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Economic diplomacy.

• Donna Lee Donna Lee Department of International Organisations and Diplomacy, University of Birmingham
• , and  Brian Hocking Brian Hocking Diplomatic Studies Programme, Clingendael
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.384
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 11 January 2018

Mainstream studies of diplomacy have traditionally approached international relations (IR) using realist and neorealist frameworks, resulting in state-centric analyses of mainly political agendas at the expense of economic matters. Recently, however, scholars have begun to focus on understanding international relations beyond security. Consequently, there has been a significant shift in the study of diplomacy toward a better understanding of the processes and practices underpinning economic diplomacy. New concepts of diplomacy such as catalytic diplomacy, network diplomacy, and multistakeholder diplomacy have emerged, providing new tools not only to recognize a greater variety of state and nonstate actors in diplomatic practice, but also to highlight the varied and changing character of diplomatic processes. In this context, two themes in the study of diplomacy can be identified. The first is that of diplomat as agent, in IR and international political economy. The second is how to fit into diplomatic agency officials who do not belong to the state, or to a foreign ministry. In the case of the changing environment caused by globalization, economic diplomacy commonly drives the development of qualitatively different diplomatic practices in new and existing economic forums. Four key modes of economic diplomacy are critical to managing contemporary globalization: commercial diplomacy, trade diplomacy, finance diplomacy, and consular visa services in relation to increased immigration flows. The development of these modes of economic diplomacy has shaped the way we think about who the diplomats are, what diplomats do, and how they do it.

• international relations
• economic diplomacy
• state actors
• nonstate actors
• international political economy
• globalization
• commercial diplomacy
• trade diplomacy
• finance diplomacy
• consular visa services

Introduction

International developments are driven by and also impact on a number of factors that are economic, social, cultural, and political in nature, none more so than the processes and effects of changes in the structure of the world economy. To what extent, if any, does the study of diplomacy (the “study of diplomacy” is consciously referred to here rather than “diplomatic studies” since the latter may unhelpfully separate diplomacy from the broader literature of International Relations and International Political Economy) have the analytical tools to highlight and explain major global economic developments such as regionalization, globalization, and economic development? This is a question often ignored by scholars of diplomacy but one which those who study International Relations (IR) are constantly confronting. Mainstream studies of diplomacy have traditionally approached international relations using realist and neorealist frameworks (see Lee and Hudson 2004 ), and this has determined both focus and approach, resulting in state-centric analyses of mainly political agendas. Consequently, much of the literature has tended to undervalue economic matters, failing to reflect on how theories and concepts of diplomacy can explain key international processes such as imperialism, globalization, and development.

In recent years, however, there have been significant ontological and conceptual shifts in the study of diplomacy. Scholars have highlighted the necessity of understanding international relations outside the narrow state-centric security nexus. In the light of this, the essay focuses on how contributors to this developing debate have moved the study of diplomacy toward a better understanding of the processes and practices of economic diplomacy. Several scholars have imported analytical tools from other social science fields and in particular International Political Economy (IPE) and Business Studies to highlight the importance, and impact, of economic actors and economic interests to diplomatic practice and processes. In so doing they have developed new concepts of diplomacy – catalytic diplomacy, network diplomacy, multistakeholder diplomacy – which provide new tools not only to recognize a greater variety of state and nonstate actors in diplomatic practice, but also to highlight the varied and changing character of diplomatic processes. Diplomacy, in this view, is not confined to interstate relations in an international system, but is more the social, economic, cultural, and political relations among networks of political actors in formal and informal domestic and systemic environments. In essence the study of diplomacy has shifted from a focus on the diplomacy of economics in which the key theme was the economic tools of statecraft to the study of economic diplomacy in which two themes emerge. The first is that of diplomat as agent, in IR and IPE. The second theme is how to fit into diplomatic agency officials who do not belong to the state, or to a foreign ministry.

Against this background, the essay highlights how, by focusing on economic matters, the study of diplomacy has evolved conceptually in order to accommodate key system-level processes such as regionalization and globalization, the changes to the organization of diplomacy within governments, the development of new forms of diplomatic practice alongside the emergence of “new” diplomatic actors.

Economics Matters

Key developments such as the creation of the post-World War II Bretton Woods institutions (mainly the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)), the oil crises of the 1970s, the decline of American hegemony, indebtedness of developing countries from the 1980s onward, the East Asian financial crisis in the 1990s, and the rise of the Chinese and Indian economies in the 2000s, provide evidence of the high stakes of international economic relations, as well as their political and social importance. Such developments can change our understanding of the way the world works and force major intellectual shifts in IR, such as the emergence of theories of interdependence, hegemonic decline, development, economic and political transition, regionalization, and globalization. Within each of these intellectual shifts we see a significant movement away from the narrow focus on states and security issues and toward analysis of the interdependence of economic, social, and political issues, as well as the interconnectedness of state and nonstate actors in the international system.

But the literature on diplomacy has been far less influenced by these developments than has the IR canon more generally. Thus the economic dimensions of diplomatic practice continue to attract little attention. However, there is growing recognition that economic diplomacy is significant to an understanding of both the concept and practice of diplomacy. Not only have we begun to recognize and to explain the everyday impact of diplomacy in the economic sphere, and the role of diplomats in the development and regulation of markets, we have also begun to examine the role of diplomats in “global economic governance.” This is appropriate because, contrary to some of the governance literature, diplomats remain highly significant players in the creation and maintenance of the practices and institutions and rules of international economic relations. Diplomats are often invisible servants of the world economy and any account of developments in world economic history needs to acknowledge their role. Equally significant is the lead role that diplomats play in the unnoticed everyday events in the development of markets, whether that be in “selling socks for Britain,” as one diplomat described his commercial activities, or negotiating a new loan with the IMF.

The study of economic diplomacy is concerned not only with the broader diplomatic agendas as they emerge from the processes of market integration, such as negotiations to achieve a low carbon economy, intellectual property rights bargaining, e-commerce agreements, and transnational finance negotiations, but also with changes in diplomacy and especially with the emergence of new modes of diplomacy, new diplomatic actors, and new formal and informal structures of diplomacy. Many of those who study economic diplomacy are making a conscious effort to address the lack of attention to these new structural and agency developments by mainstream studies of diplomacy.

The study of economic diplomacy also informs our understanding of the international political economy in that it forces a recognition that diplomats as agents are significant actors and part of a dense, yet largely unexplored, network of market actors in the world economy. After all, as an example, current commercial diplomacy – the promotion of inward and outward investment as well as exports – involves the search for competitive advantage in the world economy by diplomat–business networks. An IPE agenda that includes analysis of current diplomatic practice with its emphasis on agency will better expose the connections between human agency and systemic transformation and stability – and thus add to debates about the relationship between structure and agency in IPE. Those who come to diplomacy studies from an IPE perspective are intentionally seeking to signpost the role of agency in the world economy, something that is often missing from IPE. IPE is predominantly concerned with the relationship between states and markets and tends to place emphasis on structures and process in this relationship rather than agency. By focusing on the role of diplomats as agents, research into economic diplomacy can provide insights into the political processes involved in the creation, regulation, and development of markets. Economic diplomacy scholars focus on the role of diplomatic actors and the linkages, activities, and institutions in which they work as they seek to both create and manage economic interdependence and dependence. Diplomats, so the study of economic diplomacy would contend, are key players in negotiations to establish market rules and regulations, the dissemination of norms and cultures in the international economy, the promotion and implementation of economic policies, and the advocacy of public and private economic interests. And by introducing nonstate actors into the frame through, for example, the concept of catalytic diplomacy, some scholars of economic diplomacy have been able to bring to our attention the contests between competing social forces at the domestic and systemic levels (see, for example, Pigman 1998 ; Hocking 1999a ; 2004 ; Lee and Smith 2008 ).

Conceptualizing Economic Diplomacy

The emergence of explicit concepts of economic diplomacy is a relatively recent development in the study of diplomacy that dates from the 1980s. The key theoretical issue in the study of economic diplomacy is the extent to which economic diplomacy is tied to the state and public interests or whether it pertains to a broader range of social actors and interests. This classic debate lingers of course in analyses of diplomacy per se. It is also at the very root of our understanding of the practice and purpose of economic diplomacy. If diplomacy is tied to state actors and state interests then economic diplomacy tends to be limited to the use of traditional diplomatic tools to achieve the economic goals of the state. Understood in this state-centric realist framework, economic diplomacy is seen primarily as intergovernmental, conducted by foreign service officials and as a means for advancing the economic interests of the state in foreign countries and the world economy. This prominent line of argument in the conventional view of economic diplomacy sees a constitutive relationship between diplomacy and state sovereignty, as well as a constitutive relationship between diplomatic systems and an anarchic system of sovereign states (Gardner 1980 ; Watson 1982 ; Barston 1997 ; Marshall 1997 ). Generally diplomacy (including economic diplomacy) is “the means by which states pursue their foreign policies” (Berridge 2005 ). Economic diplomacy is the pursuit of economic security within an anarchic international system. A brief review of the contents of the major diplomacy textbooks shows that economic diplomacy is generally defined as the use of traditional diplomatic tools such as intelligence gathering, lobbying, representation, negotiation, and advocacy to further the foreign economic policies of the state (Watson 1982 ; Hamilton and Langhorne 1995 ; Barston 1997 ; Marshall 1997 ; Berridge 2005 ; Jönsson and Hall 2005 ). At the power play end of economic diplomacy is what Baldwin ( 1985 ) calls economic statecraft, which is the strategic use of positive and negative economic sanctions such as trade embargoes as well as aid programs by states and other actors such as the United Nations to coerce other states to cooperate (see also Hogan 1987 ; Zimmerman 1993 ; Kunz 1997 ; Davis 1999 ). Thus economic diplomacy conceived in this realist way is concerned with the economic agenda in diplomacy which can be distinguished from the political agenda. It does not involve a different type of diplomacy or a different set of diplomatic actors (see for example the entry on economic diplomacy in Berridge and James’s Dictionary of Diplomacy , 2003 :91). And similar concepts such as trade diplomacy and commercial diplomacy are, for the most part, also conceived in this way.

And yet, as one former ambassador has written, “it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is political in diplomacy and what is economic, and indeed, whether there is a dividing line between the two which has any validity at all” (Meyer 1998 ). Indeed, some studies have shown that the very origins of diplomacy in most countries lie in developing cordial relations in order to facilitate trade (see Lee and Hudson 2004 ). Thailand provides one example. The Foreign Ministry’s own account of its historical development (found on its webpages at www.mfa.go.th ) emphasizes how trade interests in China drove Thai diplomacy in the thirteenth century and Thai diplomatic relations with Europe in the seventeenth century .

The newer approaches to economic diplomacy recognize that diplomacy cannot be compartmentalized into separate economic and political activity, and that, in practical terms, most countries would find such a separation simply unworkable. In all countries economic diplomacy is a key strand in diplomatic strategy and it therefore becomes necessary for states to develop an integrated or coordinated diplomacy. This coordinated diplomacy involves a multiplicity of actors and individuals built around policy networks drawn from several government ministries, including the foreign ministry, as well as the private and civil sector actors placed in national, regional, and international levels (Hocking 2004 ). When we think of diplomacy we need to move beyond simply thinking of the foreign ministry and its officials in overseas missions. A more useful concept is the “national diplomatic system” (Hocking 2007 ). This concept better captures the diverse and complex nature of coordinated diplomacy. Economic diplomacy may be driven by the foreign ministry, but it involves those with economic responsibilities and interests inside and outside of government at all levels of governance. In the national diplomatic system (NDS) rendering of diplomatic structures and process, the foreign ministry becomes the integrator or coordinator of diplomacy. That is, it works with “partners” such as other government departments, as well as business and civil groups to deliver diplomatic goals. Some countries have developed new institutional structures within government as a way of formalizing this coordinating role. Australia, Canada, Fiji, and Mauritius, for example, have merged their trade and foreign ministries into one department as a bureaucratic way of integrating diplomacy. Others, such as the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic, have kept the two ministries distinct but have created new joint bodies to coordinate and facilitate integrated diplomacy.

In a global, interdependent economy, economic diplomacy subsumes more issues, thus expanding the potential number of national and systemic players with economic interests and responsibilities in the diplomatic process (Bayne and Woolcock 2007 ). In this understanding of diplomacy it is necessary for scholars to identify the linkages between this diverse set of public and private actors and interests – that is, the nature of the diplomatic networks and the relationships between public and private within diplomatic systems (Hocking 2007 ). Then changes to diplomatic practice can be understood in terms of changes to diplomatic networks and to the NDS within states that vary through time and across issues.

Diplomacy and Globalization

For much of the twentieth century and all of the twenty-first century the global economy has become ever more integrated through either regionalization or a process many describe as “globalization.” Indeed globalization is currently one of the most widely used – and contested – concepts in IR. Some scholars of diplomacy have been fairly slow to fully address the impact of the process and effects of globalization upon diplomatic practice and organization. This neglect both derives from, and exposes, the limitations of conventional realist approaches to diplomacy already discussed. And yet, as we have also already indicated, diplomats can be seen as the agents of globalization given their direct involvement in the creation, development, and regulation of markets and capital through trade and finance negotiations, as well as commercial activity. In the context of this changing environment caused by globalization, economic diplomacy commonly drives the development of qualitatively different diplomatic practices in new and existing economic forums. It involves networks of state and nonstate actors at domestic and systemic levels in pursuit of private as well as public interests (Pigman 2005 ). These networks operate in, are influenced by, and also influence an increasingly integrated and interdependent world economy; that is, a globalizing economy.

For the purposes of this necessarily brief piece, let us set aside the many critiques of the concept of globalization and assume that it is primarily an economic process driven by new technologies which heightens interdependence and integration. Put simply, globalization means that there is much more economic activity occurring in national, regional, and international markets due to ever increasing flows of capital, trade, services, people, ideas, and information between states, firms, and individuals. Such changes, quite naturally, have increased the need for and significance of integrated diplomacy to help facilitate as well as manage and govern economic development and market integration. Furthermore, if we understand globalization to include higher levels of integration of progressively more competitive markets as a result of increasing liberalization of international trade and finance, then diplomacy becomes an important tool for managing increased economic risks and opportunities. Finally, since globalization is one of many processes (such as regionalization and dependency) that break down the barriers between the domestic and the international, the agendas of economic diplomacy are found more at the boundaries of international relations. Climate change, for example, is an issue that transcends national boundaries yet has enormous economic implications in relation to strategies for low carbon economic growth. Equally interesting is the need for studies of diplomacy to encapsulate the increasing domestication of diplomacy which results from the breakdown of domestic–systemic barriers in the world economy. This is encapsulated in the growing concern in NDSs with public diplomacy. Increasingly, this is seen as more than the management of image such as the UK’s “Cool Britannia” branding exercise designed to attract foreign direct investment into the British economy. Public diplomacy also has a broader concern with promoting the strategic objectives of the state in the economy, such as Canada’s public diplomacy on climate change (Melissen 2005 ).

The impact and significance of globalization for diplomacy have been highlighted in a number of ways. Here we focus on four key modes of economic diplomacy that are seen as critical to managing contemporary globalization: commercial diplomacy, trade diplomacy, and finance diplomacy, as well as consular visa services in relation to increased immigration flows. How has the development of these modes of economic diplomacy shaped the way we think about who the diplomats are, what diplomats do, and how they do it?

Commercial Diplomacy

One of the key developments has been the growth of commercial diplomacy within the NDS (Coolsaet 2004 ; Lee 2004 ; Potter 2004 ; Rana 2004 ) as well as internationally (Kostecki and Naray 2007 ). Globalization in this sense is seen to increase economic vulnerability and/or open up new opportunities for trade and investment growth in the world market. Globalization has also facilitated the growth of international business and generally increased competitive pressures on business. The impact on diplomacy is twofold. First has been the institutional impact. Throughout the last two decades in particular, governments have increased commercial diplomatic activities by increasing funding for export and investment support in foreign ministries and other agencies, as well as creating new or bolstering existing institutional frameworks. Second has been the drawing in of private actors from business. Responding to competitive pressures and the need to find and exploit new markets for domestic goods and services, commercial diplomacy primarily involves export and investment support and advocacy for domestic business. Commercial diplomacy focuses on building networks of diplomats and business groups based in overseas missions to promote trade and investment as well as business advocacy. For many developing countries, commercial diplomacy also includes tourism promotion as a primary activity. Diplomatic networks provide commercial intelligence, tourism marketing, business links and partner searches, as well as business assistance. Conceptually, studies of commercial diplomacy point to complex organizational networks involving ministries of commerce (often with trade promotion agencies/departments), trade, and finance, in addition to the foreign ministry. Business groups are also, not surprisingly, key players in the network and in many cases are formally placed into overseas missions and consuls through secondment programs (Lee 2004 ). Business involvement is also channeled through other government departments as well as through links with national and local chambers of commerce and the like. In this conceptualization of commercial diplomacy, business actors are merged with the state rather than autonomous, and as such both public and private interests are included in diplomatic representation.

Trade Diplomacy

The scholarship on trade diplomacy has also begun to shape the way we rethink diplomacy by highlighting the role of nonstate actors, networks, ideas, and institutions in diplomatic processes and outcomes. New ways of conceptualizing diplomacy have emerged from studies of trade. Developments in international trade relations, such as the growth of regional trade organizations, the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the extension of the trade talks agenda to include new issues such as internet gambling, highlight the need to recognize and understand new actors, new topics, and new forums of economic diplomacy, and point to the necessity of moving beyond the predominant realist conception of diplomacy. Earlier conventional classic studies of trade diplomacy such as Curzon ( 1965 ) and Hudec ( 1975 ) provide state-centric accounts of power-based diplomacy in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This is not surprising given the intergovernmental nature of the GATT/WTO regimes. Recent work continues to emphasize the roles of states in trade diplomacy but also points to the role of nonstate actors in multilateral, regional, and bilateral trade relations (Hocking and McGuire 2002 ; Pigman 2004 ; Heron 2007 ). Indeed, in an early attempt to reconceptualize diplomacy in order to reflect the growing interaction of the foreign ministry with other, nonstate actors, Hocking ( 1999b ) developed the concept of catalytic diplomacy to highlight the growing linkages between official and nonofficial diplomatic actors in diplomatic machinery.

The world economy is now governed by a set of economic institutions with rules and procedures. With the creation of the WTO in 1995 , trade between states is increasingly governed by international rules that have to be negotiated and implemented. The 2000s have also witnessed an increase in the number of bilateral free trade agreements between states, which, added to the network of regional trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union, the Southern African Development Community, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, all extend the agenda and need for trade diplomacy. Much of the literature on trade diplomacy focuses on multilateral trade negotiations, in particular providing detailed accounts of GATT/WTO rounds (Winham 1986 ; Croome 1999 ; Lee 1999 ; Lee and Wilkinson 2007 ). For many, trade diplomacy is a zero-sum game of hard intergovernmental bargaining between rational-actor states pursuing maximum concessions from others while conceding as little as possible (Odell 2000 ; Steinberg 2003 ). Much of our understanding of the diplomacy of economic negotiations has been imported from prominent IPE scholars such as John Odell . Odell ( 2000 ) makes use of game-theoretical models to tease out the diplomatic processes involved in negotiations in the world economy in order to explain cooperative behavior bargaining and outcomes among self-interested states in forums such as the WTO.

Adopting a similar neoliberal game theoretic approach, Putnam ( 1988 ) has been influential in highlighting the importance of domestic as well as international factors in international economic negotiations. In this seminal work he developed the highly influential concept of “two-level games” (Level I refers to international bargaining, and Level II refers to domestic-level bargaining between interest groups). With others, Putnam also introduced the concept of “double-edged diplomacy” (Evans et al. 1993 ) to highlight how diplomatic processes involve bargaining at both domestic and systemic levels, as well as the opening up of economic diplomacy to include legislators and, consequently, domestically based interest groups. This work usefully details the complicated diplomatic process in international economic negotiations in which diplomats must not only negotiate with other states at the systemic level but also negotiate with powerful political actors back home in the national sphere. In so doing it highlights the endogenous and exogenous sources of diplomatic processes and practice. Putnam’s insights into the domestic context of trade negotiations at least begin to recognize the conflicted nature of states’ interests in trade diplomacy. Stopford and Strange ( 1991 ) also highlight these conflicts within states by underscoring the complex and dynamic character of trade relations in a continuously changing international political economy structure. In drawing in the changing structural context to economic diplomacy they successfully challenge the assumption built into rational actor models of trade diplomacy that state interests can be fixed and, indeed, known. Stopford and Strange conceptualize economic diplomacy as “triangular,” dominated by state–state, state–firm, and firm–firm relations. In this triangular diplomacy, business diplomats are as powerful as states and a strategically successful state will seek allies with powerful firms to increase its structural power. Langhorne ( 2005 ) has referred to the ambassador-like role of the chief executive of Microsoft, Bill Gates , for example, in his study of the growing influence of transnational firms in contemporary diplomacy. One of the key issue areas where transnational business has been active in trade diplomacy is in intellectual property rights (IPRs). Susan Sell ’s seminal work on IPR negotiations demonstrates not only the large number of players involved in the negotiations (business, states, lawyers, interstate organizations, users of intellectual property), but also that the network of players functions quite differently from one period to another as the nature of, and conflicts within, the issue changes (Sell 2003 ). Business was, for example, a key promoter of the 1995 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) during the Uruguay Round talks in order to protect business knowledge capital, whereas when the issue shifted to one of global public health in the Doha Round (following the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health in 2001 ) business retreated and public health nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) became the prominent actors. As the issue of IPRs clearly shows, it is important not to limit our conceptualization of agency in trade diplomacy to states and firms.

Other influential studies of trade diplomacy suggest an even more complex process of trade negotiations. In a key ontological move away from structural accounts of trade negotiations, Hocking ( 2004 ) highlights the many other actors involved, reflecting the “multi-stakeholders” in economic diplomacy. Similar to commercial diplomatic process, business is seen to operate within and merge with the state in trade diplomacy processes such that the distinction between public (state) and private (business) interests is difficult to draw.

International trade governance has become an increasingly contested area since the infamous “Battle of Seattle” at the 1999 WTO Seattle Ministerial Meeting. Other actors have been drawn into trade diplomacy as part of this contestation. NGOs such as Oxfam and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development have become critically engaged with the WTO process as participants involved directly in negotiations, often as members of smaller and developing countries’ state delegations because they can provide much needed expertise and resources. Other actors participate as highly visible protest groups challenging the WTO process (which is seen as undemocratic and unaccountable) as well as attacking the dominant neoliberal ideas which, it is argued, create poverty in developing countries and increase inequality between the powerful industrialized countries and the powerless less developed countries (Scholte et al. 1999 ; Wilkinson 2006 ).

The study of trade diplomacy has certainly improved our understanding of the WTO process and the workings and effects of institutional environments on trade talks, whether it be the very detailed discussion of WTO negotiations (see Jawara and Kwa 2004 ) or the more historical institutional approach of Wilkinson ( 2006 ). Studies of the recent emergence of developing countries in WTO negotiations (Narlikar 2003 ; Clapp 2006 ) are also significant, not least because they bring a welcome move away from a focus on the major industrialized countries, thereby making the study of diplomacy more inclusive (Rana 2002 ; 2004 ). In this context there has also been recent analysis of the diplomatic strategies – mainly focusing on strategic alliance building – of the new coalition groups within the WTO such as the G20 and the Africa Group (Narlikar and Tussie 2004 ; Lee 2007 ; Taylor 2007 ). This work usefully discusses and draws attention to the diplomatic practices of countries otherwise neglected in the study of economic diplomacy, such as the BRICSAM states (the BRICSAM countries are the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Mexico) (Antkiewicz and Whalley 2005 ), as well as regional organizations such as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the East African Community, and so on.

Finance Diplomacy

Another key issue area in the global economy is international finance, and in the context of globalization, finance diplomacy is mainly concerned with attempts by governments to create stability and prosperity in a regime which lacks the rules and laws of the international trade regime. Much like studies of trade diplomacy, the literature goes a long way toward shaping a broader conceptualization of economic diplomacy since it points to the role of nontraditional diplomatic actors such as finance ministries, central banks such as the Bank of England, business groups and the banking sector, as well as nontraditional diplomatic forums such as the World Economic Forum (Pigman 2007 ).

Influential work on the Group of Seven (G7) and Group of Eight (G8), as well as the IMF and WB, not surprisingly (since G7/G8 summitry is wholly intergovernmental and the IMF and WB are instruments of governments) tends to reinforce a state-centric approach to financial diplomacy (Bayne 1998; Kirton 1999 ; Budd 2003 ; Wicks 2007 ). Most studies of financial diplomacy are concerned with the failure of financial diplomacy to avert the various financial crises of recent years, such as the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s, and studies of the IMF and WB generally focus on the economic effects of the policies of these organizations rather than the diplomatic process of the negotiations. In one notable exception, Kahler ( 1993 ) adopts the two-level approach to financial diplomacy developed by Putnam to account for the failure of the IMF to reach agreement with developing countries. Kahler finds Level II factors within the IMF as well as the recipient countries best explain the failure to reach agreement despite the apparent structural power of the IMF. Recent developments such as the G20 meetings of finance ministers, as well as the now regular meetings of the fast developing countries and interested parties through the newly created BRICSAM organization, which is a network of states, NGOs, and business (Cooper et al. 2007 ), have expanded analysis of finance diplomacy to include networks of state and nonstate actors as well as new regimes.

Immigration and Consular Work

One feature of globalization is the increased flow of people across borders. Migrations, coupled with the increased threat of terrorism in the 2000s, have increased the volume as well as the significance of consular visa services, while at the same time redefining and reconstituting the concept of “consularity” (Dickie 2007 ). Thus national diplomatic systems are responding to enhanced population mobility and the threat posed by terrorism and organized crime by locating a police presence in key missions. A recent study of the development of a common European Union visa policy has pointed to the changes to the management of the consular function emerging from this diplomatic collaboration. These include high levels of intergovernmental cooperation between consular services across Europe (Fernández 2008 ).

Consular visa services are another example of diplomatic developments facilitating the merger of the domestic and international arenas of diplomacy in a similar fashion to the developments in public diplomacy. Studies of visa services again demonstrate how changes in the world economy, such as increasing flows of migrant workers, change diplomacy and the way we view it. In view of the transnational and global threat posed by diseases such as SARS, as well as the need to control the flow of suspected terrorists across borders, visa issuance has become a critical diplomatic instrument to facilitate cooperation and signal recognition. Alternatively, nonissuance is a diplomatic tool to enhance the security interests of the state, or part of a coercive diplomacy strategy to signal protest or nonrecognition, as in the case of UK visa policy toward Zimbabwe from 2002 (Stringer 2004 ).

What then has been the impact of the developments reviewed in this essay? In sum, it has both empirical and conceptual dimensions. Empirically we are drawn into a wider (perhaps more representative) world of economic diplomacy covering a broader agenda and a wider set of diplomatic actors. Conceptually we see economic diplomacy as a set of formal and informal processes and linkages between public–private networks comprising state and nonstate actors. Although, as conventional approaches have been quick to point out, there is a danger here in that “anyone can be a diplomat in this conceptualization of diplomacy” (see Langhorne 1997 ; Sharp 2001 ) and that if one goes too far in this direction then economic diplomacy as something distinct from international economic relations simply disappears.

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Links to Digital Materials

International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development. At www.ictsd.org , accessed Apr. 2009. Offers detailed insight into the involvement of NGOs in trade diplomacy.

Oxfam International. At www.oxfam.org , accessed Apr. 2009. Describes the wide-ranging activities of this international NGO, including its trade campaigns.

Center for International Development at Harvard University. At www.cid.harvard.edu/cidtrade/ , accessed Apr. 2009. Provides a centralized information resource on global trade negotiations.

Clingendael Discussion Papers in Diplomacy. At www.clingendael.nl/cdsp/publications/discussion-papers/archive.html , accessed Apr. 2009. The publications of the Clingendael Institute in The Hague include a number of papers on economic and commercial diplomacy.

The Diplo Project. At http://textus.diplomacy.edu/textusBin/BViewers/oview/EconomicDiplomacy/oview.asp , accessed Apr. 2009. Portal from the DiploFoundation team examining economic diplomacy and commercial diplomacy.

Institute for Trade and Commercial Diplomacy. At www.commercialdiplomacy.org/ , accessed Apr. 2009. The homepage of the Institute provides definitions and case studies targeted at the professional practice of commercial diplomacy.

Economic Negotiation Network. At www-rcf.usc.edu/∼enn/, accessed Apr. 2009. Professor John Odell ’s Economic Negotiation Network. The website contains details of the latest scholarly research on economic negotiations.

Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. At www.guisd.org/ , accessed Apr. 2009. Over 50 case studies that can be used for teaching economic diplomacy can be purchased from this site.

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Economic Diplomacy and Economic Security

NEW FRONTIERS FOR ECONOMIC DIPLOMACY, pp. 37-54, Carla Guapo Costa, ed., Instituto Superior de Ciéncias Sociais e Politicas, 2009

18 Pages Posted: 22 Jul 2009

Peter A. G. van Bergeijk

Erasmus University - Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

Selwyn Moons

Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) - Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

Date Written: July 20, 2009

This chapter investigates how economic diplomacy can be used to generate and increase economic security. The first section sets out a definition for economic diplomacy, uncovers some of the historical roots and discusses empirical findings on the trade - conflict - cooperation relationships. The second section deals with the impact of the process of globalisation and its relevance for economic diplomacy and commercial policy. In particular we investigate whether the scope and efficacy of public activities have been influenced by the assumed reduction of distance as a barrier to trade. The third section focuses on new dimensions of and recent trends in (the use of) economic diplomacy. We will pay special attention to the emergence of new actors in the global game and will analyse how this alters the rules of the game. The fourth section deals with the requirements of economic security and discusses the issue of energy security as a special case. The final section draws conclusions and identifies issues for further research.

Keywords: economic diplomacy, globalization, energy security

JEL Classification: F5, F59, Q34

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

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Article Contents

Introduction, practices of digital diplomacy, toward a research agenda for digital diplomacy practice, conclusions, acknowledgements.

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Practice Approaches to the Digital Transformations of Diplomacy: Toward a New Research Agenda

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Elsa Hedling, Niklas Bremberg, Practice Approaches to the Digital Transformations of Diplomacy: Toward a New Research Agenda, International Studies Review , Volume 23, Issue 4, December 2021, Pages 1595–1618, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab027

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As a growing number of diplomatic practices take new digital forms, research on digital diplomacy is rapidly expanding. Many of the changes linked to digitalization transform or challenge traditional ways of doing diplomacy. Analyses of new forms of “digital diplomacy” are therefore valuable for the advancement of practice approaches in international relations theory. That said, digital diplomacy poses a number of challenges for international relations scholarship that are only beginning to be addressed. Digitalization is both a process and a result, and provokes key questions regarding continuity, change, agency, space, and materiality in diplomacy. The overarching aim of this article is to advance a research agenda that seeks to address key questions in the study of digital diplomacy on the basis of various practice approaches. In particular, the article highlights three dimensions of change as being central to the research agenda and investigates how these can be explored in future analyses of digital diplomacy.

The emergence and global spread of Internet technologies have fundamentally reshaped societies in just a few decades. In international politics, it is forcing diplomats to rethink core issues of governance, order, and international hierarchy ( Seib 2016 ; Bjola and Manor 2018 ; Riordan 2019 ). The intersection of diplomacy and information technology has led to the emergence of new practices of “digital diplomacy.” An intern posting a photograph on an embassy's social media account, high-level diplomats networking with tech companies in Silicon Valley, and state leaders using Twitter to comment on international negotiations are now examples of everyday diplomatic life. Digital diplomacy is a broad term that refers to how the Internet, digital tools, digital media, and the technology sector have influenced or even transformed diplomacy. Conceptually, digital diplomacy is seen as both a driver and a result of digitalization, and thus encompasses all the various ways in which digitalization interacts with diplomacy ( Bjola and Holmes 2015 ). However, changes in processes and practices amount to more than adaptations of the taken-for-granted ways of doing diplomacy. New technology is bringing new actors into the field of diplomacy. It is also challenging established actors to change their ways of doing things and how they present and perceive themselves. Digital diplomacy can be said to have disrupted traditional diplomacy because it is in many ways a self-ascribed experimental practice. Diplomatic actors are often aware that digitalization involves taking risks and engaging with the unknown, which in turn is at odds with the perception that diplomacy should display foresight and be risk-averse.

As research on digital diplomacy expands rapidly, “practice theory” in international relations (IR) has become a point of departure for studies because of its supposed ability to account for both continuity and change in international politics ( Holmes 2015 ; Adler-Nissen and Drieschova 2019 ; Cooper and Cornut 2019 ; see also Adler and Pouliot 2011 ). The practice idiom can be used to describe a range of concrete phenomena from mundane aspects of local e-mail protocol to ceremonial use of social media in state representation or increasingly structured activities of teleconferenced negotiations in international organizations. The swift shift to “zoom diplomacy” in early 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how these practices can, at least temporarily, replace face-to-face diplomacy, alas not without its own attendant difficulties ( Naylor 2020 ; Eggeling and Adler-Nissen 2021 ).

The study of the social practices of digital diplomacy is therefore assumed to offer opportunities to explore how processes, interactions, and habits are influenced by new technology, and how the interconnectedness of the Internet is unfolding on the ground. However, practice theory is not in itself a coherent set of theoretical propositions to be applied off-the-shelf to the study of digital diplomacy or any other field of social inquiry. Practice theory in IR is rather a pluralistic set of approaches that more or less coherently draws on insights from, inter alia, pragmatism, phenomenology, and critical theory (e.g., see Bicchi and Bremberg 2016 ; Kustermans 2016 ; Bueger and Gadinger 2018 ). As a pluralistic endeavor, it is open to different theorizations of social change. This plurality of approaches is only partly reflected in the research front on digital diplomacy; its character as a “moving target” tends to hamper theoretical advancements. Some research on digital diplomacy has already shown well-known symptoms of diplomacy being “particularly resistant to theory” ( Der Derian 1987 , 91), by focusing on evaluations or recommendations related to supposedly valuable skills in digital diplomacy rather than analyses of the social and political implications of digitalization in the field of diplomacy. Insights from different practice approaches in IR are sometimes used in an ad-hoc way to advance arguments that, for example, suggest that new technology in digital diplomacy can lead actors to the discovery of new ways of doing things, new goals, and new meanings. In his detailed account of how the emergence of digital communication and social media has affected the practice of public diplomacy, Manor (2019) , for example, makes reference to “front stage” and “backstage” social interaction (using Erving Goffman's terminology), but does not engage with microsociology in the analysis of interactionist change or insights from practice approaches on the performative aspects of diplomacy.

We believe that there is much more to be gained in the field of digital diplomacy from engagement with practice approaches. The changes derived from digitalization that influence the long-standing culture and practice of diplomacy are instructive in probing some of the big questions in IR, not least those centered on the relationship between agents and their environment, in which practices can be analyzed as both signifiers of continuity and carriers of social and political change. We would therefore like to invite scholars in IR and related fields of inquiry to help advance a more reflective research agenda that can address key questions in digital diplomacy drawing on insights from various practice approaches. We propose an initial focus on three sets of interconnected questions that seem particularly fruitful. The first set of questions addresses diplomatic agency: How do encounters with digitalization reshape the diplomatic profession? How do digital diplomats challenge traditional diplomats? A second set of questions probes the spatial and material aspects of the “digital” in diplomacy: What is the relationship between online and offline practices of diplomacy? What practical difference does the absence of face-to-face interactions make? Finally, the third set of questions addresses the extent to which transparency in digital diplomacy creates and connects new kinds of audiences: How do online audiences contribute to enact diplomacy? What are the constitutive effects of online visibility?

This article has a three-fold aim as it seeks to (1) take stock of the research front in practice theory and digital diplomacy; (2) identify where more research is needed to understand the theoretical potential of this intersection; and (3) advance a new research agenda on practice approaches to digital diplomacy. We seek to achieve these aims through a conceptualizing and synthesizing discussion that addresses the risks and opportunities of practice approaches and digital diplomacy in two parts. The first part discusses the pitfalls and promises of practice approaches to digital diplomacy and how these are reflected in recent studies of the field. The second part addresses the methodological opportunities provided by digital observations and discusses the analytical tools offered by practice approaches to IR. We then take steps toward outlining a research agenda, which mainly draws on the pragmatist tradition of practice theory, which can inform analyses of digital diplomacy. We suggest three key dimensions of digital diplomacy in order to address the questions outlined above. We conclude by calling for more systematic interaction between practice approaches to map these practices and how they are transforming diplomacy.

Pitfalls of Using the Practice Idiom without Theorizing Practices

Thus far, research on digital diplomacy has been dominated by studies of the digitalization of public diplomacy, which is sometimes included in the definition of the term “new public diplomacy” ( Melissen 2005 ; Seib 2010 ; Hayden 2012 ; Pamment 2013 , 2016 ; Manor 2019 ). In this body of literature, approaches that use concepts such as “soft power”, “strategic communication”, and “nation branding” have led to an instrumental understanding of how such influence is best projected and how it can be measured. From this perspective, digital diplomacy is often reduced to a tool of soft power aimed at attracting and persuading foreign publics through the promotion of a country's cultural attributes and values ( Nye 1990 , 2004 ). These studies have been well received by practitioners in the field, that is, the diplomats and civil servants who benefit from studies of digital diplomacy practice understood as practical knowledge that can easily be transferred and adopted in and through guidelines. This perspective is not problematic per se and such studies have contributed to an exploration of sites of digital diplomacy, but they have also created some confusion over the promises of a practice approach to digital diplomacy where practice is simply understood as “practical” in direct contrast to “theoretical” (cf. Kustermans 2016 , 178).

We argue that this instrumental view of practice is not totally irrelevant as long as it is connected to social theory insights that can provide an analytical lens on this specific kind of rationality. Best practices on digital diplomacy can have explanatory significance through engagement with logics of action that can isolate the “doing” from its actors and environment. That said, this is where the strictly instrumental and rationalist approach falls short, since the art of diplomacy is not a skillset that can be acquired from a textbook: it requires tacit knowledge. Part of the problem here is that the international spread of digital diplomacy has become a top-down process. The diplomatic corps was not dominated by digital natives but instructed to change and adopt by their governments. In order to capture the influence of change and continuity in international politics, research should focus on the agency of diplomats doing digital diplomacy rather than evaluating policy or communication campaigns. Essentially, we should not assume that anyone can do digital diplomacy after having read a manual of best practice. Moreover, it is also relevant to consider how these new patterns of digital diplomacy output may reproduce or disrupt patriarchal social structures ( Standfield 2020 ).

The interesting practical knowledge of digital diplomacy is rather related to agency and the preconditions of logics of action. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many challenges related to the constraints on converting diplomatic practices that depend on tacit knowledge to the use of digital tools. In April 2020, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, expressed the difficulty of building trust and finding compromise in EU diplomacy when all social interaction takes place by video conference ( Borrell 2020 ). To distinguish them from policy briefs or think tank reports, studies into these processes should strive to better capture how diplomats balance their online and offline environment in practice, and the potential constraints or lack of them. The balancing of online and offline practices can reveal how diplomats overcome constraints in the absence of face-to-face diplomacy and more generally contribute to a mapping of the socialization of diplomatic conduct online and the emergence of digital norms in new habits.

The entanglement with strategic communication, public relations, and marketing in digital diplomacy is also problematic in relation to how practices are often understood as relying on unreflective, automatic, unconscious, and habitual actions. This could be reason enough to push digital diplomacy into strictly rationalist models of diplomacy that view diplomacy as strategic interactions. This, however, would be a lost opportunity for studying an area of diplomacy with patterns of meaningful action that are gradually being naturalized into contemporary diplomacy. In terms of communication strategies, more research is needed to understand why certain strategies are becoming commonsensical while others are being abandoned in favor of stable routines. This is an area where practice approaches could contribute by situating digital diplomacy practice as a process of knowledge construction in which its practitioners are both leading and shaping their practice. The results of practices are therefore found not only in the impact of digital diplomacy, but also in the way that these practices themselves evolve. These patterns of output should be distinguished from strict understandings of the effects or impact of strategic communication on diplomacy. For instance, diplomats’ use of social media can be considered a practice that leads not only to effects of increased visibility and transparency, but also to more contention in diplomacy. To leave the analysis here would in our view be a major pitfall because the aim of practice approaches is to move away from the view of practices only as outcomes in need of an explanation. The relationship between visibility, transparency, and contention in diplomacy is related to the interplay of different levels of diplomatic interaction, different material aspects of communication, and different levels of participation by spectators. The added value of studying practices as they unfold on the ground is therefore that they can and should be studied as both processes and the outcomes of these processes (e.g., see Adler and Pouliot 2011 ).

The materiality of digital diplomacy practice deserves more attention as it poses additional challenges to the value of practice approaches in this field. While one promise of the “practice turn” in IR was to open up new ways of studying the interplay between discourse and behavior, the materiality of practices is often studied in ways that favor one over the other. Digital diplomacy covers the visual practices of diplomacy not only because they are visible as they take place in the open, but also because social media are intrinsically visual ( Manor and Crilley 2018 ). Practice approaches to digital diplomacy have therefore also drawn attention to visual and affective power in IR. The assumption that we live in a “visual age” suggests that visual elements such as images are shaping politics ( Hansen 2011 , 2017 ; Bleiker 2018 ; Adler-Nissen, Andersen and Hansen 2019 ). This is a promising route by which to study the interplay between behavior and discourse in analytically alike routines and ceremonial uses of social media. Once again, however, we foresee some troubling entanglement with strategic communication and practical knowledge when visuality is studied in digital diplomacy. For instance, are we speaking of strategies to generate emotion through visual representation or can we speak of visual or emotional practices of digital diplomacy? Visual representation and emotive storytelling are undoubtedly central to the opportunities presented by the digitalization of public diplomacy ( Manor 2019 ). Social media favors intimacy and personalized communication over information, often through the use of images as cognitive shortcuts to emotions. In addition, Duncombe (2019) has highlighted the emotional dynamics of Twitter as a social media platform that can play a role in the escalation or de-escalation of international conflict. Nonetheless, we still need to further explore what it means when diplomatic actors are producing emotional content. What is the role of the social media platforms in such actors’ ability to communicate emotions and how do their material conditions differ? What practices are visual media reflecting and how are they changing diplomacy?

While highly relevant, attention to the visual elements of digital diplomacy is a potential pitfall for practice approaches when they risk being treated only as techniques or outcomes of digitalization. Framing theory, for instance, tends to overstate the reach and speed of social media instead of paying more attention to how the format itself transforms the practice beyond the traditional frames of mass media. When considered as a trending practice of strategic communication, visual representations are often bundled together with textual communication but fail to recognize that the nonverbal character is often ambiguous. Moreover, visual political communication plays a central role in populist rhetoric. The way that visuals are engaged in digital diplomacy should therefore also be contextualized within a broader societal setting, both as the means and an outcome of adaptation to populist challenges (see Cooper 2019 ; Duncombe 2019 ). Visual analysis should be engaged with the promise of contextualizing the role of visuals to show that videos or images themselves as material objects are not necessarily contentious but may become so when considered as contextual practices ( Hansen 2011 , 2017 ). To treat visuals as merely an effective format of communication is to ignore the fact that the material and symbolic aspects and affordances of social media may also perform authority and knowledge.

Finally, digital diplomacy is simultaneously a front stage for diplomacy as a result of the digitalization of diplomatic practice, a window into a backstage area previously out of public reach, a journal or cumulative record of everyday practices of diplomacy, and a set of tools that facilitate ways of doing diplomacy. All of these forms and functions in which digital diplomacy serves to manifest diplomatic practice depend on interactions between leaders, between diplomats, with civil servants, with news media or with the public. While interaction between the first three groups of actors is a continuation of traditional forms and functions of diplomacy, the visibility, visuality, and interactivity grants a more prominent role to audiences. Thus far, attempts to theorize the role of audiences in IR have often fallen short and analyses tend to stop at elite perceptions of public and emotional engagement. Practice approaches in IR offer no easy remedy for this problem but the digitalization of everyday activities in combination with the accessibility (and normalization) of statements by international leaders such as former US President Donald J. Trump are key aspects of the understanding of audiences in diplomacy. These audiences matter greatly to our understanding of how Twitter might facilitate daily interaction and produce routines, specialized language and ceremonial uses of social media, for instance by creating expectations in which loaded silence and the absence of expected tweets become equally important. Thus, practice approaches offer many, albeit hitherto mainly unexplored, ways to theorize the role of audiences in digital diplomacy.

The Promises of Practice Theory

It has been argued that the main aim of practice theory in IR is to bridge dualist positions primarily within constructivist scholarship on ideational versus material, agency versus structure, and continuity versus change ( McCourt 2016 ). Even though the ongoing revindication of the “practice turn in social theory” (cf. Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and von Savigny 2001 ) seems to have resonated most strongly with constructivist scholars thus far, we adhere to the notion that practice theory in IR is, and needs to be, a pluralist endeavor. Bueger and Gadinger (2018) suggest that “international practice theory” currently cover a wide range of theoretical approaches, including Bourdieusian praxeology (e.g., see Kuus 2014 ), Foucauldian governmentality (e.g., see Merlingen 2006 ), Wenger's notion of communities of practice (e.g., see Bicchi 2011 ), Schatzki's view on situated practical understandings (e.g., see Bremberg 2016 ), and varieties of actor–network theory (ANT) (e.g., see Best and Walters 2013 ). This allows for quite different understandings of social practice, and it is hard to argue that certain understandings are necessarily more useful or valuable than others. This also means that “practice theory” cannot easily be applied to any field of inquiry (such as digital diplomacy) without specifying in some detail what notion(s) of practice the researcher wants to engage with and how to do so.

In general, we think that it is useful to define practices as patterns of meaningful action stemming from emerging nexuses of saying and doing. Practices are both agential and structural, since they are performed through agency but upheld by structure, which in turn ranges from standards of competence to technology. Moreover, some practice approaches emphasize the struggle for recognition as a key driver of political change ( Pouliot 2016 ). Others stress that change is instead an outcome of collective learning processes ( Adler 2019 ). These theoretical positions need not be mutually exclusive but can be combined in different ways ( Adler and Pouliot 2011 ). For example, Adler-Nissen (2016) suggests that we should distinguish between “ordering” and “disordering” practices as a means of understanding how social practices relate to change as well as continuity. Others suggest that in order to analytically capture social and political change, we need to theorize in much more detail how improvisation and creativity can work to reshape practices, and thus specify the conditions under which habitual action is replaced by conscious reflection ( Cornut 2018 ; Hopf 2018 ).

We agree with Pouliot (2014 , 237) that insights from different practice approaches suggest that social causality is limited to specific contexts. At the same time, however, if we assume that practices are patterned meaningful actions, it seems possible that certain practices might travel to other social contexts within the same interpretive boundaries. Practice approaches in IR have for instance proved valuable for better understanding the dynamics of international security, where security practices tend to privilege stability over change but are disrupted and evolving in and through social relations and material conditions in various settings (e.g., see Pouliot 2010a ; Bremberg 2015 ; Bueger 2016 ; Græger 2016 ; Ekengren 2018 ).

We, like many others, argue that diplomacy, as a social field and an object of academic inquiry, is especially well-suited to be explored by practice approaches because it combines path-dependent rituals of communication and representation with adaptive responses to societal change, not least linked to technological developments ( Pouliot and Cornut 2015 ; Bicchi and Bremberg 2016 ). Diplomacy is traditionally defined as the “tactful” conduct of official relations among independent states (e.g., see Satow 1979 [1917] ), although contemporary conceptualizations tend to emphasize that diplomacy is not necessarily only performed by accredited diplomatic agents and that it needs to be understood as an “evolving configuration of social relations” ( Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann 2011 , 528; see also Barston 1997 ; Constantinou and Der Derian 2010 ). Advancing on this understanding, we suggest that diplomacy involves a set of practices that are concerned with both upholding the political status quo and managing social change in IR. For example, Neumann (2012 , 307) suggests that the modern diplomatic practice of permanent representation is spread across Europe from Italian city-states partly as a result of the further weakening of the myth of Christian unity in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, i.e., a process of social transformation facilitated by new technology in the shape of the printing press. Moreover, Guzzini (2013 , 524) argues that modern diplomacy has been heavily influenced by the behavioral repertoire of Court Aristocracy because even as new social groups entered European diplomatic corps by the early twentieth century, they essentially adopted the pre-revolutionary diplomatic habitus, albeit with “some adaptations due to the ‘nationalization’ of politics.”

Among the practices most commonly studied in diplomacy studies, those which result from digitalization and increased interaction with digital media are new in comparison to more established ways of doing diplomacy through bilateral negotiations, multilateral meetings, cultural exchanges, peace mediation, and so on. Digital diplomacy practice, however, consists of transformed traditional practices (digitalization as structural change) and new practices that are emerging as a result of new opportunities and improvisation on the ground (digitalization through participatory culture). This dual process of change seem to resonate with transformations of diplomatic practice in the past and thus makes digital diplomacy a fertile ground on which to explore and develop practice approaches to IR (for a similar suggestion, see Cooper and Cornut 2019 ).

While it is becoming more common to adopt a macro understanding of the digitalization of politics (and its opportunities and challenges), the changes brought about by the Internet, and social media in particular, were noticeable first “on the ground”. The field of digital politics emerged rapidly but IR scholars were relative latecomers, in part because of the challenges of bringing the structural aspects of new media into theory ( Jackson 2018 ). Holmes (2015) was one of the first proponents of a practice approach to digital diplomacy. He argued that the potential lay in the ability to explain the role of digital diplomacy in the management of international change. Rather than departing from digitalization as a process of change, he considered the role that digital diplomacy could play in two types of changes in the international system: top-down exogenous shocks and bottom-up incremental endogenous shifts. Diplomacy constitutes the international practices of managing these two types of change through mentoring or responses such as adaptation or reaction. In his view, digital diplomacy resulted from the bottom-up incremental endogenous shift where practices such as gathering and analyzing information online, negotiating using video-conference tools or listening to the public discourse on the ground, constituted types of diplomatic response.

This view of digital diplomacy as a set of international practices that develop on the ground represented the early understanding of the Internet as a facilitator of transparency, visibility, and connectedness in international politics. In fact, a decade ago, digital diplomacy was first and foremost synonymous with public diplomacy and understood as practices of listening and conversing online with foreign publics or the domestic public on the subject of foreign policy ( Melissen 2005 ; Seib 2010 ). These practices were thought to facilitate the management of international change through the opportunities for connectedness and for speedy access to information brought about by the Internet. This bottom-up view of digitalization was associated with a notion of democratization of diplomacy, influenced by the increased inclusion of non-state actors, the rise of new virtual communities, and the growing relevance of freedom of information legislation brought about in the domain of IR by the Internet ( Archetti 2012 , 183).

Holmes (2015) sought to expand the understanding of practices influenced by digitalization to include negotiations and changes to face-to-face diplomacy, predicting that exogenous shocks such as international crises would increasingly be managed using digital tools. These predictions appear to reflect current developments. While face-to-face diplomacy remains the cornerstone of international politics, digital tools are increasingly being engaged to complement, assist or even substitute face-to-face diplomacy during unexpected events. Digital diplomacy was engaged during the nuclear negotiations with Iran in 2013–2015 ( Seib 2016 ; Duncombe 2017 ) and in the aftermath of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 ( Bjola and Pamment 2016 ), and later, during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Bramsen and Hagemann 2021 ). In the spring of 2020, a number of virtual high-level meetings were conducted using videoconferencing tools by the leaders of the G7, the G20, the United Nations, and the European Union ( Perrett 2020 ). By April 2020, European diplomats were speaking out about the constraints of operating online, such as the inability to “read a room” or engage in corridor diplomacy in order to reach consensus on sensitive issues ( Barigazzi, de la Baume, and Herszenhorn 2020 ; Heath 2020 ). These comments seem to reflect what have previously been identified as the problems of fostering relationships and signaling intentions when substituting digital tools for personal social interaction ( Holmes 2015 ).

Today, ministries of foreign affairs and embassies have guidelines on how to use social media for crisis communication and public outreach in unforeseen circumstances, but these routines have evolved gradually and proved effective to varying degrees. In addition, social media outlets—mainly Twitter—are now commonly used in communications between states and have become at least to some extent accepted channels of representation. They might even facilitate interpersonal contact that would otherwise not be possible. Digitalization has thus greatly influenced and even transformed diplomatic practice in ways that often challenge traditional protocol. Duncombe (2017 , 555–60) for instance has shown how social media are employed in the practice of interstate dialogue. Twitter is a new technological platform for dialogue but its structure and formatting logic constrains and transforms practices such as the digital form of diplomatic signaling. When interstate dialogue is practiced on Twitter, the presence of an international audience changes the expectations of the performances of state actors. Using the case of Iran–US relations during the negotiations on the Iran nuclear agreement, Duncombe showed how Twitter provided Iran with new ways to signal support for the negotiations. Her study demonstrates how Twitter can shape, carry, and reflect states’ struggles for recognition, and thereby legitimize political opportunities for change. Digital diplomacy practice, in this case interstate dialogue on Twitter, can thus lead to new conditions for, and new means and forms of interaction and outcomes in diplomacy, which are to a large extent visible to the public. As Iran–US relations became tense again under the Trump administration, it is therefore understandable that analysts turned to Twitter to observe signs of change, in particular following the Soelimani strike and the subsequent accidental shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in Teheran in January 2020. This time, social media was used to reduce tensions between the United States and Iran. While the hashtag #worldwar3 was trending in public discourse on Twitter, state officials and world leaders primarily used the channel to signal de-escalation. 1 Another similar example is provided in Cooper and Cornut's analysis of US Ambassador Michael McFaul's use of Twitter as a means to reach out to Russian citizens in the midst of deteriorating Russia–US relations ( Cooper and Cornut 2019 , 314). Thus far, some of these actions appear to have been sporadic, but they can be said to constitute emerging practices in the sense that they illustrate what can be done ( Pouliot 2010a ).

Exogenous shock in the diplomatic community has also led to an increased need to understand the structural aspects of new media; how digitalization has not just led to new tools and political artifacts, but also influenced power relations in international politics. The rise of digital disinformation and cybersecurity threats has forced states and international organizations to rethink the role of digital diplomacy ( Bjola and Pamment 2016 ; Duncombe 2018 ; Ördén 2018 ; Hedling 2021 ). Disinformation, or the deliberate use of false information to deceive, mislead, and confuse, is now a well-known aspect of planning and executing a state's digital communication strategy. While the digitalization of public diplomacy has meant a greater emphasis on diplomatic relationships with the public, both foreign and domestic, digital disinformation has emerged as the “dark side of digital diplomacy” ( Bjola and Pamment 2018 ). The threat of digital disinformation in addition to other areas of cybersecurity threat effectively ended the “age of innocence” in digital diplomacy debates. In addition to sophisticated and creative communication strategies, diplomacy is now being increasingly transformed by its adaptation to technological advances, using algorithms and machine learning to balance the positive aspects of digitalization with its vulnerabilities ( Riordan 2019 ). The realization that digital tools are not just available for promotional purposes has increased levels of competition in digital diplomacy. States and even individual diplomats that fare poorly in the online world of diplomacy can suffer consequences in the offline world. In addition, global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic enhance the practicality of using digital tools in diplomacy. While online negotiations may be less than optimal, a crisis of such magnitude can often spur the emergence of alternative practices. For all these reasons, digital diplomacy can no longer be seen as optional in the diplomatic repertoire.

Consequently, digitalization has both enabled a more participatory culture of diplomacy and restructured patterns of communication and representation. The state of digital diplomacy practices, such as Twitter messaging or information gathering online, generally reflects both these characteristics. They are adaptations of ways of doing things but have to some degree also developed in their local context, depending on the actors that engage with digital media and the opportunities and challenges they encounter. Despite the fact that digital diplomacy is becoming a set of recognizable practices, it is still to a large extent an explorative and experimental area of diplomatic practice. Thus, its normative and behavioral underpinnings are shaped by the interplay between the host diplomatic institution and the opportunities and constraints offered by digital society in a specific political context. The new norms and behaviors that have emerged through the establishment of digital diplomacy must therefore be understood in the light of how political practices converge with digital society. This is why we argue that practice approaches are well-suited to furthering the conceptual understanding of digital diplomacy. The challenge to this field of inquiry is therefore to carefully and systematically map the practices of digital diplomacy alongside traditional practices of face-to-face diplomacy while acknowledging that both dimensions will continue to evolve.

The Methodological Opportunities of Digital Observations

Diplomacy studies that draw on practice approaches often seek inspiration from the methodological tradition in social science of using inductive insights into lived experiences. Such insights also carry weight for studies of digital diplomacy. When departing from insights from various practice approaches, it is often assumed that the analytical process involves tracing the background knowledge and tacit understandings of those who are “doing diplomacy”. This includes the intersubjective rules and resources that are considered imperative for the performance of diplomatic practices such as negotiation and representation (e.g., see Pouliot 2008 ; Adler-Nissen 2014 ; Bueger 2014 ). Practice approaches favor publicly accessible performances over private mental states, which in effect treats practices as “raw data” ( Andersen and Neumann 2012 ). In many ways, digital diplomacy is therefore an area of diplomatic practice that is especially well-suited to practice approaches, because it departs from the notion of subtle change (digital transformation) where practices are to some extent visible and observable. When diplomats use social media to signal or report during negotiations, the interactions that follow, or at least those which take place online, can be observed. Other practices in this group that do not take place in public, such as WhatsApp conversations, videoconferencing or using word processing to negotiate agreements, may still be observable because they are often assumed to be less sensitive than habits of mediation or decision-making, and are therefore more likely to be studied through practice-favored methodologies.

The view of digital diplomacy as experimental and thus characterized by high degrees of risk-taking has mostly been explored in relation to the specific logic of social media, where speed and reach are sometimes favored over accuracy, and mistakes are increasingly perceived as short-lived ( Manor 2019 , 33). However, digital diplomacy is also an experimental practice in broader terms. When in 2017, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced the world's first “tech ambassador” with a global mandate and physical presence in three time zones (Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Copenhagen), they said that they did not know exactly what the goal was or what they were going to do. The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that it was facing the future and was openly prepared to experiment in the development of diplomacy ( Jacobsen 2017 ). Since then, the Danish ambassador and his team have been learning by doing, very much in line with the pragmatist view of a “hands on” approach to learning through creative experiment (cf. Dewey 1929 ). Diplomatic representation to the tech industry also illustrates the shifting power relations in a digital society where tech companies rather than state actors are acknowledged partners in diplomatic crises. In addition, this illustrates an acceptance of the need to learn by doing in order to keep up with societal developments. The fact that the Danish ambassador's presence in Silicon Valley can and has been used in unanticipated situations reflects how improvisation in specific cases is constitutive of the “big picture” in international politics ( Cornut 2018 ). 2 While diplomatic representation to the tech industry appears to be spreading (Australia and France now also have “cyber ambassadors”), we do not know to what extent this practice reflects a fundamental shift in diplomacy. Adding this capacity to diplomatic institutions could, eventually, enhance the role of technology in diplomatic practice. However, tech ambassadors could also remain a rare breed of tech savvy individuals operating on the margins of conventional diplomacy. Here, studying practices of digital diplomacy holds the promise of helping us better understand if and how new practices go from being self-ascribed as experimental to becoming self-evident, normal ways of doing things (cf. Hopf 2018 ).

Thus, practices can and should be studied through multiple methods of data collection. They can be seen, talked about or read, which in turn encourages a combination or mix of methods of collecting empirical material. The favored method thus far for IR researchers who adhere to practice approaches has been qualitative interviewing ( Pouliot and Cornut 2015 ; Adler-Nissen 2016 ; Bicchi and Bremberg 2016 ). Such interviews are often unstructured or semi-structured to account for the informants’ descriptions of how they go about their business. While elite interviews appear to be the most common approach, Pouliot (2014 , 245) considers ethnographic participant observation to be the best method for embedding practices in their social context. Indeed, ethnography is conceived as the holy grail of studying practices of diplomacy ( Neumann 2012 ; Kuus 2014 ; Marsden, Ibañez-Tirado, and Henig 2016 ). The assumption is that observations of how practitioners do politics, preferably in combination with direct and unfiltered accounts, ideally enable the researcher to understand how and why agents act, behave, think, and feel (see Pouliot 2010a ). In reality, however, such access is rarely possible.

We argue that digital diplomacy is particularly interesting to practice approaches in IR because it involves practices that can be observed to a better extent than many other diplomatic practices. This is linked to the transparency of the Internet, where for instance communication practices are highly visible, as well as the relative or perceived neutrality of technology compared to other elements of diplomacy. It is arguably less likely that a researcher would be allowed to observe a high-stakes negotiation than the less secretive ways of updating a social media account. While the content of online group discussions may be subject to secrecy regulations, it is not impossible for researchers to gain access to the ways in which such communication technologies are being used. For instance, in their empirically rich account of track-change diplomacy, Adler-Nissen and Drieschova (2019) draw on participant observations made through access to a large number of documents on draft legislation circulated for the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper), which negotiates in preparation for the meetings of the EU Council of Ministers. Access to these documents enabled the researchers to see how word processing software (specifically the track-change function) plays an instrumental part in the negotiation of political agreements. While these practices were contentious and reflected struggles for power, the fact that they could be “seen” rather than “talked about” was a probable factor in the successful methodology of the study.

The visibility of digital diplomacy also opens up avenues for promising research designs where interviews can be combined with observation. In addition to gaining access to otherwise sensitive negotiation documents, some digital diplomacy practice can be seen online and therefore scraped to enable large- N investigations and network analyses. The field also offers numerous opportunities for visual analysis that can reveal new dimensions of negotiations and signaling in diplomacy ( Duncombe 2017 ). To date, there have been no known studies of digital diplomacy using netnography, in the strict sense of the term. Netnography or “virtual ethnography” is the adaptation of ethnography to the digital world. It has been argued that netnography offers unobtrusive and non-influencing monitoring of the communication and interaction of online usage behavior, which is to some extent a contradiction of its ethnographic roots ( Kozinets 2010 ). However, social movement and youth studies have produced interesting results on online/offline relationships using netnographic approaches ( Wilson 2016 ; Barisione, Michailidou, and Airoldi 2019 ). While diplomacy is a formal practice and therefore less inclined to the type of mobilizing behavior that might be expected from social movements, netnography holds the promise of reaching otherwise elusive audiences for digital diplomacy. The increased role of the public in international politics is a common point of departure in studies of new media in IR, but most studies have been limited to including the perceptions of audiences. Social media is believed to emotionally engage and its impact is measured in terms of likes, reposts, and viewing time. This perceived audience is a source of legitimacy that has increased the stakes when it comes to digitalizing diplomacy. Here, practice approaches have a central role to play in theorizing the role of the audience as both spectator and participant in the practice of digital diplomacy. Studying audiences is methodologically challenging but methods such as netnography offer opportunities to overcome the focus on perception or the quantification of audiences’ engagement to understand their relational role in new practices of international politics.

While we think that the opportunities outweigh the methodological problems, there are many questions to keep in mind in taking a practice approach to digital diplomacy. These questions invoke the urgency of including theorizations of the microdynamics of social life ( Goffman 1959 ). For instance, technology enables stage management, in the sense that diplomatic actors can project a persona online. At the same time, managing a role is more difficult in a real-time drama where there is no equivalent to the backstage sphere and still an offline persona to manage at the same time. While at the outset new media opportunities might be assumed to foster impression management, a role must resonate with the expectations of an audience. It is therefore possible that the online/offline dimension might lead to more unfiltered accounts. The risk of not resonating with the offline persona endangers the accumulation of support from the following audience. Furthermore, a “tech ambassador” is a persona and a diplomatic signal of engagement that challenges previous role conceptions in diplomatic practice. For one, the fact that the ambassador has a global mandate differs from the traditional role of ambassadors as local envoys (even though it follows the state practice of appointing ambassadors-at-large or special envoys). This signals that the acknowledgement of co-presence with tech companies has led to changes in both the role and the script that future ambassadors will perform. To think of sector ambassadors with global mandates only in terms of change, however, would be to miss how this development also signals continuity. For example, corporate diplomacy is a phenomenon that has its roots in the early modern world ( van Meersbergen 2017 ). There are plenty of opportunities to explore how change and continuity in the social interactions of diplomacy are currently unfolding and practice approaches offer ways to think about relevant methods for doing so.

Against the backdrop of the promises and opportunities of practice approaches to digital diplomacy, we suggest ways to develop a research agenda. Efforts to understand digital diplomacy have sometimes emphasized change at the expense of continuity. However, we would like to stress the need to consider digital diplomatic practice as an interplay between continuity and change in this field. This is particularly important if digital diplomacy is viewed as more than a subset of diplomacy. If anything, previous research demonstrates that digital diplomacy practices are increasingly emerging alongside other practices in multiple sites of diplomacy. The breadth of digitalization highlights how digital diplomacy contains more than changes in diplomatic communication. It has led to transformations in both the structural conditions for diplomacy and the agency and working routines of diplomacy on the ground. Therefore, digital diplomacy should be understood as an emergent political practice in increasingly digitalizing societies.

In our view, a particularly useful way of theorizing change and continuity in digital diplomatic practice draws on pragmatist notions of human action ( Whitford 2002 ; Kratochwil 2011 ; Frankel Pratt 2016 ). The pragmatist view on practice is well in line with the practice approaches developed by Wenger and Schatzki, but that does not mean that we do not find insights from for instance Bourdieu to be useful as well (see above). The key insight here, however, is that there is an alternation between habitual and creative actions because social practices do not completely specify the appropriate or “natural” code of conduct. There is always some “room for manoeuvre”, meaning that there might be more than one course of action that is perceived to be naturally appropriate in a given situation; and that in situations that do not correspond to what actors are normally faced with, they are often forced to come up with their new ways of doing things ( Gross 2009 ). In line with this pragmatist-inspired understanding of social practices, political change can be thought of in both incremental and more radical terms.

It is in a local context that we can observe the interaction between elements of change and the practices that they reproduce. Since practices are both general and contextually embedded, conceptualizations that do not take account of the social context and the political prerequisites of diplomacy will fall short in analytical terms and remain centered on instrumental migration to the digital sphere. A contextual understanding of diplomacy as political practice, however, does not mean that more general conceptualizations are ruled out. Rather, it is through social causality in a local context that we can hope to generate analytically general insights ( Pouliot 2014 ). In our view, the aim of research that draws on practice approaches must therefore be to strike a balance between thick description and conceptual abstraction.

In the table below, we suggest three areas where practice approaches can collectively contribute to furthering our understanding of digital diplomacy and where we see opportunities for theoretical advancement. First, we identify the questions of diplomatic agency at stake in digital diplomacy and discuss the evolving “habitus” of diplomats in the digital age. Second, we discuss the issue of space and the materiality of new technology where the interrelations between saying and doing become visible online. Finally, we consider the new role of audiences for digital diplomacy and how to theorize their role in the practices they observe, expect, react to, engage with or ignore. The practice approaches that we engage with here are not meant to be understood as exhaustive, and the main purpose of this agenda is to encourage more collective reflection as we imagine that the categories in the table could be complemented with more avenues for future research ( Table 1 ).

Diplomatic Agency

Digital diplomacy depends on new communication and technical skills. While communication is a cornerstone of diplomacy, the codes, habits, and norms of communication online differ from both the formal and the informal diplomatic communications that take place behind closed doors. Mastering the formatting logic of software, the navigation of big data and management of relationships with tech companies have become new tasks of diplomacy ( Riordan 2019 ). This has led to a need for diplomatic organizations not only to learn new skills, but also to recruit new competences. In general terms, diplomatic organizations have internalized strategic communication to a greater extent than before, leading to an increased number of professional communicators in diplomatic organizations—a different professional role to diplomats as communicators. This is partly a result of the embrace of social media, but it also reflects the shift toward more proactive news media relations that began before the emergence of social networks online ( Pamment 2016 ). Yet, a majority of these practices reflect a mere migration of the conventional broadcast mode of communication. For example, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ use of social media may not be indicative of substantial change. Thus far, the need for communicators and training resources does not appear to have had an impact on the selection of new diplomats, but it is likely that this development will eventually challenge longstanding criteria for “good candidates” for diplomatic training. 3 As technology gradually takes over the role of rational analysis, future diplomats may be shaped by the dependence on machines and artificial intelligence. Embassies are now expected to perform local online data analysis, and digital disinformation is both a domestic and an international problem for the public diplomacy of states and organizations. Diplomatic organizations today are undergoing a process of professionalization of these skills, and digital diplomacy is therefore concerned with changes in diplomatic agency.

In Bourdieu's (1990) practice approach to agency, habitus corresponds to agents’ dispositions as a result of lived experiences and socialization. According to Bourdieu, practices change because of improvisations that come naturally to the actors that perform them. Hence, digitalization changes the habitus of diplomats because they naturally adapt to new conditions and new tools. Bourdieu's approach to practice has been criticized because it tends to exclude the role of reflection and learning (e.g., see Adler 2019 ). While the absence of reflection has sometimes been notable in practices of digital diplomacy (see below), we argue that learning (or lack thereof) is central to understanding the changes in diplomatic agency brought about by digitalization. Indeed, other practice approaches, such as building on pragmatism, have developed the role of reflection and learning and connected these dimensions to the process through which actions become patterned ( Kustermans 2016 ; Bueger and Gadinger 2018 ). In the context of digital diplomacy, the fact that habitus is changed not only through new practices, but also through the influx of new agents and new situations stress the need to pay more attention to diplomatic agency (cf. Bicchi and Bremberg 2016 ). Changes in agency therefore also refer to the diversification of social background in diplomacy, for instance through the increase of women, and digitalization may intersect with gradual change in gendered practices (cf. Standfield 2020 ).

We imagine that these encounters with digitalization shape and will continue to reshape the diplomatic profession and we encourage studies that can map and offer analyses across different sites of transformation. The influx of communicators are only one aspect of how new demands for digital skills are changing diplomacy from within ( Hedling 2021 ). Other fertile grounds for exploration can for instance be located in new attempts to shape digital strategies, practices of cyber security, and experimentation with artificial intelligence. These sites involve a multitude of actors that engage in processes of shared learning by gradually establishing ways of doing things through their everyday interactions. Practice approaches inspired by the work of Wenger could offer insights into how digital transformation shapes and reshapes communities of practice around these sites (cf. Bremberg 2016 ).

Even though diplomacy is commonly understood as first and foremost about negotiation and representation among state officials (e.g., Satow 1917/1979 ; Barston 1997 ; Berridge 2010 ), the scope of diplomatic practices cannot be limited to actions that are performed by national diplomats. To study digital diplomacy is also to consider diplomatic practices conducted by agents from outside the field of accredited diplomatic organizations. Conveying a diplomatic message through visibility and reach is increasingly considered an act of diplomacy. An abundance of new media opportunities has allowed famous and highly visible individuals to gain access to large international audiences in order to conduct celebrity diplomacy ( Wheeler 2013 ; Bergman Rosamond 2016 ). As noted above, corporate diplomacy is a longstanding practice, but in the digital age it has come to include tech companies whose concentration of power in international politics is still relatively under-researched and poorly understood. Diplomatic agency is also expanded through the new role of audiences as both spectators of and participants in diplomacy. For instance, Golovschenko, Hartmann, and Adler-Nissen (2018) have studied citizens as curators of digital disinformation. Digital disinformation and efforts aimed at countering it are now commonly considered practices of digital diplomacy. In some ways, when citizens become interlocutors and curators of digital information online, they challenge conceptions of diplomatic agency by participating and shaping social exchanges rather than merely acting as audiences of communication. Diplomacy is then involved in a process that links performers and audiences in ways that should be of interest to interventions from both the sociology of networks, by forming “actants”—the relational source of action in ANT ( Latour 1996/1990 ), and the sociology of action by linking agency and structural conditions.

Discussions on media diplomacy have debated the role of the news media. News media actors are rarely understood as diplomatic actors precisely because they are still often seen as a medium of communication. Social media instead enables diplomatic actors to bypass the news media and engage directly with audiences. When these audiences actively participate in the activities that define a practice of digital diplomacy, such as digital disinformation, it could be argued that they do so with agency, that is, they actively participate in the making of diplomatic practices. We envision that engagement with ANT could produce innovative ways of approaching the general expansion of agency in diplomacy through in-depth analysis of the local unfolding of actants, for instance, in relation to the role of algorithms and networks in diplomatic use of social media.

The value of practice approaches in relation to digital diplomacy is to keep role conceptions as open questions and seek to understand how “traditional” and “non-traditional” diplomatic agents become part of an evolving configuration of social relations ( Constantinou and Der Derian 2010 ; Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann 2011 ). It is in this interplay between traditional and non-traditional diplomatic agents that digital diplomacy has emerged as a practice that can be distinguished from online behavior or digital action through the material aspect of doing diplomacy. The struggle for recognition as competent diplomatic performers is a key element in this process, and as such the emergence of digital diplomacy can be seen as part of the larger processes of reconfiguring diplomacy as a social institution currently being explored by IR scholars (e.g., see Benson-Rea and Shore 2012 ; Cooper, Heine, and Thakur 2013 ; Kuus 2014 ; Pouliot 2016 ). This research agenda also stresses the need to explore agency as an empirical phenomenon in IR ( Braun, Schindler, and Wille 2018 ). Digitalization also highlights the difference and possible tensions between the analytical focus on organizational agency and individual agency in the field of diplomacy. In order to make insightful contributions to this agenda, we argue that studies of digital diplomacy should further the understanding of different types of diplomatic agency at stake and strive to pinpoint the transformations of diplomatic agency in practices of digital diplomacy.

Space and Materiality of New Technology

The “digital” in digital diplomacy refers to both space—virtual space online or sectorial space such as the tech industry—and materiality, as conditions or objects of communication. In addition, the social science research on digital media now often ascribes agency through performativity to new technology, or at least to algorithms and their ability to shape social, political, and economic life ( Kitchin 2017 ; Wilcox 2017 ).

This presents conceptual challenges, as studies often engage several of these dimensions at the same time. A common approach is to consider the digital as a structural process and digitalization as enabling and constraining diplomatic practice. However, the materiality of technology may also confine the digital to “materials of practice”, tools of automation or dissemination ( Pouliot 2010b ), affordances ( Adler-Nissen and Drieschova 2019 ) or even props used to perform or enhance the presentation of the self ( Goffman 1959 ; Aggestam and Hedling 2020 ). This multitude of dimensions and levels, however, also offer opportunities for studying practices of digital diplomacy, where the spatial and material aspects always interact to some degree. For instance, studies following the tradition of symbolic interactionism can explore social media as a stage on which interesting performances of diplomacy take place but still maintain the materiality of Twitter in such a performance, by emphasizing the personal or intimate tone it allows. For instance, the processes in which social media reshapes expectations of diplomatic rituals are instrumental to grasp changes to “interaction orders” ( Goffman 1959 ). Such processes of connection and engagement also highlight the ways in which technology assists the embodiment of diplomatic roles and practices, such as ambassadorship or negotiation through emotions such as trust or esteem. However, social media platforms lend themselves to emotional engagement in different ways through their specific affordances, that is, what they allow their users to do ( Bucher and Helmond 2018 ). Twitter, Weibo, Facebook, and Instagram are, for instance, different socio-technological environments and may therefore afford their users different kinds of practice. The way that these affordances allow for new practices to transgress the boundaries between the private and the public may also change expectations of (gendered) intimacy in diplomacy ( Standfield 2020 ). Digital media therefore have both embodied and embodying effects on everyday practices of diplomacy and we suggest that more research is aimed toward capturing how spatial and material aspects condition new possibilities for practical change in diplomacy.

Furthermore, the Internet enables both material connections (new communication channels) and the connection of materials (technologies as political artifacts) that can be circulated with increasing ease, speed, and reach. In our view, this multidimensionality belongs at the center of practice approaches to digital diplomacy because it relates to how saying and doing interrelate in these practices; that is, how verbal, scripted and told, and non-verbal, shown and performed acts are enmeshed within each other. In addition, using social media for the purpose of diplomatic signaling or a word processing program for the purpose of negotiating agreements are patterns of meaningful action that use technologies (both as space of communication and as material artifacts) to produce material outcomes while at the same time leading to changes in behavior and practical dispositions. It is therefore relevant to maintain an analytical distinction between space and materiality of new technology in order to explore their functions in practices of digital diplomacy.

For these reasons, the process of digitalization requires careful contextual understanding that accounts not only for how the process unfolds locally, but also for the hierarchical order of different levels of entanglement with new technology. The hierarchy of dimensions of change matters because it reflects directions of power. For instance, the way that the Internet facilitates communication through speed, reach, and representation often leads to a top-down view of how digitalization structures diplomatic communication through its opportunities for cognitive shortcuts or visual elements that reproduce power relations and hegemonic norms (e.g., United States’ soft power diffusion). The way in which technological affordances through algorithms, software or applications change the ways in which information is shared, exchanged or negotiated, however, instead suggests a bottom-up direction of how practices produce and reproduce power. Adaption to these practices can be a result of exogenous shocks such as pandemics, cyberattacks or digital disinformation campaigns. The digitalization of diplomacy means that these processes of change in diplomatic contexts take place simultaneously. Attention to local context might tell us whether adaptation from above or exploration on the ground are driving digitalization processes at different moments in time, which is often a reflection of the offline dimensions of local diplomatic practice. For instance, in a recent contribution, Bramsen and Hagemann (2021) offer a micro-sociological analysis of the effects of virtual peace mediation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The changing conditions for face-to-face diplomacy during the pandemic offer ample opportunity to conduct similar studies across diplomatic contexts.

This discussion becomes even more relevant when studies on digital diplomacy bring in assumptions from ANT (e.g., Archetti 2012 ; Adler-Nissen and Drieschova 2019 ). The added value of ANT appears to be the ability to extend the relational approach of practice approaches to non-human entities such as technology, while opening up the possibility of symmetry between human and non-human actors in social practices. Hence, agency is conceived as a relational effect ( Braun, Schindler, and Wille 2018 ). It is therefore central to connect agency to practices in ways that the relationship with technology leads to practices that would otherwise not exist in any meaningful way. This does not necessarily imply that we need to adhere to post-humanist ideas, because in our view it is not the agency of technology per se that is of interest but rather how technology embeds, conditions, and embodies diplomatic agency. However, we believe that this is a debate to which studies of digital diplomacy, explicitly drawing on insights from ANT and other practice approaches, might be able to make useful contributions.

For these reasons, we encourage studies that engage with key questions of online and offline practices of diplomacy and confront the practical differences between spaces and materials of diplomacy. While we imagine that many directions of inquiry can result from these questions, we suggest that a common objective will be to offer analyses of how digital transformations become possible in their local contexts and how they reproduce or challenge traditional (offline) modes of diplomacy. As we have noted, several practice approaches could offer pathways for such analyses, we point to Schatzki's understanding of situated practical understandings as a point of departure to capture local changes in “good practice”. Furthermore, Schatzki's engagement with materiality may offer pathways to consider how and to what effect the material properties of the digital world are implicated in the digitalization of diplomacy (e.g., see Schatzki 2019 ).

Audiences have thus far not been studied to any large extent in research on digital diplomacy. This is probably a reflection of both theoretical and methodological challenges. IR scholars are not used to conceptualizing the audiences for international politics because their empowered role is a relatively new development. In the broader research field of new media in IR, audiences are increasingly being included in the theorization of, for instance, the role of media in war and conflict ( Der Derian 2009 ; Hoskins and O'Loughlin 2015 ; Pantti 2016 ; Jackson 2018 ; Merrin 2018 ; Miskimmon, O'Loughlin, and Roselle 2018 ). The point of departure here is that digital media have both expanded and diversified the audiences for war and conflict. There is a similar assumption in studies on digital diplomacy that diplomats and diplomatic organizations do digital diplomacy to a large extent because of the expansion and diversification of international audiences. Audiences have expanded in terms of both reach and speed, which has led to new opportunities for and constraints on diplomacy, not least when it comes to generating and upholding public legitimacy. Audiences have become more fragmented and must therefore be engaged with differently, depending on the diplomatic goals at stake. At the same time, the traditional boundaries between national audiences have eroded in the online sphere, making it more difficult to appropriate messages. In addition, there is growing competition for audiences online as a growing number of actors look to shape online discussions. The trending topic of digital disinformation further illustrates how audiences are susceptible to such influences.

The relative neglect of the role of audiences in studies on digital diplomacy calls for relational approaches because traditional communication theories fail to grasp the “newness” of digital media due to their inability to conceptualize the changing role of audiences. The common view of the communication process as unidirectional leads to difficulties in accounting for the agency of audiences beyond two-way communication attempts at “listening.” Audiences for digital diplomacy do more than produce public discourse for diplomats to listen to; however, they are both objects and subjects in the practices of digital diplomacy. In less obvious ways, audiences also condition the use of emotional cues and images in social media through their perceived and actual engagement. The affordances offered by social media platforms condition the ways in which audiences can be reached and engaged by such elements. The power and authority that these elements perform depend on their resonance with an audience. Therefore, knowing whether, how, or why audiences respond to images (and whether or not the response was intended by its disseminator) is an essential practical understanding to grasp the influence of visual and affective artifacts. Furthermore, the focus on the perceived roles of the audience has seemingly led to an overstatement of public interest in digital diplomacy. While live videos and curated content are increasingly valued practices of digital diplomacy among states’ ministries and embassies as well as international organizations, the number of viewers and their level of engagement is often modest, at best ( Hedling 2020 ). It would therefore also be valuable to include the influence of lack of interest or even ignorance among audiences in the understanding of how these practices evolve.

At first glance, practice approaches may seem ill-suited to address this challenge, but all social performances, relationships or processes of emancipation depend on receivers, listeners, spectators, publics or “others”—all audiences in some sense. This is perhaps most explicit not only in analyses of social interaction that use stage-related metaphors ( Goffman 1959 ), but also in attempts to theorize democracy, for instance in Dewey's seminal work on the political public ( Dewey 1927 ). The role of audiences as a site of tension between practice approaches that tend to disregard, underestimate or neglect audiences is challenged by the digital sphere in which social resonance is expanded in terms of scale and speed. Audiences are at the same time both closer (e.g., the intimacy of social media) and more distant (e.g., big data as raw material) ( Couldry and Yu 2018 ). Apart from early anticipation of digital diplomacy as a process that might lead to increased democratization of diplomacy, the importance of studying public participation in the construction of both knowledge and everyday habits remains central to the challenges facing global governance today. We envision that both Goffman's symbolic interactionism and Dewey's work on the political role of the public are instructive to analyzing key changes in the information environment. For instance, how do digital audiences contribute to negotiate the success or failure of diplomacy? More attention to the active role of spectatorship in both of these traditions could contribute to enhance the theorizing of audiences in IR.

The methodological challenge for students of IR is of course how to study audiences, how to collect meaningful samples, and how to analyze digital behavior. We think that much would be gained if scholars drawing on insights from practice approaches in the study of digital diplomacy should further explore the opportunities for conducting observations of audiences online. In order to do so successfully, however, audiences will need to be brought into the understanding of what constitutes digital diplomacy practice more systematically. In this mission, we believe scholars drawing on practice approaches to study digital diplomacy can push their insights in other directions and explore new ways of conceptualizing audiences in comparison to what has been accomplished up until this point.

In this article, we have suggested that practice approaches offer opportunities for theoretical and methodological advancement in the field of digital diplomacy. We argue that digital diplomacy provides opportunities to study the interplay between continuity and change in international politics, and that recent studies in this field have demonstrated the promise of using practice-oriented approaches. As digital diplomacy becomes an established international practice, we also argue that it is important to resist conceptualizing it merely as a subfield of diplomacy and instead favor integrating its premises with theories of IR. Digital diplomacy today is much more than world leaders’ use of Twitter. It is a fundamental dimension of contemporary international politics. The article has sought to demonstrate the opportunities that digital diplomacy opens up for the further development of practice approaches in IR. The visibility, transparency, and visuality of digital media provide ways to observe new practices as they unfold. In order to make meaningful contributions to the intersection of digital diplomacy and practice theory in IR, we call for a more systematic research agenda. By taking stock of the promises, opportunities, and pitfalls of existing digital diplomacy research, we highlight three central areas for fruitful cross-fertilization with different versions of practice approaches that are already being explored by IR scholars.

First, digitalization has already led to changes in diplomatic agency in the sense of changing expectations of both what counts as diplomatic action and who counts as a diplomatic actor. These changes highlight the evolving interaction between “traditional” and “non-traditional” diplomatic agents and that digital diplomacy has emerged as a practice that is distinguished from online behavior or digital action through the material aspect of doing diplomacy. Digital diplomacy can thus be seen as part of the larger process of reconfiguring diplomacy as a social institution. Several recent studies draw on insights from practice theory in IR to make important contributions to our understanding of how digitalization changes diplomatic agency. In order to advance the research agenda, however, we stress the need to further specify how different types of agency are made possible in and through the emerging practice of digital diplomacy, and in so doing to get a better grasp of the stakes involved for those who are actually doing that digital diplomacy. The different understandings of what constitutes agency and the relationship to structural conditions can assist in exploring the multiplicity of agency change.

Second, there is complexity in the spatial and material aspects of “the digital” that requires careful distinction and more research in order to fully grasp how digitalization influences diplomatic practices. Technologies assist the embodiment and enacting of diplomacy in different ways. They may also constrain its effectiveness. Attempts to carry on diplomacy “as usual” during the COVID-19 pandemic have illustrated how digital tools can overcome spatial obstacles but still fall short of delivering the expected outcomes in the absence of physical, interpersonal, and situated rituals. Lessons from digital adaptation at moments of disruption are therefore valuable to advance our understanding of which digital diplomatic practices eventually become commonsensical while others are gradually abandoned. In addition, the different affordances of social media platforms and the varying outcomes produced by digital diplomacy practice suggest that we have more to learn from the socio-technological environments in which diplomacy now also takes place. We therefore call for the careful treatment of the digital as a space, material resource, and means of agency.

Finally, practice approaches are challenged by the empowered role of audiences in international politics and how they increasingly affect and constitute aspects of the everyday practice of diplomacy. While practice approaches may not offer sufficient explanatory grounds on which to further our understanding of audiences in IR, we have argued that theorizing the role of audiences matters to our understanding of digital diplomacy practices. The way in which interactions with and among audiences have intensified the public nature of diplomatic practices must be taken into account. This development has changed the role of the public in diplomatic social interaction, and audiences may therefore have more influence on the logics of action in diplomatic practice than before the rise of social media.

In addition to these three central areas, we imagine that other developments in the wider field of IR can reinvigorate this research agenda further. More engagement with feminist and post-Western theories or the micro-sociology of emotions and affect could, for instance, open for new avenues of exploring relationships between the institutional legacies of overaching power relations and digital change in diplomacy.

We believe that there is great potential for theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances to be made through further study of the digital transformation of diplomacy, building on various insights from practice approaches. We invite scholars interested in diplomatic practices and the processes of digitalization to think in terms of how to contribute to such a research agenda, even though they might not think of themselves as primarily involved in practice-based research. We are aware that this article is only a first step and we welcome fellow scholars in IR and beyond to challenge our proposals in the spirit of critical engagement.

A research agenda for digital diplomacy practice

Elsa Hedling gratefully acknowledges funding from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (project number 2018.0090).

We are grateful to August Danielson and Constance Duncombe for comments on a previous draft, as well as the participants and audience of the panel ``Digital diplomacy in world politics: peace, gender, emotion and popular culture'' during the ISA Annual Convention, Toronto, 2019. We would also like to thank the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

President Trump initially responded to the Soelimani strike with hostile tweets aimed at Iran but was met by Iranian signals of sincerity and transparency. The exchange between Trump and Iran's Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif was later described as “real time deescaltory twitter” that may even have stopped a war ( Suciu 2020 ).

When a Danish citizen was killed by an Islamic terrorist while travelling in Morocco in 2017, a video of the attack was posted online. Denmark's tech ambassador quickly used his connections in Silicon Valley to get Facebook and Google to remove the video ( Satariano 2019 ).

To our knowledge, no study has as yet found significant changes in the recruitment of diplomats as a result of digitalization. Nonetheless, generational development could still reflect such a change in skillsets as new diplomats today are “digital natives”, and research into the digitalization of ministries of foreign affairs highlights the effects of increased digital training, allocation of resources and recruitment of communicators ( Pamment 2016 ; Manor and Crilley 2020 ).

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Hidden Debt Revelations

How reliable are public debt statistics? This paper quantifies the magnitude, characteristics, and timing of hidden debt by tracking ex post data revisions across a comprehensive new database of more than 50 vintages of World Bank debt statistics. In a sample of debt data covering 146 countries and 53 years, the paper establishes three new stylized facts: (i) debt statistics are systematically under-reported; (ii) hidden debt accumulates in boom years and tends to be revealed in bad times, often during IMF programs and sovereign defaults; and (iii) in debt restructurings, higher hidden debt is associated with larger creditor losses. The novel data is used to numerically discipline a quantitative sovereign debt model with hidden debt accumulation and an endogenous monitoring decision that triggers revelations. Model simulations show that hidden debt has adverse effects on default risk, debt-carrying capacity and asset prices and is therefore welfare detrimental.

We received valuable comments from Fernando Arce, Tamon Asonuma, Gadi Barlevy, Volker Clausen, Aitor Erce, Stelios Fourakis, Juan Carlos Hatchondo, Aart Kraay, Leonardo Martinez, Julian Martinez-Iriarte, Marti Mestieri, Ugo Panizza, Juan Passadore, Carmen Reinhart, Diego Rivetti, Juan Sanchez, Zachary Stangebye, and Christoph Trebesch as well as from seminar participants at the Kiel Institute, the Inter-American Development Bank, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics, the World Bank, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan, Purdue University, the Chicago Fed, the Richmond Fed, the 2024 NBER IFM Spring Meeting, the 2023 SED Annual Meeting and the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik. We thank Evis Rucaj and the entire team of the World Bank Development Data Group for answering countless questions on the International Debt Statistics. Gregor Ilsinger and Robert Remy provided excellent research assistance. We thank the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and the German Federal Ministry of Finance for their financial support. All views expressed in this paper are those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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