ABSTRACT

Embassies are integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But Embassies are also discreet political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory ‘immune’ from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis Embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. It is this aspect of Embassy experience that this collection of essays explores and Embassies in Crisis revisits flashpoints in the recent lives of Embassies overseas at times of acute political crisis.

Ranging across multiple British and other embassy crises, unusually, this book offers equal insights to international historians and members of the diplomatic community.

chapter |17 pages

Embassies in crisis

Diplomacy, communities and conflicts

chapter 2|18 pages

‘Ambassador brawls with minister’

Emotions and internal and external crisis at the French Embassy to the Holy See

chapter 3|16 pages

Keeping the flag flying

John Reeves and the British consulate in Macao, 1941–45 1

chapter 4|23 pages

Austrian diplomatic missions in crisis

From 1938 to the Cold War 1

chapter 7|21 pages

Crisis at the creation

The establishment of the first US Embassy in Israel, 1947–49 1

chapter 9|18 pages

Hook, line and sinker

The British Embassy in Cairo and Egypt’s ‘expulsion of Soviet advisers,’ 1972

chapter 11|12 pages

Crisis response in a twenty-first-century British embassy

Ukraine 2013/14

chapter 12|17 pages

Embassies responding to crisis

A practitioner’s perspective