Endorsements

How does diplomacy describe what it sees? What is at stake in these descriptions of the world? Since the beginning of modern diplomacy in the Renaissance, diplomatic communication has been marked by concern with linguistic precision and invested in the words that make sense of political subjects and their contexts. The stakes are high: actors can be recognised as allies or enemies, gain assistance, or be excluded, violence can be legitimated or condemned, war or peace decided. Drawing on interpretive approaches, this volume explores and maps how diplomatic text constitutes and promotes descriptions of subjects and their spatial, temporal, and normative contexts. It firstly develops a methodology to map diplomatic reporting, determine how its descriptions work, and trace their development. Secondly, this approach is applied to the diplomatic communication of two case studies, the First Vietnam War and the Western Sahara conflict, demonstrating how descriptions of actors and their contexts evolve continually, responding to institutional, drafting and analysis practices and interaction with other diplomatic agents, texts and, most importantly, policy concerns. Finally, the book conceptualises the conditions of practice, language, and discourse that make diplomatic descriptions convincing. The contributions expounded in this volume, particularly its inductive method to empirically analyse how diplomacy produces knowledge about subjects and their contexts, provide key insights. Speaking to analysis and practice of how the state produces and manages knowledge, the method determines how descriptions are produced and developed, as well as their subsequent journeys within and across diplomatic institutions. This approach makes it relevant to numerous approaches to diplomacy. Whether instrument of the Prince, constitutive institution, or contingent practice, diplomacy is implicated in constituting how the world is understood. Even if its subject matter is knowable and objectively real, diplomacy is always caught mediating the perception of shaky subjectivities. This mediation depends on descriptions that, produced by practices ranging from espionage to reporting and analysis, rely on text to emerge, be communicated, and developed. This method cracks open the secrets carried in diplomatic texts because, ultimately, such is the power of knowing whom we and the Other are.