on the digitalisation of peace mediation, the article concludes by suggesting three directions to be taken in future research.
Di Wu and Efe Sevin
Abstract
This study looks at how digital technologies disrupted signalling and signal cost calculations in public diplomacy within the context of Covid-19. The pandemic presented a noteworthy opportunity to observe how countries attempt to navigate a relatively unknown communication landscape as a result of external shock and a crisis for states’ images and reputations. We position the communicative outcomes of the pandemic as an exploratory case to discuss how countries use social media to engage with target audiences. We study American and Chinese messaging on Twitter about Covid-19 employing an analytical model of signal cost developed from signalling theory. Using a data set of 1,512 tweets coming from nine different American and Chinese accounts, we investigated their signal cost through content and network analyses. Our findings describe and operationalise signal cost in digital public diplomacy through signaller, signal content and outreach.
Ilan Manor
Abstract
Studies examining the digital disruption of diplomacy focus on the micro level of diplomats’ working routines. This article investigates the new practice of ‘domestic digital diplomacy’ to explore interactions between micro- and macro-level disruptions. The practice of domestic digital diplomacy stems from the digital disruption of government ministries that embrace an outward-looking stance. Domestic digital diplomacy also impacts society as diplomats create a prism through which citizens can make sense of their world. Few studies have investigated how ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs) create such a domestic prism. This study addresses this gap by analysing the images shared on Twitter by the British Foreign Office following Brexit. Using Barthes’s semiotic approach to image analysis, this study demonstrates that MFAs can use images to shape their citizens’ worldviews, values and beliefs. The study concludes that investigating digital disruption in diplomacy requires that scholars focus on interactions between micro- and macro-level disruptions.
Federica Bicchi and Marianna Lovato
Abstract
The article analyses how and to what effect diplomats navigate a landscape in which the physical and the digital have become inextricably intertwined, with emphasis on written communications in the European Union (EU) foreign policy system from the 1970s to the present. Putting International Relations literature into dialogue with Management Studies (particularly media richness theory and sense-making), it looks at how diplomats work their way through different forms of digital written communications. It addresses the effects of diplomacy’s digitalisation in terms of time, space and confidentiality. Digital tools have hastened diplomacy’s tempo and affected security considerations, while they have had mixed effects in terms of centre–periphery relations in diplomatic conversations, particularly for gender and wealth. The EU foreign policy system exemplifies these dynamics, from the spectacular rise of the COREU system to its decline in favour of faster, easier-to-use technologies such as e-mail and texting.
Albert Triwibowo
Abstract
One facet of information and communication technology in diplomacy is how and to what extent states implement digital tools in their diplomatic practices. This article focuses on the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) and argues that it has performed the early stages of digital diplomacy, during which it is carried out for information dissemination purposes and is mainly influenced by the domestic agenda. The research finds that Indonesian digital diplomacy is affected by various factors that have a substantial effect on the MoFA’s digital diplomacy plan of action. This article is a qualitative study supported mainly by primary data from interviews with Indonesian diplomats, high-ranking officials in the Indonesian MoFA, and Indonesian scholars and citizens. The focus is on the social media activity of the Indonesian MoFA on Twitter (@Kemlu_RI), Facebook (Kementerian Luar Negeri RI) and Instagram (kemlu_ri) from 2020 to April 2022.
Publication date: December 2023
Issue 2
Issue 2 at Brill.comTal Dingott Alkopher and Naama Barak
Abstract
The aim of the article is to enhance understanding of the phenomenon of humanitarian public diplomacy in relation to digital communication strategics. It aspires to grasp the nature of discursive practices and strategies of public communications used by practitioners of humanitarian diplomacy. The article analytically maps discursive practices and strategies of public communications employed by humanitarian international organisations across humanitarian crisis cases and explains similarities and differences across cases. Three contexts of humanitarian crisis were chosen as case studies: the humanitarian crisis resulting from the war in Syria (2011-2022); the refugee-related humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean (2015-2021); and the humanitarian crisis that accompanied the Nepal earthquake in 2015.
Nicholas Ross Smith and Tracey Fallon
Abstract
Typically, China has tried to use positive aspects of its history, such as its previous grandeur and its philosophical and cultural heritage, to guide its diplomatic strategic narratives – a kind of historical statecraft. However, this has largely failed to inspire international audiences. Analysis of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ regular press conferences over a twenty-year period reveals there is an observable seeping of more negative aspects of history into China’s diplomatic language during Xi Jinping’s second term. Negative history appears in China’s strategic narratives to highlight changes in the international order by reframing understandings of China and the nature of other major powers. Negative history of this type might afford Xi significant domestic legitimacy, as well as some international supporters, for its assertive articulations; at the same time, however, it reduces China’s ability to win over international audiences and positively disseminate its vision of international order.
Simon Schunz and Ediz Topcuoglu
Abstract
In 2013, the European Union (EU) formulated its ambition to develop a ‘water diplomacy’. Subsequently, it attempted to put this aspiration into practice, notably through various Council Conclusions. Despite this activity, the EU’s evolution as a ‘water diplomat’ remains underexplored. To address this gap, this article examines the EU’s understanding of ‘water diplomacy’ by conducting a comprehensive discourse analysis of its framing of water as an object of diplomacy and the resulting diplomatic approaches. The analysis of key EU documents, triangulated through interviews with policy-makers, reveals that several water frames currently intersect, resulting in a multifaceted EU external water action comprising both a narrow and a broad understanding of water diplomacy. Following an explanation of this finding focusing on the policy entrepreneurship of intra-EU water diplomacy stakeholders, the article concludes by discussing its implications for the academic study and political practice of water diplomacy within and beyond the EU.
Jordan Lynton Cox
Abstract
Diaspora diplomacy is a fundamental framework for understanding diasporic engagement, the ways in which diasporic communities from the Global South contribute to the political and economic landscapes of their home nations, as well as the role their diasporic advocacy plays in the relationships between home and host nations. However, complex histories of migration and colonialism can complicate the perceived site of the diaspora’s diplomacy. Recent publications reflect on the concept of ‘multiple worlds’ within postcolonial diasporic communities. In this article, I partner diaspora diplomacy with the postcolonial framework of hybridities to trace the shifting roles of Chinese Jamaican institutions as diasporic diplomats over time. I explore how these organisations both navigate and reinvent themselves within the diverse formations of Chinese identity that endure within the Chinese diasporic ‘periphery’, changing local and Chinese geopolitics and their own positionality within a primarily Black, postcolonial nation.
Tore Fougner
Book reviewed:
- Baptiste Morizot (2022) Wild Diplomacy: Cohabiting with Wolves on a New Ontological Map. Translated by Catherine Porter. SUNY Press.
Nguyen Ngoc Thao Le
Book reviewed:
- Vu Lam (2023) Public Diplomacy in Vietnam: National Interests and Identities in the Public Sphere. Routledge.
Ibrahim Murat Kara
Book reviewed:
- Maria Repnikova (2022) Chinese Soft Power. Cambridge Elements: Global China. Cambridge University Press.
Tamás Peragovics
Book reviewed:
- Constance Duncombe (2019) Representation, recognition and respect in world politics: The case of Iran-US relations. Manchester University Press.
Cheng Yeung Yang
Book reviewed:
- Xin Liu (2020) China's Cultural Diplomacy: A Great Leap Forward? Routledge.
Danielle Wolff
Book reviewed:
- Tuomas Forsberg and Sirke Mäkinen, eds. (2022) Russia's Cultural Statecraft. Routledge.
Kseniia Soloveva
Book reviewed:
- Chris Miller (2023) We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin. Harvard University Press.
Abhinand Siddharth Srinivas
Book reviewed:
- Samantha Cooke, ed. (2022) Non-Western Global Theories of International Relations. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Springer.
Publication date: February 2024
Issue 3
Issue 3 at Brill.comAndré Barrinha
Abstract
It is only in the last two decades that states have started to focus on the need to use traditional diplomatic means in discussions surrounding cyber-policy. This article explores how these discussions have been progressively ‘diplomatised’. Diplomatisation is proposed in this article as a process which involves external and internal dynamics of institutionalisation and positioning, both of which are essential for the successful creation of a new diplomatic field. Understanding the emergence of cyber-diplomacy is crucial to recognise the successes, frustrations and opportunities associated with the (lack of) regulation when it comes responsible state behaviour in this domain. This article does so based on 40 interviews conducted with diplomats and experts involved in the emergence of cyber-diplomacy. It looks at the idiosyncratic evolution of this field within specific nation states as well as overall developments at the international level, particularly within the context of the United Nations.
Caroline Hecht
Abstract
International recognition, and its revocation, derecognition, have important legal and practical implications. This article addresses the issue of derecognition as a foreign policy strategy answering the question: what are the strategies that origin states pursue to achieve the derecognition of contested states? Analysis of the foreign policy of Morocco towards the Western Sahara shows that origin states do indeed seek derecognition as a policy goal, primarily using economic and domestic political tools. International law and identity linkages appear to play a more rhetorical than influential role. Power politics is notably absent from recogniser state decision-making, but lack of great power interest may foster the sense of ambiguity under which derecognition thrives. This article provides a theory of derecognition foreign policy; a taxonomy of recogniser states into holdouts, reversers and cyclers; and a plausibility probe of the relationship between recogniser states and their associated foreign policy tools.
Niklas Bremberg and Anna Michalski
Abstract
The European Union (EU) has systematically promoted global climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Since the 1990s, despite varying success in international climate negotiations, it has sought to take a leadership role in global climate politics. Internal consolidation of environmental and climate policies has enhanced EU policy coherence and strengthened its ability to influence international efforts to mitigate climate change. Globally, however, the picture is marred by geopolitical competition, rendering the context of global climate politics less propitious for the EU’s climate leadership. This article examines how the EU’s climate diplomacy is adapting to an increasingly complex international context. It finds that while the EU climate action is still premised on the deep-seated beliefs of the EU’s ambitious approach to climate, the practices of EU climate diplomacy have adapted to a changing geopolitical context. This evolution is traced through a set of key diplomatic practices: narration, co-ordination, outreach and mainstreaming.
Elise Stephenson and Susan Harris Rimmer
Abstract
Much of the research on gender and diplomacy has focused on those already let into the ‘club’. This article analyses the ‘threshold’ to diplomacy: security clearance processes. Security vetting ultimately determines who progresses, and what level of clearance (and therefore seniority or position) a diplomat can achieve. This article seeks to trace the journey for individuals entering a diplomatic career. It argues that security vetting is simultaneously based on legitimate processes for assessing potential national security threats, and on values interpretation (such as loyalty, maturity and trustworthiness) which may invite bias or lead to illegitimate processes of exclusion. By excavating the gendered history of vetting, we can better understand the limitations of the current de-historicised and ‘impartial’ process. We argue that clearance processes have not sufficiently evolved over the past decades of social progress, which has negative implications for the evolution of diplomacy as a social practice.
Stuart Y. MacDonald and Shaun Riordan
Abstract
An embassy is the physical representation of diplomacy. It makes a statement about how a country wants to be seen in the country where it is constructed. It reflects historical, geopolitical, economic and commercial, decisions taken by its government, including to recognise the country where it is located and to establish a diplomatic presence there. The latter does not automatically follow from the former.
It also reflects the way a country sees itself, and wishes to be seen by others – it communicates and represents. Is it an embassy of a global power that needs a global presence? Or is it a smaller regional power that must limit its overseas presence to fit its budget?
Lien Verpoest
Abstract
Built by the architect Louis Montoyer in Vienna between 1803 and 1808 for the Russian ambassador to Austria, Andrey Razumovsky, the famous Razumovsky Palace would become the centre of anti-Napoleonic diplomacy in the early nineteenth century and a fixture in Vienna’s lively cultural scene. This article first discusses how the ambassador used his embassy as a meeting place for formal and informal diplomacy that contributed to Russia’s positioning against Napoleon long before the Grande Armée invaded the empire. Secondly, the architectural outline of the Razumovsky Palace is linked to the different cultural functions of the embassy that underpinned and strengthened Razumovsky’s diplomatic network. The final section of the article explores the role of the Razumovsky Palace as a determinant factor in the ambassador’s decision to leave diplomatic service and remain in Vienna until his death in 1836.
Katrina Ponti
Abstract
What can the historical study of early American legations in Europe tell us about how the United States approaches its embassies in the world today? Embassy buildings today represent over two hundred years of American trial and error in constantly shifting foreign political environments. They are, by their nature, intended to straddle multiple modalities: public and private; political and personal; global and local. It was because of their deliberately fluid representational states that the first American diplomatic missions to Europe could attempt to bridge the paradigm of aristocratic and democratic approaches to embassy curation abroad. As the first modern post-colonial democracy, the diplomatic agents of the US experimented with the placement, decoration and occupation of their ministerial spaces. In doing so, they innovated strategies of fluidity still seen in American embassies today.
Laura-Maria Popoviciu
Abstract
On 1 October 2004, a new Royal Netherlands Embassy building opened in Warsaw, Poland. Its striking, contemporary appearance surprises and seduces at the same time: glass, concrete and wood artfully intersect in a sophisticated design that champions transparency and openness. This four-year building project commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs was entrusted to the highly acclaimed Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat (b. 1956). His carefully conceived architectural programme invites a wider discussion on the ways in which embassy architecture can support the aspirations of modern diplomacy. To this end, this article situates the Dutch Embassy building within the wider context of Dutch–Polish diplo-matic relations and examines how its design contributes to defining the practice of Dutch diplomacy. It also proposes a comparative view of trends within Dutch embassy architecture by considering other contemporary ex-amples in South America, Central Europe and Africa.
Hendrik W. Ohnesorge and Anna-Sophia Decker
Abstract
The opening of the Congress Hall in Berlin-Tiergarten in 1957 took place during the heyday of the Cold War. Designed by American architect Hugh Stubbins, the building became a focal point in East–West confrontations. Against this backdrop, the article explores the role of architecture in national soft power by taking the example of the Berlin Congress Hall. Commencing with a discussion of architecture as a component of soft power along five criteria, it goes on to examine the planning of the Congress Hall and the significance of its unique design vocabulary. The article concludes that the building, strategically located near the sector borders separating East and West, represents a concrete embodiment of US soft power. Although not an official representational building, the Congress Hall has thus served as a political, cultural and ideational ‘embassy’ of the United States and a major building block in German–American relations up to the present.
Publication date: July 2024
Issue 4
Issue 4 at Brill.comPaula Lamoso González
Abstract
Why do Member States agree to create supra-state institutions? Do institutional frameworks affect outcomes? This study employs theory-testing process tracing to contribute to liberal intergovernmentalism by examining the configuration process of the European External Action Service, negotiated within two innovative institutional settings: the Convention and the Quadrilogue. The study concludes that liberal intergovernmentalism needs to be nuanced, as institutional settings are crucial in building supra-state institutions by shaping actors’ behaviour through available choices and conclusions. The bargaining was supra-state rather than intergovernmental. Preference formation was domestic but not liberal, as no interest group, other than the diplomatic corps, was involved. The European External Action Service was agreed upon as a package deal based on benefits to Member States and EU institutional actors, along with control mechanisms. Evidence comes from sixty in-depth elite interviews with EU officials and member state representatives directly involved in the negotiations.
Angel M. Villegas Cruz
Abstract
The article examines how economic ties between host and guest countries affect the emotional valence in the social media content published by digital diplomats. Strong economic ties will lead digital diplomats to adopt a positive tone because such ties raise the potential costs of verbal aggressiveness online. A positive emotional valence on social media also serves to cultivate good public perceptions of the guest and its economic activities. To evaluate these claims, the article analyses 53,601 original tweets published by 88 Chinese diplomatic missions on Twitter from 2014 to 2020. It finds that economic ties have a strong positive effect on the tone adopted by digital diplomats. As the host’s trade dependence on China increases, Chinese diplomatic missions are more likely to adopt a positive tone on Twitter, especially when talking about politics and business. This research contributes to the study of how countries use social media to conduct diplomacy.
Ahmed Nabil
Abstract
American diplomacy employs contact groups to secure the United States’ national interests and fulfil its role as a superpower in several regions worldwide. This article explores three examples of contact groups formed by US diplomacy to intervene in the civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen. It tracks the groups’ formation process, meetings’ content and the US assessment of their influence on American interests and the course of the conflicts. The article concludes that the formation process was developed under sensitive compromises among the stakeholders of each conflict and led to the exclusion of some essential actors. The contact groups were influential at the tactical level and impacted the course of the conflicts in the short term, preventing humanitarian disasters, taking de-escalation steps and securing American interests, but they failed to achieve successful settlements.
Jan Melissen
Abstract
Students of diplomatic practice will know the traditional functions of diplomacy by heart, with communication, representation, information-gathering and negotiation having a central place among these. They may well remember them from Hedley Bull’s imposing The Anarchical Society (1977) or any of the more recent introductory books and articles on diplomacy. This Forum on the strategic functions of diplomacy from a European perspective can be seen as a balance sheet on the challenges for diplomatic practice towards the end of the first quarter of this century. The two Forum articles are written by practitioners who are not unfamiliar with writing for a scholarly or think tank readership. Academic researchers tend to read such written work on diplomacy by practitioners both literally and as academic code. Insiders’ commentaries are precious as sources of inspiration for conceptual and theoretical work and with a view to interpreting such accounts for students in the context of diplomatic studies.
Manuel Lafont Rapnouil
Abstract
It may be that diplomacy is not just meeting with a more difficult international system, but that it is actually under deliberate attack. Diplomatic communication is turning conflictual. More diplomats seem to be declared personæ non gratæ. Multilateral institutions are plunged into deliberate deadlocks. Manipulations of information hollow out the diplomatic debate. Diplomatic processes are set up only to provide cover for the pursuit of military operations. In a nutshell, diplomacy has to put up with a more competitive, transactional, distrustful, fragmented and contested space. While it has been defined as ‘the management of separateness’, it may be faced with actors who are choosing radical separation as a political strategy. To deal with this deliberate ‘brutalization’, diplomacy will need hardened capabilities, but it will also need to reinvest in a number of policy issues on which it will need to perform better.
Arjan Uilenreef
Abstract
This contribution discusses the impact of three structural phenomena on the strategic functions of future diplomacy. The first is the shifting global power balance, which has important consequences for the manner in which European ministries of foreign affairs reposition themselves with regard to both big and middle powers. The assertiveness of big, revisionist states implies a return to realpolitik in which hard power takes centre stage. The ascendency of middle powers reinforces the need to build equal partnerships with increasingly influential non-Western countries. The other two game changers are the existential challenges of climate change and the ascent of artificial intelligence. A conflict-sensitive climate approach requires an adjusted diplomatic toolkit. Artificial intelligence has an effect on many different policy dimensions, from international governance to trade promotion. All these developments are relevant to the practice of diplomacy and the skills diplomats need in order to navigate through a changing global environment.
Kristin Eggeling
Book reviewed:
- Dylan M.H. Loh (2024) China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy. Studies in Asian Security. Stanford University Press.
Luca Federico Cerra
Book reviewed:
- Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings, eds. (2017) Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c. 1410-1800. Routledge.