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In 1962, Congo was catapulted into the international consciousness as the scene of conflict and confusion when a civil and constitutional crisis erupted just a week after the independence ceremony. The breakdown of law and order began when the Congolese army, the Force Publique, mutinied against their Belgian officers, leading to violence and chaos in the capital Leopoldville. This book reinterprets the role of the United Nations (UN) Organization in this conflict by presenting a multidimensional view of how the UN operated in response to the crisis. The United States (US) and Britain were directly involved with formulating UN Congo policy, through an examination of the Anglo-American relationship. The book analyses how the crisis became positioned as a lightning rod in the interaction of decolonisation with the Cold War, and wider relations between North and South. It establishes why, in 1960, the outbreak of the Congo crisis and its successive internationalisation through UN intervention was an important question for Anglo-American relations. The book highlights the changing nature of the UN from 1960 to 1961. It focuses on the emergence of a new US policy in New York. Discussing the role of United Nations activities in the Congo (Operation des Nations Unies au Congo), it explains why military incursions into Katanga in September, and again in December of 1961, proved damaging to the Anglo-American relationship. The invigoration of the Secretariat, demands of the Afro-Asian bloc, Operation UNOKAT, and efforts to construct a Western friendly regime in the Congo are also discussed.

The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together established experts from Atlantic History and Transatlantic Studies – two fields that are closely connected in their historical and disciplinary development as well as with regard to the geographical area of their interest. Questions of methodology and boundaries of periodization tend to separate these research fields. However, in order to understand the Atlantic World and transatlantic relations today, Atlantic History and Transatlantic Studies should be considered together. The scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges. This volume thus documents and reflects on the changes within Transatlantic Studies during the last decades. New perspectives on research reconceptualize how we think about the Atlantic World. At a time when many political observers perceive a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks will provide an academic foundation to move forward.

Can private citizens serve as self-appointed peacemakers and influence diplomatic relations between parties to a conflict? The book analyzes the international phenomenon of private peace entrepreneurs (PPEs) – private citizens with no official authority who initiate channels of communication with official representatives from the other side of a conflict in order to promote a conflict resolution process. It combines theoretical discussion with historical analysis, examining four cases from different conflicts: Norman Cousins and Suzanne Massie in the Cold War, Brendan Duddy in the Northern Ireland conflict, and Uri Avnery in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The book defines the phenomenon, examines the resources and activities of private peace entrepreneurs and their impact on the official diplomacy, and explores the conditions under which they can play an effective role in peacemaking processes.

The book highlights the ability of private individual citizens – who are not politicians, diplomats, or military leaders – to operate as influential actors in international politics in general, and in peace processes in particular. Although the history of internal and international conflicts reveals many cases of private peace entrepreneurs, some of whom played a critical role in conflict resolution efforts, the literature has yet to give this important phenomenon the attention it deserves. The book aims to fill this gap, contributing to the scholarship on conflict and peace, diplomacy, and civil society. It also makes a historiographical contribution by shedding light on figures excluded from the history textbooks, and it offers an alternative perspective to traditional narratives concerning the diplomatic history of the conflicts.

Turkey has shown an unprecedented interest in its diaspora only since the early 2000s. This book provides the first in-depth examination of the institutionalisation of Turkey’s diaspora engagement policy since the Justice and Development Party’s rise to power in 2002 and the Turkish diaspora’s new role as an agent of diplomatic goals. It also explores how Turkey’s growing sphere of influence over its overseas population affects intra-diaspora politics and Turkey’s diplomatic relations with Europe.

The book is based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Turkey, France and Germany. Drawing on more than 110 interviews conducted with representatives of a wide range of diaspora organisations originating in Turkey as well as with Turkish, French, German and EU policymakers and journalists, supplemented with an analysis of official documents and news sources, it argues that Turkey has conceived of the conservative elements of its diaspora as a tool of political leverage, mobilised towards enhancing Turkey’s official diplomatic endeavours. At the same time, however, Turkey’s selective engagement with its expatriates has complicated relations with disregarded diaspora groups and Europe.

This study contributes to the growing literature on diasporas and diplomacy. Diasporas have become identified as influential actors that transform relations at the state-to-state level and blur the division between the domestic and the foreign. A case study of Turkey’s diasporas is thus a significant study at a time when emigrants from Turkey form the largest Muslim community in Europe and when issues of diplomacy, migration, citizenship and authoritarianism have become even more salient.

This book complements extant histories of diplomacy by discussing change in the form of tipping-points, understood as the culmination of long-term trends.

The first part of the book discusses social evolution on the general level of institutions. The diplomatic institution has undergone four tipping-points: between culturally similar small-scale polities, between culturally different large-scale polities, permanent bilateral diplomacy, and permanent multilateral diplomacy. The consular institution has seen three: the emergence of the consul as the judge of a trading colony, the judge as a representative of the state, and the imbrication of the consular institution in unitary foreign services. The second part challenges extant literature’s treatment of diplomacy as a textual affair and an elite concern. It lays down the groundwork for the study of visual diplomacy by establishing diplomacy’s visual genres, discussing how diplomats spread images to wider audiences and drawing up a taxonomy of three visual strategies used for this purpose: a hegemonic and Western strategy, a national strategy, and a strategy that is spiteful of Western hegemony. Two case studies discuss the evolving place of the visual in one diplomatic practice, namely accreditation, and the importance of the social imagination. One possible evolutionary effect of the latter seems to be as a lair of hibernation for the otherwise threatened idea that diplomacy is not about dialogue but about the confrontation between good and evil. The book concludes by seeing the future of diplomacy in a continued struggle between state-to-state-based diplomacy and diplomacy as networked global governance.

The book represents the first comprehensive account of the public and cultural diplomacy campaigns carried out by the United States in Yugoslavia during the height of the Cold War. Based on extensive multinational archival research, as well as private papers and personal interviews, this book charts the reasoning behind the US campaign and the impact it had on specific Yugoslav communities and individuals. American soft power, as a form of cultural power, deliberately sought to ‘open up’ a relatively closed society through the provision and diffusion of liberal traditions, ideas, and ideals. Tito and his Party allowed USIA and State Department cultural programs to enter Yugoslavia, liberated from Soviet control, to open cultural centres and pavilions at its main fairs, to broadcast Voice of America, and have American artists tour the country. Exchanges of intellectual and political personnel helped foster the US–Yugoslav relationship, but posed severe ideological challenges for both countries. By providing new insights into porous borders between freedom and coercion in Tito’s regime, the book shows how public diplomacy acted as an external input for Yugoslav liberalization and dissident movements. Meant for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the cultural Cold War, international relations, and diplomacy, this book fills a gap in the literature by looking at the political role of culture in US–Yugoslav bilateral relations, analysing the fluid links between information and propaganda, and the unintended effects propaganda can produce beyond the control of producers and receivers.

This book recounts the history of the Fulbright Program in Australia, locating academic exchange in the context of US cultural diplomacy and revealing a complex relationship between governments, publicly funded research and the integrity of academic independence. The study is the first in-depth analysis of the Fulbright exchange program in a single country. Drawing on previously unexplored archives and a new oral history, the authors investigate the educational, political and diplomatic challenges experienced by Australian and American scholars who won awards and those who managed the complex bi-national program. The book begins with the scheme’s origins, moves through its Australian establishment during the early Cold War, Vietnam War dilemmas, civil rights and gender parity struggles and the impacts of mid-to-late twentieth century belt-tightening. How the program’s goal of ‘mutual understanding’ was understood and enacted across six decades lies at the heart of the book, which weaves institutional and individual experiences together with broader geopolitical issues. Bringing a complex and nuanced analysis to the Australia–US relationship, the authors offer fresh insights into the global influence of the Fulbright Program. It is a compelling account of academic exchange as cultural diplomacy. It offers a critical appraisal of Fulbright achievements and limitations in avoiding political influence, integrating gender and racial diversity, absorbing conflict and dissent, and responding to economic fluctuations and social change.

The purpose of this book is to critically enhance the appreciation of diplomacy and sport in global affairs from the perspective of practitioners and scholars. The book will make an important new contribution to at least two distinct fields: diplomacy and sport, as well as to those concerned with history, politics, sociology and international relations. The critical analysis the book provides explores the linkages across these fields, particularly in relation to soft power and public diplomacy, and is supported by a wide range of sources and methodologies. The book draws in a range of scholars across these different fields, and includes esteemed FIFA scholar Professor Alan Tomlinson. Tomlinson addresses diplomacy within the world’s global game of Association Football, while other subjects include the rise of mega-sport events as sites of diplomacy, new consideration of Chinese ping-pong diplomacy prior to the 1970s and the importance of boycotts in sport – particularly in relation to newly explored dimensions of the boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games. The place of non-state actors is explored throughout: be they individual or institutions they perform a crucial role as conduits of the transactions of sport and diplomacy. Based on twentieth- and twenty-first-century evidence, the book acknowledges antecedents from the ancient Olympics to the contemporary era, and in its conclusions offers avenues for further study based on the future sport and diplomacy relationship. The book has a strong international basis because it covers a broad range of countries, their diplomatic relationship with sport and is written by a truly transnational cast of authors. The intense media scrutiny of the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup and other international sports will also contribute to the global interest in this volume.

The book explores Carter’s human rights policy and its contradictory impact on US–Soviet affairs. It argues that the administration envisioned its approach to the Soviet Union as moving along two interdependent tracks that were supposed to form a “virtuous circle”. On the one side, the United States aimed to renew its ideological challenge to the USSR through human rights and to persuade the Soviets to ease internal repression in order to strengthen Congressional support for détente and arms control. On the other, continuing the bipolar dialogue, the administration aimed to promote human rights further in the USSR. Contrary to what he envisioned, Carter was caught between Scylla and Charybdis. The more vigorously the White House pursued human rights in bipolar relations, the more the Soviets lost interest in détente; the more the administration relegated human rights to quiet diplomacy, the more critics within the United States accused the president of abandoning his commitment to human rights. Trapped in this contradiction, Carter’s human rights policy did not build domestic support for arms control and worsened bipolar relations. In the end, the White House lost the opportunity to stabilize bipolar relations and the domestic support Carter had managed to garner in 1976. Critics of détente, helped by the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, defeated him.

The rapprochement between Germany and Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust is one of the most striking political developments of the twentieth century. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently referred to it as a ‘miracle’. But how did this ‘miracle’ come about? Drawing upon sources from both sides of the Iron Curtain and of the Arab–Israeli conflict, Lorena De Vita traces the contradictions and dilemmas that shaped the making of German–Israeli relations at the outset of the global Cold War. Israelpolitik offers new insights not only into the history of German–Israeli relations, but also into the Cold War competition between the two German states, as each attempted to strengthen its position in the Middle East and the international arena while struggling with the legacy of the Nazi past.