Politics of Diplomatic Training Workshop

For two days in September 2023, the ‘Training Diplomats’ team gathered a global, interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners to discuss the field of diplomatic training and explore avenues for ongoing collaboration. This included several directors of long-established international diplomatic academies, as well as historians, geographers, political scientists and educationalists working on the politics of diplomatic training.

Workshop participants at King’s College London

The impetus for the workshop stemmed from a common realisation that despite the essential role it plays in the everyday workings of international relations, international law and in the various multilateral organisations, the training of diplomats has received little critical attention in the social and political sciences. A small but growing literature within International Relations has focused on the notion of socialisation to explain how international society, broadly defined, absorbs new members. The issue of pedagogy and its political implications is key here, but not well enough understood. The few isolated studies to have focused on diplomatic training and working lives have mostly been through specific case-studies in the global North.

Drawing on a global range of historical and geographical perspectives, the papers shared at the workshop will form the basis of a future collaborative publication that will set the agenda for critical research and practice in diplomatic training.

Pedagogies of Diplomacy

Each panel brought theoretical and practical contributions into conversation. The first considered ‘Pedagogies of Diplomacy’.

Sam Opondo of Vassar College drew attention to the importance of language and literature, what he termed diplomatic fictions, in the articulation of postcolonial diplomacy. Pointing to the controversial dominance of English and French as the languages of ‘African literature’, Opondo’s provocation asked what modes of relations existing outside the modern diplomatic regime of recognition and meaning-making are excluded from the teaching of diplomatic theory and practice?

The coordinating director of the new Ghana Foreign Service Institute, Ambassador Akua Ahenkora, outlined the ambition of the Institute to provide a specialist learning hub in for diplomats in Ghana. The Institute aims to serve as a regional centre and build on the experience and expertise of African diplomacy, facilitating learning throughout career stages and drawing on the practical knowledge of seasoned diplomats.

The voices of defence attachés receiving training in diplomatic practice were brought to the workshop in a paper from An Jacobs and Tim Archer of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. The question of how diplomatic skills and knowledge are presented to military personnel, within broader frameworks of individual career progression and wider UK foreign policy, allowed the paper to identify and problematize areas where political knowledge is assumed or tacit.

Change in Diplomatic Training

In the second panel, sharing work emerging from our own project, we outlined the conceptual lens of ‘tutelage’ which, coupled with scholarly literature on socialisation and international education, links relationships of power in the classroom to international geopolitics. As formal decolonisation took place, we argue that training for the diplomats of newly independent states was a site where international dependencies were reproduced and contested.

Continuing with the historical theme but with a more European framing, Laurence Badel of the Sorbonne traced diverse developments in diplomats training, highlighting plurality and contestation across the continent. She drew out fascinating differences between national and regional traditions of diplomatic training.

Socialisation through Training

The third panel began with a set of reflections from Yolanda Spies of Oxford University’s Diplomatic Studies Programme, on the role of diplomatic training in international society. She outlined the theoretical rationale for a constructivist perspective to account for evolving norms, identities and interests that constitute international society and the role of training in perpetuating and contesting them. 

Clingendael Academy’s director Ron Ton then offered several observations on the evolving training needs of diplomatic personnel and methods of both identifying and responding to those needs within an educational institution. He introduced the concept of “Nexus Diplomacy”, integrating policy challenges, institutional development, diplomatic competence development and work processes. He began by sharing recollections of the training courses in 1992/93 for the diplomats of the ANC, to prepare them for integration with the South African Foreign Service.

Tobias Wille of Goethe University used more recent observations of diplomatic training in the Western Balkans to unpack a central tension in international diplomatic training programmes: that they are both diplomatic and pedagogical encounters. He contrasted horizontal diplomatic relationships between formal equals with vertical teaching relationships between trainer and trainee, and called for greater attention to how this tension reproduces a particular imaginary of international politics and forms subjects of a particular kind.

Practising Diplomatic Training

The fourth and final panel included participants from across North America, Africa, Europe and Asia. Geoff Wiseman of DePaul University presented a defence of the ‘internationalist’ mindset and need for transprofessionalism in contemporary diplomacy, but asked to what extent this could be didactically taught as opposed to socialised.

In separate papers, Guy Martin of Winston-Salem State University and Patrick Maluki of the University of Nairobi unpacked, respectively, past and present approaches to training African diplomats through the Nairobi Diplomatic Training Programme. Martin compared the experience with that of the International Relations Institute of Cameroon (IRIC) through the 1970s and 80s, and highlighted the pan-African outlook, spirit and mindset of both courses. Maluki confirmed the continuing legacy of the earlier programme in terms of its regional remit, but outlined a diversification of the training offer. 

Finally, Lesley Masters of Nottingham Trent and Helen Drake of Loughborough University outlined the early findings of their survey of diplomacy studies in UK Higher Education. They traced the rapid growth in postgraduate courses in diplomacy since the 1990s, and questioned the philosophical, political and ideological basis for diplomacy as a field of study within academia.

Our Thanks

We are grateful to all participants, including those who acted as discussants, for their sharing their research, experience and perspectives on the politics of diplomatic training. We hope to have publication plans to announce in the coming months.