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China and Africa, 20 Years Since the Forum on Africa–China Cooperation  

David Monyae

The increasing intensity of interaction between China and Africa, which was a result of the growing compatibility of their strategic interests toward the end of the 20th century, led to the establishment of Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000. The FOCAC was part of China’s revitalization of the developing-world dimension in its foreign policy and part of Africa’s engagement with major and emerging world powers. Having gathered regularly in 3-year intervals since its inception in 2000, the FOCAC has become more comprehensive and sophisticated. It has become the principal site on which China–Africa relations are shaped. The relationship has grown both in scale and scope in areas like political cooperation, international solidarity, peace and security, media cooperation, and development finance and infrastructure, as examined in this article. However, the FOCAC is not without its shortcomings. Weak institutionalization, tendency toward Sino-centrism, lack of accountability, and the preponderance of the state are some of the weaknesses that should be addressed going forward.

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China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Debates, Impacts, and Trends  

Xiang Li, Mengqi Shao, and May Tan-Mullins

President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI一带一路) in 2013. The BRI, which will pass through over 60 countries in Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, aims at improving and creating new trading routes and investment opportunities. It consists of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI), and is a continuation of China’s “opening up” policy. It comprises six overland and one maritime economic cooperation corridors, supporting the expansion of Chinese enterprises abroad to facilitate industrial upgrading at home, paving the way for Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and trade abroad, and advancing the internationalization of the Chinese currency. In addition, the project is welcomed by recipient countries due to their need for infrastructure investment. China remains the biggest player in the initiation and implementation of BRI projects. As such, the impact of Chinese projects on the economic, political, cultural, and environmental fabric of host countries will likely be dramatic, especially since many BRI projects are large-scale infrastructure projects that cut across different regions and states. The COVID-19 pandemic further implicated the progress of BRI projects in these areas.

Article

Conflict Management and Peacebuilding in Asia  

Monalisa Adhikari and Yuji Uesugi

While Asian states do not have a coherently delineated international peacebuilding policy, their increased role and leverage in conflict management are being recognized both in scholarship and praxis. This article underlines how the geopolitical context of Asia, defined by competing regional hegemons, a weakly institutionalized regional organization, and a role of the United States as a security guarantor, has defined the conflict-management approaches of different states. “Asian” conflict-management approaches are situated within the burgeoning literature on “alternative” forms of peacebuilding and the emerging body of work on authoritarian, and illiberal forms of peacebuilding. The normative priorities of the primary Asian states of India, China, and Japan in their conflict management, including stability and development, are teased out, and the forms or modalities through which these are executed are unpacked. What such norms and practices mean for conflict-affected states in Asia are discussed in the end.

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Constitutive Theory in International Relations  

Mervyn Frost

Constitutive theory is a philosophical analysis of the logical interconnections between actors, their actions, and the social practices within which they perform these. It draws on insights from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as developed and extended by Peter Winch and John Searle. It highlights that actors and their actions can only be understood from within the practices in which they are constituted as actors of a certain kind, who have available to them a specific repertoire of meaningful action. It stresses that the interpretation of their actions involves: understanding the language internal to the practices in which they take place; understanding the rule-boundness of that language; the meaning of its terms; a holist perspective on the practice; and, crucially, an understanding of the ethics embedded in it. It briefly explores the implications of such a philosophical analysis for those seeking to understand the actors and their interactions in global practices. It highlights how international actors (both states and individuals) are constituted as international actors in two major international practices, the practice of sovereign states and the global rights practice. It indicates the guidance constitutive theory might provide for all who would better understand international affairs.

Article

Cultural Diplomacy  

David Clarke

Cultural diplomacy designates a policy field, in which states seek to mobilize their cultural resources to achieve foreign policy goals. The nature of those goals, and of the cultural resources mobilized to achieve them, has been subject to historical change, and a range of terminology has been used to designate this kind of policymaking in different national and historical contexts. Nevertheless, the term cultural diplomacy is a viable one for designating this particular area of foreign policy, which is often understood as one component of a state’s broader public diplomacy or, following Joseph Nye’s terminology, its “soft power.” Cultural display and exchange have arguably always played a role in the relations between peoples. With the emergence of the modern state system in the early modern period, such display and exchange became an expression of formal diplomatic relations between courts, yet it is only in the 19th century that we see the emergence of cultural diplomacy in the sense it is understood today: It is no longer a matter of communication between rulers, but rather an expression of national identity directed at an international public. Throughout the 19th century, cultural diplomacy was closely associated with the rivalry of the Great Powers, particularly in the colonial context. However, following the end of the First World War, cultural diplomacy increasingly came to be understood as a means to pursue ideological competition, a trend that became central to the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War. Nevertheless, scholarship’s focus on the cultural dimensions of the confrontation between the two Cold War superpowers has drawn attention away from other varieties of cultural diplomacy in the “Third World” or “Global South,” which sought to establish forms of solidarity between postcolonial nations. The post–Cold War world has been characterized by a shift in the rhetoric surrounding cultural diplomacy, which now frequently contains an economic dimension, as states compete for markets, investments, and attention in the context of neoliberal globalization. Nevertheless, we also see a pluralization of strategies of cultural diplomacy, in which a range of actors tailor their approach to cultural foreign policy according to their own perceived position in a multipolar world. Nevertheless, despite the continued popularity of cultural diplomacy in policymaking circles and the significant attention it has received from researchers in the 21st century, the assessment of the impact of cultural diplomacy remains a challenge.

Article

De Facto States in the 21st Century  

James Ker-Lindsay

De facto states have become an increasingly interesting topic for scholars and policy makers. Regarded as an anomaly in the international system, their increasing prevalence is raising serious questions about the nature of statehood and secession in the contemporary international system. But they present a number of definitional and conceptual issues. Quite apart from how they should be called, which is a debate that seems to be close to settlement, there have been debates about which territories should qualify as de facto states. More importantly, what hope do these territories have of being legalized or legitimized in the future? It seems that the strong aversion to recognizing unilateral acts of secession will remain in force. It is also worth noting that the very nature of the international system is now changing. The international system focused almost exclusively on states is disappearing rapidly. All sorts of bodies, organizations, and companies now interact on the world stage. In this sense, de facto states may well find that they find a place in their own right in an evolving and expanding international community.

Article

Digital Diplomacy  

Kristin Anabel Eggeling

Digital diplomacy, virtual diplomacy, cyber diplomacy, and e-diplomacy are some of the most common English terms international relations (IR) scholars and practitioners use to describe diplomatic work online. The German foreign ministry, moreover, speaks of vernetzte Diplomatie (networked diplomacy), Danish diplomats call their approach “techplomacy,” and the Francophone world talks of diplomatie numérique (numbered diplomacy). Broadly, all these terms refer to the practices, procedures, and norms of doing diplomacy in digitalizing contexts. While the terms look similar, they are used to emphasize considerably different phenomena ranging from how diplomatic or foreign policy actors use digital devices to the stakes and future of diplomatic trust, constraint, or politeness in mediated communication and on social media platforms. The main question that has been driving research on “digital diplomacy” has been, How and to what extent diplomacy is changing in the digital age? and a second, related question is whether this development is desirable or not. The debate about digital diplomacy is therefore part of broader debates about the relationship between technology and politics and a normative concern of how to manage it. In this broader frame, scholars ask questions such as What happens to diplomacy—a profession and practice that has traditionally been imagined as taking place in intimate face-to-face and closed-door meetings—when digital information and communication technologies enter the scene? How secluded and confidential is the diplomatic negotiation room in times of digital hyperconnectivity? and How autonomous are diplomatic representatives when they are permanently online? Since the 2000s, IR and diplomatic studies have seen a rise in scholarship on such and related questions. This literature is broad and diverse and includes authors who write from realist, constructivist, area-focused, practice theoretical, political communication, or big data perspectives, among others. Given the fast pace of technological development in the 21st century, both the practice and study of “digital diplomacy” are moving fields. Any written account of them may therefore quickly become (out)dated. Over the course of writing this article (2022–2023), for example, the standing and future of the main digital platform used for international diplomatic communication, Twitter, is tumbling into uncertainty. But there are, nonetheless, real insights to report. One concerns the concept's normative career. While initially embraced as a harbinger of more transparency and inclusion, for example, in the early moments of the Arab Spring, the digitalization of diplomacy has over time attracted more critical commentary, for example, the polarizing tweets of former U.S. president Donald Trump. A second insight speaks to the stakes of digital diplomacy and the extent to which it has become impossible to speak of a diplomacy that is non-digital. This is reflected in scholarship that argues that digitalization’s impact on diplomacy reaches much deeper than public communication or e-services and has seeped into how basic diplomatic tasks, including negotiations, reporting, and information sharing, are entangled with digital tools and services. A third insight concerns the future of the diplomatic profession itself. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that if it must, diplomacy can continue in digital formats. It has also shown that digitalization is not an external challenge that diplomats can be trained to competently handle but a condition of modern life that is becoming inseparable from the conduct of human and political affairs, including diplomacy.

Article

Diplomacy  

Paul Sharp

Both historical and contemporary trends suggest that the meaning of diplomacy varies considerably over time and across space. Diplomacy is defined neither by the types of actors on behalf of which it is undertaken nor by the status of those actors vis-à-vis one another, in the sense of their being, for example, sovereign and equal. There are, however, four common threads underlying these historical variations on diplomacy. The first is an assumption about the necessarily plural character of social relations, namely that people live in groups which regard themselves as separate from, yet needing or wanting relations with, one another. The second is that this plural social fact gives rise to relations that are somehow distinctive to and different from relations within groups. People believe and feel themselves to be under fewer obligations to those whom they regard as others than to those whom they regard as their own. Third, therefore, if these relations are to remain peaceful and productive, they require careful handling by specialists who should be treated neither as one’s own nor, at least in the usual sense, as others. Fourth, these specialists develop a measure of solidarity as the managers of relations in worlds distinguished by the plural social fact. Where these four elements are in play, then there emerges a system of relations which can be recognized as having the character of diplomacy.

Article

Diplomacy and Diplomats  

Iver B. Neumann

The diplomat is formed in certain socially specific ways, and is defined by the role they play within certain contexts in the field of international relations. Since it is human beings, and not organizations, who practice diplomacy, the diplomats’ social traits are relevant to their work. Historically, diplomats can be defined in terms of two key social traits (class and gender) and how their roles depend on two contexts (bureaucrat/information gatherer and private/public). Before the rise of the state in Europe, envoys were usually monks. With the rise of the state, the aristocracy took over the diplomatic missions. Nonaristocrats were later allowed to assume the role of diplomats, but they needed to be trained, both as gentlemen and as diplomats. From the eighteenth century onwards, wives usually accompanied diplomats stationed abroad, though by the end of the nineteenth century, a few women came to work as typists and carry out menial chores for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). As women became legal persons through performing such labor, they later became qualified to legally serve as diplomats. Meanwhile, in terms of context, the key context change for a diplomat is from “at home” (as in “my home country”) to “abroad.” Historically, work at home is the descendant of bureaucratic service at the MFA, and work abroad of the diplomatic service.

Article

Diplomacy and Intelligence  

John D. Stempel

There is a potentially serious difference between diplomacy and intelligence. Creative tension between diplomacy and intelligence stems from the involvement of both with questions of strategy and statecraft. Indeed, the source of this conflict is often clandestine or covert activities that become public and adversely affect both relations between states and diplomats’ ongoing work. Early works in the intelligence scholarship focuses basically at the descriptive level and centers on acquiring information. In 1922, studies began considering the political aspects of the intelligence–diplomacy connection, zeroing in on the defects of US intelligence and the adequacy of policies, including those related to intelligence gathering and its impact on diplomacy. Studies about the details of the intelligence–diplomacy connection also began to appear. These studies look at the interplay between intelligence and policy making as well as the morality of clandestine operations. In order to link intelligence goals to policy needs, future studies on the intelligence–diplomacy connection should further assess the impact of culture on intelligence gathering and perception, provide better insight into the characteristics of good versus bad intelligence officers and diplomats, include qualitative estimates of the effectiveness and efficacy of techniques and strategies as well as legal and ethical discussions of control and policy, and explore the strategic interactions between intelligence officers and diplomats and how these are managed in various governing systems.

Article

Diplomacy and International Law  

David Clinton

Within the international society, law and diplomacy have always been complementary and interdependent. However, lawyers and diplomats deal with international issues differently, making them rivals to be the primary mode of international interaction. Diplomacy is the art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of states; it usually refers to international diplomacy, the conduct of international relations through the mediation of professional diplomats with regard to a full range of topical issues. Nations sometimes resort to international arbitration when faced with a specific question or point of contention in need of resolution. For most of history, there were no official or formal procedures for such proceedings. They were generally accepted to abide by general principles and protocols related to international law and justice. International law is the set of rules generally regarded and accepted as binding in relations between states and between nations. It serves as a framework for the practice of stable and organized international relations. Much of international law is consent-based governance. This means that a state member is not obliged to abide by this type of law, unless it has expressly consented to a particular course of conduct, or entered a diplomatic convention. Interdisciplinary courses, like diplomacy and international law, are designed to help one think critically about diplomatic and international legal issues in real-life contexts, while applying theory to practice and addressing some of the key questions facing the world today.

Article

Diplomacy and People  

Jozef Bátora

Public opinion has long been associated with diplomacy. The earliest records of public involvement in diplomacy are available from the city-states of ancient Greece, where diplomats in the Greek city-states were chosen by public assemblies following thorough public deliberations. However, the growth of a sense of professional community among diplomats following the rise of foreign ministries led to a gradual structuring of the communication patterns. Most generally, a cleavage started to appear between modes of communication in relation to actors within the professional community and in relation to actors outside it. Within the diplomatic community, communication followed the rules, norms, and procedures of emerging diplomatic practice and ceremony. Outside the diplomatic community, the patterns that emerged can be conceptualized along two paths: (1) information gathering, and (2) informing the public at home and abroad about foreign policy. Modern professional diplomacy has been seeking to strike a balance between limiting public access to diplomatic processes and trying to communicate with the public with the aim of generating a public opinion favorable to government foreign policy. The current information-intensive global environment poses a challenge to foreign ministries’ institutionalized mode of limited public communication along two dimensions: the rising importance of so-called public diplomacy, and the increasing need for public legitimization of foreign policy decisions.

Article

Diplomacy and Religion  

Scott Thomas

Religion has long been seen as an obstacle to diplomacy, especially in disputes and conflicts that seem to be related to or motivated by religion. The very nature of religion—its concerns for dogma, truth, and certainty— would seem to be contrary to the nature of successful diplomacy, with its emphasis on empathy, dialogue, understanding, negotiation, and compromise. However, religion and diplomacy have become more interrelated since the end of the twentieth century. Globalization and the changing nature of conflict have exposed the limits of conventional diplomacy in resolving these new conflicts in a global era, and this has opened up new opportunities for religious actors involved in diplomacy. A so-called “faith-based diplomacy” has emerged, which promotes dialogue within and between religious traditions. Particularly in the Islamic world, with a new generation of theologians and politicians, it is recognized that there is a key role for religious leaders and faith-based diplomacy in the Middle East. Faith-based diplomacy can be distinguished from the traditional models of peacemaking and conflict resolution by its holistic approach to the sociopolitical healing of a conflict that has taken place. In other words, the objective of faith-based diplomacy is not only conflict resolution but also the restoration of the political order that has suffered from war and injustice, and the reconciliation of individuals and social groups.

Article

Diplomacy and Revolution  

Noé Cornago

The relationship between diplomacy and revolution is often intertwined with the broader issue of the international dimensions of revolution. Diplomacy can offer important insights into both the historical evolution of world order and its evolving functional and normative needs. In other words, the most important dimension of diplomacy, beyond its concrete symbolic and pragmatic operational value, is its very existence as raison de système. A number of scholarly works that explore the link between revolution and the international arena have given rise to a minority subfield of scholarly research and debate which is particularly vibrant and plural. Three basic lines of research can be identified: case studies undertaken by historians and area studies scholars that focus on the international dimensions surrounding particular revolutions; comparative political studies that address the international implications of revolutions by departing from a more comprehensive theoretical framework but still based in comprehensive case studies; and more theoretically comprehensive literature which, in addition to careful case studies, aims to provide a general and far-reaching explanatory theoretical framework on the relationship between revolution and long-term historical change from different perspectives: English school international theory, neorealism, world systems analysis, postmarxism, or constructivism. In a context of growing inequality and global exploitation, the international dimension of revolutions is receiving renewed attention from scholars using innovative critical theoretical approaches.

Article

Diplomacy and War  

Robert Weiner and Paul Sharp

Scholars acknowledge that there is a close connection between diplomacy and war, but they disagree with regard to the character of this connection—what it is and what it ought to be. In general, diplomacy and war are assumed to be antagonistic and polar opposites. In contrast, the present diplomatic system is founded on the view that state interests may be pursued, international order maintained, and changes effected in it by both diplomacy and war as two faces of a single statecraft. To understand the relationships between diplomacy and war, we must look at the development of the contemporary state system and the evolution of warfare and diplomacy within it. In this context, one important claim is that the foundations of international organizations in general, and the League of Nations in particular, rest on a critique of modern (or “old”) diplomacy. For much of the Cold War, the intellectual currents favored the idea of avoiding nuclear war to gain advantage. In the post-Cold War era, the relationship between diplomacy and war remained essentially the same, with concepts such as “humanitarian intervention” and “military diplomacy” capturing the idea of a new international order. The shocks to the international system caused by events between the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have intensified the paradoxes of the relationship between diplomacy and war.

Article

Disaster Diplomacy  

Carmela Lutmar and Leah Mandler

Almost every disaster brings up hope that natural disasters can somehow open up space for peaceful diplomatic interaction between parties in conflict, be they warring states or warring domestic factions. Advocates of “disaster diplomacy” argue that while earthquakes, floods, windstorms, and tsunami result in human tragedies, these events also generate opportunities for international cooperation, even between enemies. While quantitative research focusing on disaster and conflict clearly shows the connection between the two phenomena, the causal effect is not always straightforward. Certainly, conflict-prone zones suffer from higher vulnerability and risk than places where people reside in peace, just as frequently disaster-stricken areas provide more opportunities for conflicting parties to clash. However, the chicken-and-egg question remains to be clarified as most disasters in conflict zones are complex, long-term disasters exacerbated by human activity. At the same time, more detailed case studies of individual disasters substantiate the claim that natural disasters sometimes encourage diplomacy, but also emphasize significant differences in circumstances and conflict characteristics among others.

Article

Economic Diplomacy  

Donna Lee and Brian Hocking

Mainstream studies of diplomacy have traditionally approached international relations (IR) using realist and neorealist frameworks, resulting in state-centric analyses of mainly political agendas at the expense of economic matters. Recently, however, scholars have begun to focus on understanding international relations beyond security. Consequently, there has been a significant shift in the study of diplomacy toward a better understanding of the processes and practices underpinning economic diplomacy. New concepts of diplomacy such as catalytic diplomacy, network diplomacy, and multistakeholder diplomacy have emerged, providing new tools not only to recognize a greater variety of state and nonstate actors in diplomatic practice, but also to highlight the varied and changing character of diplomatic processes. In this context, two themes in the study of diplomacy can be identified. The first is that of diplomat as agent, in IR and international political economy. The second is how to fit into diplomatic agency officials who do not belong to the state, or to a foreign ministry. In the case of the changing environment caused by globalization, economic diplomacy commonly drives the development of qualitatively different diplomatic practices in new and existing economic forums. Four key modes of economic diplomacy are critical to managing contemporary globalization: commercial diplomacy, trade diplomacy, finance diplomacy, and consular visa services in relation to increased immigration flows. The development of these modes of economic diplomacy has shaped the way we think about who the diplomats are, what diplomats do, and how they do it.

Article

Emotions and International Relations  

Simon Koschut

The growth of research on emotion in international relations (IR) has produced a significant body of literature. This body of literature has raised a number of interesting questions, debates, and theoretical positions regarding the agentic properties of international actors and how they are embedded in international structures. Emotions have long been viewed in IR as self-evident and irrational by-products of cognitive processes and have, until recently, remained largely implicit and undertheorized. The first wave of research lamented the discipline’s neglect and marginalization of emotions in mainstream IR theories and concepts. The second wave has turned to specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research within specific issue areas, from diplomacy, security, war, and ethnic conflict to transnational actors, institutions, governance, and conflict management. The literature on this topic is so extensive that many even speak of an “emotional turn.” Its intellectual roots stem from various disciplines, such as psychology, neuroscience, sociology, history, and cultural studies, and this diversity is reflected in ongoing challenges of how to study emotions and their political effects in IR. These challenges relate to a number of ontological and epistemological questions, including how to conceptualize emotions, how to capture emotions methodologically, and how to move from the individual to the collective level of analysis. Whatever divergent claims are made by these scholars, there is by now a firm consensus in the discipline that emotions matter for international and global politics.

Article

Foreign Policy of Colombia  

María Catalina Monroy

The study of foreign policy of Colombia has traditionally followed a path of thick description of specific events and generalizations that have transcended from one generation to another. There is a tendency to claim that Colombia’s foreign policy is presidentialist or personalist, of low profile, and excessively pro-American. These are just a few examples of the conventional wisdom that has defined the study of Colombian foreign policy. Although the field of foreign policy analysis is only in its preliminary phase in Colombia, there is a growing interest among students and scholars to analytically examine foreign policy decision-making through multiple levels of analysis. The foreign policy of Colombia is best understood by tracing the direction and alignment of specific foreign policy decisions into respices, meaning “look at” or “upon.” The fact that Colombia has traditionally “looked upon” a foreign entity to formulate foreign policy poses different questions regarding how autonomous foreign policymaking in Colombia really is. On the one hand, the essence of Colombia’s foreign policy has traditionally been found in a juxtaposition of the country’s interests alongside those of the United States. On the other hand, as a consequence of the articulation of this foreign policy partnership between Colombia and the United States, security has been the most recurrent topic in Colombia’s foreign policy agenda-setting, given the problems of illicit drugs, armed conflict, terrorism, and, more recently, peace.

Article

Friendship in International Politics  

Kristin Haugevik

In the international political discourse of the early 21st century, claims of friendship and “special ties” between states and their leaders are commonplace. Frequently reported by international media, such claims are often used as entry points for scholars and pundits seeking to evaluate the contents, relative strength, and present-day conditions of a given state-to-state relationship. Advancing the claim that friendships not only exist but also matter in and to the international political domain, international relations scholars began in the mid-2000s to trace and explore friendship—as a concept and practice—across time, societies, cultural contexts, and scientific disciplines. As part of the research agenda on friendship in international politics, scholars have explored why, how, and under what conditions friendships between states emerge, evolve, subsist, and dissolve; how amicable structures are typically organized; how they manifest themselves on a day-to-day basis; and what short- and long-term implications they may have for international political processes, dynamics, outcomes, and orders.