Using Social Network Analysis techniques, we develop and analyse network visualisation and quantify network relationships, to reveal structural patterns in the way that African diplomats met through training programmes

In December 2023, I was privileged to attend the 49th International Forum on Diplomatic Training (IFDT), an institution we had frequently crossed paths with in the archive. This blog uses some of these moments of connection to reflect on the developing international landscape of diplomatic training after decolonisation.

What training for African diplomats was provided by the Socialist World? Our project has focused on training in the West and in Africa, but this blog shares some examples and mentions of diplomatic training in the Socialist World, which may help contextualise further research.

For two days in September 2023, the ‘Training Diplomats’ team gathered a global, interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners to work towards a future collaborative publication that will set the agenda for critical research and practice in diplomatic training.

We examine the role of place in the construction and transmission of diplomatic knowledge, through a focus on the Nairobi Diplomatic Training Programme. We consider Nairobi’s qualities as a host city, and the pedagogical importance of visits to international institutions and simulated negotiations.

US philanthropic foundations had a strong influence in international diplomatic training in the mid-twentieth century, operating without many of the political constraints faced by states to the point of pre-empting sovereign independence through training.

How did Cameroonian reunification play out at the level of diplomatic representation and more specifically in the training of personnel? We find the experience of the first anglophone trainees sent to France emphasised their difference with their new francophone compatriots in cultural, linguistic and material terms.

Encompassing training offered globally in both French and English, this blog seeks to understand the ways that languages of instruction articulated with the defence of geopolitical spheres of influence and particular pedagogical approaches.

Au milieu d’un processus tendu de décolonisation et déségrégation, la formation de diplomates de l’ANC était forcément de nature géopolitique. Un stage s’est déroulé engagé Europe en 1992, deux ans avant l’arrivée au pouvoir de Nelson Mandela.

An examination of the place of ‘development diplomacy’ in diplomatic training following decolonisation, which appears as a geopolitical and epistemic divide between Global North and South.

I provide a brief account of an important and valuable period of fieldwork in Yaoundé, Cameroon, which has brought to light perspectives from the early days of IRIC and also the newly independent Cameroonian government.

Based on our presentation to the centennial congress of the International Geographical Union, this blog reflects on the contested internationalisms enacted within postcolonial diplomatic training courses.

Quaker Diplomats’ Conferences brought together African trainee diplomats attending various training programmes in Europe and North America. We use data visualisation techniques to explore the potential networks they created.

Preparing Ghana’s external affairs personnel for independence was a fraught exercise. British officers’ concerns about security, and the racial logics of empire, delayed and constrained Ghanaian trainees’ placements.

Following fresh archival fieldwork, we explore the ambivalences underpinning the experiences of African students who attended the University of Oxford’s Foreign Service Programme from the 1960s onwards.

En analysant l’histoire de l’inauguration de l’IRIC, ce blog étudie comment ce tournant vers l’Afrique visait à incuber une véritable formation diplomatique à l’Africaine, toute en assurant sa relevance aux normes internationales.

We see tutelage as referring to both pedagogical and (geo)political processes where guardianship and instruction are held in tension. In this blog, we show how the political issue of national independence had become a pedagogical problem for diplomatic training.

From 1962 a single cohort of Algerian diplomats trained in the specially created Centre de Formation de Fonctionnaires et Magistrats Algeriennes (CFFMA) in Paris. Though brief, its story exemplifies the geopolitics of postcolonial diplomatic training.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s one-year fellowship programme based in New York (anglophone) and Geneva (francophone) trained over 350 junior diplomats from newly independent states from 1960-1973.

A proposed session for RGS-IBG annual conference: 30th August - 2nd September 2022 | Newcastle University

Learning the International: The Spaces and Politics of Statecraft