ABSTRACT
There may never have been a better time to study diplomacy! The outstanding economic progress of China in recent decades has been raising concerns among scholars and policy-makers alike about whether the potential redistribution of power from the West to the East would lead to regional and global instability. The risk of catastrophic climate change keeps up the pressure on the international community to find ways to break the current stalemate of climate negotiations. The revolutionary events following the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ are fundamentally changing the regional relations of the Middle East and North Africa, which have had major repercussions for global politics as well. The future of the nuclear non-proliferation regime is anything but unrelated to diplomatic efforts to dissuade states such as Iran to go nuclear and to persuade states such as North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. In the late 2000s, the global financial crisis left its mark on the global economy, with many states and regional organisations (especially the Euro zone members within the EU) struggling to cope with sovereign debt crises. The forces of globalisation, and with it the need to steer these forces into warranted directions, underpin many of these challenges. We seem to be situated in an ‘in-between era’, where international politics – and with it diplomacy – needs fresh ideas and new initiatives of diplomatic engagement to interact with a changing world. The need for such a reorientation is nothing particularly new. Diplomacy has a history of adapting and reinventing itself to changing political conditions. However, the challenge for diplomats has surprisingly remained similar throughout different historical ages: how to properly recognise, interpret and project relevant forms of power by communicating with one another. In other words, what exactly is there to understand about diplomacy and how can we make sense of it? This book does not aim to provide the answer to this question, but to explore how this question can be addressed from a variety of perspectives: historical, legal, cognitive, social or ethical. In so doing, we hope to convince the readers that diplomacy represents a unique, multi-faceted, effective and highly relevant instrument for managing relationships of estrangement between political communities, while retaining their institutional, ideological and social differences. As a way of unpacking these arguments, this chapter will proceed in three steps. The first section will explain the centrality of communication to the diplomatic practice. The second section will explain why and how we plan to broaden the toolbox available for studying diplomacy by drawing on insights from related disciplines. The chapter will conclude with an overview of the themes to be covered in each chapter of the book.
