1,720,983 research outputs found
Diplomatic Negotiations in the Digital Context: Key Issues, Emerging Trends, and Procedural Changes
No full textThis chapter considers how diplomatic negotiations unfold in the digital context. It asks how digital devices, such as mobile phones, screens, or social media apps, challenge core diplomatic norms and procedures; and, more radically, considers what happens to diplomatic negotiations when the interaction itself is conducted virtually or in hybrid formats. Moving beyond an overview of how diplomatic negotiations can be theorized and studied empirically in digital contexts, we suggest that different approaches build on different understandings of ‘the digital’: as an advantage, a challenge, or as a negotiation in itself. We develop these strands in conversation with the IR literature on ‘digital diplomacy’ and illustrate our points with examples of digitalization and diplomatic practice in the European Union. We discuss critical issues, emerging trends, and procedural changes in diplomatic negotiations by relating them to broader societal digitalization trends. Diplomats’ (work) phones, individual digital competencies, and shared institutional norms co-constitute diplomatic negotiations in the digital context. Beyond a much-needed exploration of how diplomats handle digital devices in everyday negotiations, we suggest that emerging debates on the regulation, management, and limits of digital technology will be crucial for our understanding of diplomatic negotiations in the coming years
Managing uncertainty:the everyday global politics of post-9/11 US public diplomacy
No full textUncertainty lies at the heart of public diplomacy. And yet as a field, public diplomacy has been predominated by the International Relations (IR) concept of soft power that cannot account for the uncertainties of our late modern moment. Exploring public diplomacy as everyday politics, this chapter maps out an alternative theoretical and methodological path to critically explore public diplomacy and its entanglement with the politics of uncertainty. It advances a critical IR approach – a poststructuralist framework of performativity and governmentality – to trace how multiple everyday uncertainties make themselves felt in contemporary US public diplomacy. Drawing from a larger research project on ongoing US cultural exchange programmes ‘in response to’ the September 11th 2001 attacks, it argues that everyday life and culture co-constitutes global politics. Centring the ordinary individuals and banal practices that comprise these cultural exchanges enables this critical approach to interrogate the specificities of these programmes and thereby reveal the uncertainty co-constituted within them. This chapter explores how the everyday global politics of post-9/11 US public diplomacy hinges upon the management of/via uncertainty across three key sites: uncertainty as riskiness, as contingency, and as possibility. By engaging with uncertainty in multiple and complex ways, this chapter illustrates how an alternative and critical approach of performativity and governmentality provides rich, insightful analyses of the everyday practices of US public diplomacy and the global politics it co-constitutes. Uncertainty then can be embraced as opening possibilities for other knowledges, alternative identities and a reimagined politics of the everyday of US public diplomacy
Russian Public Diplomacy: Questioning Certainties in Uncertain Times
No full textIn this chapter, we first outline Russia’s strategic thinking on public diplomacy and information security, then go on to examine the relationships between the ways in which Russian politicians, and the two public diplomacy outlets, RT and Sputnik, responded to three key junctures in this recent disruptive media event – the 2018 poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury. The evidence suggests that although cases pertaining to security provide fertile ground for Russian public diplomacy to thrive by mobilising their inherent uncertainty and channelling scepticism towards mainstream sources of information, the realities of the global media environment make the process of managing uncertainty far from simple
Special Issue: At a Crossroads : Examining Covid-19’s Impact on Public and Digital Diplomacy
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Virtual diplomatic summitry
No full textThis chapter discusses the rise of virtual diplomatic summitry and its place in the digitalisation of diplomacy. Virtual diplomatic summitry refers to the diplomatic summit meetings that take place through technologies for virtual interaction such as videoconferencing tools, and that take place partly or completely in virtual venues. Virtualisation has been embraced as a solution to sustain institutionalised routines of summitry in the face of disruptions. However, some researchers challenge the adoption of digital tools and use of virtual interaction, arguing that digitalisation in this form may result in lost nuances, risk interpersonal relationships and influence positions of power – all of which are imperative to high-leveled diplomacy. Diplomatic summitry has changed in character and constellation over time and the rise of virtual summits therefore warrants a rethinking of its future role and form in diplomacy. A relational perspective is proposed that focuses on the entangled role of virtualisation and digitalisation in diplomacy and can inform future analyses of virtual diplomatic summitry alongside and in combination with, other forms of diplomatic practice
New trends in digital diplomacy : The rise of TikTok and the geopolitics of algorithmic governance
No full textTikTok’s viral short-video app has seen tremendous global growth, but its adoption in foreign policy and digital diplomacy is still low. Some diplomatic actors have refrained from developing a presence on TikTok due to geopolitical concerns emerging from TikTok’s Chinese ownership. Other diplomatic actors have established a presence on the platform due to its ability to make content with high engagements, reaching a young audience. The chapter observed three principal objectives when employing TikTok for digital diplomacy: 1) educating young audiences and raising awareness about current issues, including Covid-19 and the War in Ukraine; 2) countering misinformation and disinformation; 3) putting vulnerable communities at the forefront and empowering young people. The chapter also focuses on TikTok as a case where the international geopolitics of algorithmic governance has grown salient in the public debate, hoping to serve as a first step towards a theoretical conversation in digital diplomacy on the matter. This new interest concerns a deeper level of influence over public political debates, from an interest in actor’s participation in digital conversations to an understanding of how influence can be asserted through the algorithmic structures determining the possible scope of and promoted voices in such conversation
Digital nuclear diplomacy
No full textDespite the continued centrality of nuclear weapons in international affairs—especially at the dawn of a dangerous new nuclear age—there is little attention given to how digital communication technologies have impacted nuclear diplomacy and what this means for the world. This chapter addresses this gap by drawing together scholarship on the intersections of digital diplomacy and nuclear politics to outline and examine the issue of digital nuclear diplomacy, where digital communication technologies have had the effect of changing central aspects of diplomacy around nuclear weapons, crisis, arms control, and disarmament. The chapter first provides a brief history of nuclear diplomacy and the important role of communication technologies in this area. It then introduces the concept of digital nuclear diplomacy, before exploring several case studies of digital nuclear diplomacy, ranging from accidentally published nonsensical tweets sent by US Strategic Command, to how the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons uses Instagram, via how internet users share memes to critique Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates that nuclear diplomacy in the digital age involves multiple actors, novel technologies, visual media, and the use of humour that all impact nuclear signalling, crisis stability, conflict escalation, and the communication of nuclear issues in important ways. Because of these developments, the chapter articulates a need for multiple, interdisciplinary, and critical perspectives as we move into an uncertain future where digital nuclear diplomacy may shape the future of life, and death, on planet earth
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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