International Relations
Responding to the analytical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical challenges to analysing how diplomacy describes, this chapter proposes an integrated method that reveals how diplomatic descriptions classify and constitute representations of international subjects and their contexts. The method comprises three distinct interlinked methodological steps. The first maps reporting and instruction pathways, who reports to whom in other words, allowing analysis to account for where and how information moves up and instructions flow back down the chain of reporting within and beyond the MFA. The second step analyses individual texts in detail, showing how diplomatic knowledge production frames representations of subjects and their contexts in a single text. To achieve this, this approach imports into IR literary analysis methods to analyse text and identify textual markers. The third step accounts for the evolution of representations of subjects and their contexts across texts and time by following textual markers.
What determines the domestic and foreign impact of a representation? Five dynamics were observed that condition, firstly, the domestic impact of a specific understanding of subjects, territory, time, and norms and, secondly, their capacity to impact the diplomatic knowledge practices of another actor. These are not policy conditions and factors, but rather conditions that determine the viability of diplomatic descriptions in the context of policy and diplomatic practice. They are determined by language and its functioning as a machinery that communicates subjective positions, which is why we need to take them back to concepts of language and politics to understand how they work. For example, deciding to fight communism worldwide is not one of these five conditions. They are, however, closely related and draw upon it. They include: how the policy is described (looking for ‘fifth columnists’ for example), the management of knowledge production that emerges from policy (prioritising search for any sign of communism), the stability of a representation linked to it (Vietminh ‘fellow-traveller’), the context in which a representation emerges (claiming Vietminh were Fascists in the context of the Cold War), and how a representation is articulated (Vietminh taken over by communists because oriental). Representations depend on these conditions to emerge and be inscribed in a discursive context that grants them agency to convince.
This chapter firstly considers two early guides to diplomatic practice in tandem with a brief discussion on Realist and English School conceptualisations of diplomacy. It then explores how the production of meaning can be analysed, from the Constructivist ‘return of identity’ to Poststructuralist investigation of how identities are constituted, drawing out what these approaches mean for our endeavour to analyse how diplomacy produces knowledge. At that juncture, this chapter sets the basis to conceptualise how diplomacy produces understanding of political subjects and their contexts, and what this means for our analysis. It is argued that a conceptual and empirical focus on text is vital to researching diplomacy, setting the stage for the next chapter to develop a method to empirically analyse how diplomacy represents subjects and their contexts.
This chapter applies the method advanced in this book to the US turn to assist France in Indochina. It firstly reviews historical efforts to understand how reporting came ‘to demonize Hồ Chà Minh and the Viet Minh movement as full-fledged communists’, setting the stage to show how this method can contribute to this much-studied case by revealing how this happened in diplomatic knowledge production. The second section maps the institutional paths travelled by diplomatic communications and the archival sources used, while the third determines how representations were inscribed by analysing six texts in detail and identifying topoi textual markers signposting their presence and articulation. The fourth section follows these markers through French, American and Vietnamese diplomatic knowledge production 1948-1945 to trace how representations developed in and through the three cascades and, crucially, how convincing they were, determined by accounting for their presence, longevity, and crossover to another state’s diplomatic knowledge production. The final section gathers analytical insights, discussing how representations of Vietminh and France were interdependent and unstable. When their stabilisation in 1947 made French descriptions credible, French representation of Vietminh gradually crossed over to US reporting while, at the State Department, US diplomatic reporting concerning Communist activity gained attention as colonial grievances increasingly fell out of reporting.
Though almost entirely unknown, the Western Sahara conflict helps understand modern diplomacy, particularly how it can unlock policy influence for smaller powers like Morocco. This chapter investigates the US policy shift from supporting Sahrawi self-determination to supporting Morocco’s unilateral conquest of the territory in the 2000s and the diplomatic text that is evidence of its development. As this conflict is not well-known and is in its fifth decade at the time of writing, the first section, below, combines a review of research on the conflict’s diplomacy with a summary of events 1975-present. The second section maps Moroccan, US and POLISARIO diplomatic knowledge production pathways. Thirdly, two individual diplomatic texts from each actor are examined in detail to determine how they constitute representations and identify topoi textual markers signposting their presence. The fourth section follows these topoi across thousands of texts, analysing how Moroccan diplomacy constituted and communicated these representations, tracing their development and entry into US diplomacy in the runup to the 2008 policy shift, and exploring POLISARIO’s own efforts. The final section summarises findings, discussing how despite the more visible threat of Terrorism, Morocco did not persuade US policymakers that POLISARIO was an Islamic Terrorist group but rather that it was terrorism-enabling due to North Africa’s ‘ungoverned spaces’, a representation that in turn depended on representing Morocco as democratic, stable and unradicalised, and consequently any Moroccan weakness as dangerous to US security and War on Terror.
This chapter locates the contributions made in this book to the conceptual and analytical study of diplomacy and its practice. The contributions expounded in this volume, particularly the method to empirically analyse how diplomacy produces knowledge about subjects and their contexts, provide key insights. Speaking to analysis and practice of how the state produces and manages knowledge, the method determines how descriptions are produced, developed, and their subsequent journeys within and across MFAs. Speaking to events where a subjective view becomes persuasive, the crossover test pinpoints when and in which circumstances this takes place. This makes it of relevance to several schools of thought on diplomacy, from the most Realists to Criticals. Firstly, the method with its attendant concepts and three analytical steps is useful to produce detailed and empirically convincing histories of diplomacy, as demonstrated in the case studies. Secondly, aspects of the method and its concepts can be of use on their own. The ‘diplomatic moment’ serves as an analytical concept that solidly links the theory and praxis of diplomacy to the empirical paper trail of practices and the knowledge they produce, building a solid documentary empirical basis for different analyses of diplomacy. Thirdly, the conceptualisation of the five conditions can help both in theorising and analysing diplomacy. The method and approach in this book are a possible beginning to better understanding diplomatic knowledge production, its practices and key events, and its relationship with the diplomacy of other actors.
How does diplomacy describe what it sees? The stakes could not be higher: actors can be recognised as allies or enemies, gain assistance, or be excluded, violence can be legitimated or condemned, war or peace decided. This book explores how diplomatic text constitutes and promotes descriptions of subjects and their spatial, temporal, and normative contexts. It develops a methodology to map, analyse, and trace the development of diplomatic descriptions, which is then applied to two case studies, the First Vietnam War and the Western Sahara conflict, before conceptualising the conditions of practice, language, and discourse that make diplomatic descriptions convincing. Speaking to varied analytical interests about how the state produces and manages knowledge – whether instrument of the Prince, constitutive institution, or contingent identity-making practice – this approach reveals how diplomacy is implicated in constituting how the world is understood. This method cracks open the secrets carried in diplomatic texts because, ultimately, such is the power of knowing whom we and the Other are.
This chapter introduces the main quest of this book: to enquire how diplomatic writing produces, develops and governs knowledge, specifically focussing on how diplomacy makes and develops knowledge through descriptions of international actors and the contexts that motivate them. The chapter details the challenges that this entails, specifying them as methodological, conceptual and analytical issues that any analytical understanding of diplomacy as a producer of state knowledge must address.
I interrogate the ‘host’ label within refugee studies, taking into consideration multiple scales of analysis from international rankings of states to individuals and communities. Critically examining who counts as a host – and who counts the hosts – has important implications for practitioners and scholars. Critiques of big picture assessments of ‘host state’ rankings invite scholars to consider how geopolitics shape recognition and erasure, in turn influencing broader understandings of global displacement and reception. The findings also draw from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in Jordan with refugees, citizens and residents. I describe how individuals confront the refugee/host binary in their daily lives. I introduce the concept of humanitarian fiction to explain contemporary limitations of the ‘host’ designation. Analogous to the socio-legal examination of ‘legal fiction’, humanitarian fiction recognises that there is a gap between aid-informed knowledge production and empirical contradictions in studies of refugee displacement and reception.
This paper critically explores the role of voluntary labour in refugee-led responses to displacement. Despite the wide celebration of volunteering in response to crises and community needs, refugees and displaced populations tend to be depicted as passive beneficiaries of support. This paper engages with critical literatures challenging this assumption and provides an analysis of refugee volunteering experiences in Uganda, interrogating the uneven spaces of articulation between dominant humanitarian thinking and action on displacement, and volunteering by refugees. The analysis draws upon data collected as part of a large mixed methods investigation of volunteering by young refugees in Uganda, exploring its impacts on their skills, employability, and experiences of inequality. We explore narratives of volunteering in relation to service-delivery and self-reliance, and how different understandings of voluntary labour emerge from and against the precarities experienced by refugees navigating employment and livelihood strategies. We conclude by arguing that volunteering connects with responses to displacement in ways that are shaped by refugee subjectivities and livelihoods in particular places, and that its potential to de-stabilise existing systems is ambivalently situated between self-reliance strategies and the perpetuation of dependencies.