Tracing interpersonal networks through Quaker diplomats’ conferences
Quaker Diplomats’ Conference at Clarens, 1957 (Source: St. George’s International School)
Networking is a cornerstone of diplomatic life. A successful diplomat will be able to establish and draw on contacts within and beyond the state, to communicate, negotiate and effectively pursue foreign policy objectives. A key focus of our project is therefore on how networks were created by and for African diplomat trainees through the various training programmes they attended as part of the decolonisation process and following independence. Many programmes run in a university setting, like the Oxford FSP and the Paris IHEOM/IIAP went to great lengths to maintain contact with their former students, sending annually updated alumni directories around the world to help them keep contact not just with the programme administrators, but with each other. Such directories are a trove of data for network analysis, which we have sought to collect, clean and collate into as comprehensive a list of African diplomatic trainees during decolonisation as possible. This work in progress is beginning to help us identify patterns of participation in the various programmes over time, as well as some individuals who attended multiple programmes. By the end of our project, we plan to publish this data as an interactive map – for now though, the data is incomplete.
This month, at the Friends House Library in London, I came across an exciting new directory. I was there thanks to a lucky find in the British National Archives a few months earlier: a letter from the Geneva coordinator of the ‘Diplomatic Conferences’ of the American Friends Service Committee to the diplomatic training coordinator of the Colonial Office in 1961 asking if they would send their African trainees to that year’s conference in Clarens, Switzerland [1], and receiving a positive response. Prompted by this find, I read Stephen Collett’s short piece on the “Quaker Conferences for Diplomats”, which describe these conferences as a unique and significant training space. According to Collett, the ten-day “Clarens experience” involved in a deliberately serene environment “to promote the greatest possible friendly acquaintance” (p13), with a pedagogy based on autonomous learning, small group discussions, and significant periods of recreation, self-directed study and informal fellowship. As the image above shows, spouses and children were also invited to attend. The conferences were conceived according to the underlying principle that "obscure people in government service often determine foreign policy" (p9), and therefore sought participants that were “in line for appointment to major assignments in the next five to ten years, where they would influence foreign policies of their governments as ministers, ambassadors, chiefs of departments, and chief delegates to the United Nations and to international conferences” (p10). In line with the Quaker commitment to radical pacifism, this ‘quiet diplomacy’ sought to establish the values of international peace through mutual understanding in a very practical way, amongst diplomats.
The directory was exciting because it contained the names of almost every conference attendee from 1952-1976 – not just in Clarens but at the Quaker conferences organised in the USA (for junior diplomats posted to Washington), Japan and South Asia. As well as attendees, the directory gave the names of “consultants, chairmen and program directors”. Its scope is therefore wide both in terms of its geographical reach and historical span. Attendees came from a wide variety of countries – Global South as well as Global North, and both East and West of the Iron Curtain. We note that the African participants were almost always alumni of the various training programmes we had already identified, and many of the experts were trainers from those same programmes.
Given that the conferences appear to have been conceived of as a space of networking, we could consider charting the networks potentially generated by the conferences over the span of 24 years. Formatted nicely in three clear columns, the directory was ideal for automated text recognition using the ExtractTable tool, meaning it could be formatted into a series of tables for network analysis with relative ease.
The directory contained a total of 2259 individuals (‘nodes’ in the language of network analysis) who attended a total of 93 different conferences. Most attended only one, but some (especially the expert trainers and directors) attended several. Given that each conference had on average between 20 and 30 participants, the number of potential interpersonal connections they represented was vast – when transformed using R, there were 45,482 relationships (or ‘edges’ in the language of network analysis) between individual nodes. Inspired by Harvard University ‘Visualizing Historical Networks’ website, I used the free software Gephi to translate this data into a visual map. I found Martin Grandjean’s excellent tutorial very helpful for this purpose as a beginner user.
The results, below, are as beautiful as they are informative. They are organised with a focus on African attendees, including only the links potentially made by African participants in the conferences they attended. The first is non-geographical and interactive, locating nodes close to their connections and highlighting individuals with large numbers of connections. The various individual conferences are identifiable within the clusters created, and the ‘key people’ stand alone among these clusters. It is clear that even when only Africans’ connections are mapped, these ‘key people’ attending multiple events and making the most connections are all non-Africans.
The second map is geographical, placing participants based on the locations given in the directory. African attendees are clustered mostly in anglophone parts of East and West Africa, and North Africa. Experts are clustered in the Global North.
Network map of Africans at Quaker Diplomats’ Conferences and their potential interpersonal connections, 1952-1974
Visualising this high-volume, low-complexity data in this way is a first step towards analysing it at a more granular level, triangulating it with our other, more complex qualitative data from archival sources and interviews.
[1] TNA CO 1017/638: Letter from Paul B. Johnson to David Muirhead, 31/05/1961