Digital geographies of diplomacy: The uneven digital mediation of spaces and encounters at the UN Human Rights Council

Abstract

In Spring 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the globe, diplomats embraced the digital as a means of continuing to practise statecraft. Drawing on online observations of the (resumed) 43rd, 44th and 45th sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2020, and 23 interviews with representatives who participated in these sessions, this paper addresses two lacuna in the existing literature: the under-theorisation of the role of the spatial in studies of digital diplomacy; and the lack of attention paid to diplomacy in digital geographies scholarship. We explore how diplomacy, an inherently spatial practice, is being ‘recast’ by the digital via a shift both in the form of diplomatic interactions, and in the human and non-human actors involved in doing diplomacy. In doing so, we take as our starting point Leszczynski's theory of the mediation of socio-spatial-digital relations. We consider two features of digital diplomacy which scholarship on digital mediation opens up for examination. First, how digitalisation – specifically the use of ‘real-time’ online audio-visual communication devices – has altered the geographies of diplomatic inclusion and exclusion at the HRC, simultaneously fostering interactions between diverse diplomatic actors whilst also exacerbating pre-existing spatial exclusions. Second, the shifting geographies of diplomatic encounters, including how digital technologies have reconfigured opportunities for intimacy. The paper concludes by calling for dialogue between scholars of digital diplomacy and of digital geographies.