Manipulating Diplomatic Atmospheres: The United Nations Security Council and Syria

Abstract

This article connects growing interest in affective atmospheres in human geography with critical geographies of diplomacy. Diplomats inhabit, discuss, and operate in and through atmospheres. Specifically, and uniquely, this article explores atmospheric manipulation by them and its connection to geopolitical claim making. In this way, it adds to the work in human geography on atmospheres by revealing its politics; that is, how atmospheres through spatiotemporal and relational processes are manipulated to do the work of geopolitics. Importantly, it also exposes how atmospheres are not incidental, accidental, or unimportant to geographies of diplomacy. Manifestly, atmospheres are political and have consequences. This article is grounded empirically in accounts of atmosphere in the United Nations Security Council by its high-level current diplomatic members. The focus is on the intensity of their “lived” experience and their registering and appraisal of the emerging, transitioning, and transformative atmospheres in the Council. Crucially, their accounts link the complexities of atmospheric perturbations, diplomatic “moments,” and subjectivity with manipulation. Collectively, they expose the cognitively penetrable although differentially affected nature of atmospheric manipulation and how the staging of an atmosphere is taken up and reworked by diplomatic bodies. The specific context for the study of atmospheric manipulation is a Council meeting on the worsening political and humanitarian crisis in Syria and the formulation of a military response by three of its permanent members (the United States, France, and the United Kingdom) in April 2018.