Diplo Blog

Today’s Guardian brings an interesting diplomatic issue into in the news: you can read it here. It raises a wealth of questions in international law but it also in national culture.

As an international diplomat, you may want to address issues in international law like:

Internet governance (IG) is a particularly challenging puzzle when viewed from the perspective of countries in the Global South. Many of these countries are asymmetrically integrated and constrained by structures of dependence established by more advanced countries. This is clear in the push for IG reform by countries in the Global South, arguing that the current model does not adequately address their concerns about access and affordability.

Anyone that shops online, uses social media, or even sends an email has most likely had their personal data sent around the world. Data, including your personal details, is transferred over the global network without regard for national borders. Countries have attempted to regulate these data flows in the interests of their citizens, national security, and their own economies.

First it was the Foreign Office (FO), then it evolved into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and today it becomes – as foreshadowed by Boris Johnson on 16 June – Britain’s ‘super-department for international affairs’, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Was this a good idea?

Behold America: A history of America First and the American Dream (Sarah Churchwell, 2018, p. 356):

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books and the compilers of magazine articles and television programmes. 

Eric Hobsbawn

In view of the ongoing global health crisis, for the first time ever since its establishment in 2013, the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) was held virtually.

Dr Jovan Kurbalija, conductor of the orchestra called DiploFoundation, proposed a project called HumAInism: Visionary governance for humanity with artificial intelligence. The main aim of the vision would be to find a way towards an outline of a ‘new social contract’. A wise initiative in the right place! The old social contract of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, too.

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly shaken up old structures and accelerated 180-degree changes and innovation. Diplomacy and multilateral systems are no exception. 

Permanent missions will become increasingly important in the post-COVID-19 era, and their modus operandi will change as they become a key segment of ‘hybrid diplomacy’ (i.e., diplomacy that combines onsite and online diplomatic meetings).

These were the underlying messages of DiploFoundation’s WebDebate entitled ‘Permanent missions at global diplomatic hubs: More or less relevant in 2020?’. 

An influential article of 2014 noted that health attachés were appointed shortly after the Second World War and were thereafter assigned by 'a growing number of countries [...] to work in embassies in countries of strategic importance'. Is this true? If not, why not? And does it matter anyway?