Anthropology and diplomacy

Abstract

Diplomacy is today undergoing rapid change, shaken by new populisms, seismic shifts in the balance of world powers, the digital revolution, planetary crisis and declining confidence in institutions of world governance that were conceived in a more hopeful era. Far from offering another idealistic solution, this introduction sketches a theorization anchored in the comparison of empirical case studies that lie outside of classic definitions of diplomacy, centred on relations between states. By privileging a pragmatic and interactionalist approach, and through attention to the particular political inventiveness of the vanquished, it aims to identify some commonalities across diverse diplomatic situations, namely a particular relation to violence (not always one of exclusion), the invention of rituals that model, in miniature, the world, and the destabilizing imitation of the other.