ABSTRACT
Images, narratives and practices of diplomacy occur on a daily basis. The everydayness and ordinariness of diplomacy, however, is not readily acknowledged – at least within the discipline of International Relations (IR). In matters diplomatic, during the last century, the discipline predominantly concentrated on the activities of the official agents of states as infused by the aristocratic and bureaucratic tradition of the European international society (Satow 1922; Nicolson 1939; Kissinger 1994). Even among critical IR scholars considering the ‘future of diplomacy’ more recently, diplomacy is only reserved for the work of diplomats representing sovereign territorial units. It is not meant for the representatives of non-territorial units (e.g. NGOs, humanitarian agencies, religious missions and so on) whose activities only ‘resemble’ those of state diplomats and consequently, according to this view, only catachrestically bear the formal title diplomacy (Sending et al. 2011).
