The Future of Diplomacy

Abstract

As we enter the 21st century, everybody seems to agree that is changing and yet few people can specify exactly how or where it is heading. Since its very inception, International Journal has been a key forum for such discussions. A 1998 exchange between Paul Sharp and Andrew Cooper, for example, gave new scholarly prominence to the ways in which, and degrees to which, state-to-state was being challenged by new actors.1 This has remained a core question in debates about the changing faces of ever since. In this issue of IJ, we seek to contribute to the search for emerging patterns in diplomatic practices. Instead of focusing solely on new actors, however, we cast a wider net and locate both traditional and nontraditional diplomatic agents as part of an evolving configuration of social relations. Overall, the picture we draw shows an intriguing combination of the gentlemanly diplomacy inherited from a state-centric world with various heterodox forms of political intercourse made possible by globalization. In the changing diplomatic landscape, we argue, old and new practices coexist in a mutually constitutive relationship.As innovative relationships develop among an increasingly heterogeneous cast of diplomatic actors, the nature and function of also evolves. Of course, today's diplomacy, just like yesterday's, remains primarily concerned with the ways in which states deal with the external world. But emerging practices also indicate efforts on the part of states to enrol various nonstate actors, just as nontraditional agents seek to act globally through the state's diplomatic outreach. Observe, for instance, how foreign ministries have bankrolled historically nondiplomatic practices such as development and disaster relief, and how nontraditional agents use public resources toward their ends. As soon as one scratches a little, in fact, examples of new forms of diplomatic relations abound. Globalization and increased interdependencies have caused line ministries to interact directly with their counterparts in other countries, thereby challenging the position of foreign affairs ministries. In multilateral settings, the practice of is being reshaped by recent changes in the global distribution of power, often in unexpected ways. Nongovernmental organizations have become more visible in world politics through delegation and indirect rule, thereby opening new state-society interfaces at the global level. All the while, military professionals have developed new practices for mediating and interacting with a broader set of actors. With the current trend toward the legalization of world politics, lawyers have become central diplomatic actors in their own right, providing authoritative interpretations of other actors' room for maneuver. Religious actors are often powerful by virtue of the capacity to mobilize transnational constituencies. Economists, for their part, shape diplomatic practice through claims of expertise that go far beyond the technical details of economic governance.In this introduction, we specify two main areas in which is changing as a result of these evolving social patterns. First, we look at the relationship between representation and governance: if anything, diplomatic work is traditionally about representing a polity vis-a-vis a recognized other. To the extent that such representation now increasingly includes partaking in governing, however, a whole array of questions about the relationship between diplomats and other actors emerges. Most prominently, are the governing and representing functions compatible in practice, or do they contain inherent tensions? Second, we focus on the territorial-nonterritorial character of the relation between the actors who perform diplomatic work and the constituencies on whose behalf they act and from which they claim authority. Bunding on these distinctions, contributors to this issue use their empirical findings to reflect not only on the evolution of diplomacy, but also on broader debates on the changes in world politics. …