Digital Diplomacy

Theory and Practice

Corneliu Bjola, Marcus Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317550198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Diplomatie & Abkommen

This book analyses digital diplomacy as a form of change management in international politics.

The recent spread of digital initiatives in foreign ministries is often argued to be nothing less than a revolution in the practice of diplomacy. In some respects this revolution is long overdue. Digital technology has changed the ways firms conduct business, individuals conduct social relations, and states conduct governance internally, but states are only just realizing its potential to change the ways all aspects of interstate interactions are conducted. In particular, the adoption of digital diplomacy (i.e., the use of social media for diplomatic purposes) has been implicated in changing practices of how diplomats engage in information management, public diplomacy, strategy planning, international negotiations or even crisis management. Despite these significant changes and the promise that digital diplomacy offers, little is known, from an analytical perspective, about how digital diplomacy works.

This volume, the first of its kind, brings together established scholars and experienced policy-makers to bridge this analytical gap. The objective of the book is to theorize what digital diplomacy is, assess its relationship to traditional forms of diplomacy, examine the latent power dynamics inherent in digital diplomacy, and assess the conditions under which digital diplomacy informs, regulates, or constrains foreign policy. Organized around a common theme of investigating digital diplomacy as a form of change management in the international system, it combines diverse theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented chapters centered on international change.

This book will be of much interest to students of diplomatic studies, public diplomacy, foreign policy, social media and international relations.

PART I Digital diplomacy

The policy dimension

DOI: 10.4324/9781315730844-2

1 DIGITAL DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Marcus Holmes

DOI: 10.4324/9781315730844-3

The puzzle of digital diplomacy1¹

Despite the significant changes in communication and transportation that globalization has brought to the world, the structure of international politics and diplomacy has, in many ways, remained unchanged. Today’s leaders and diplomats travel the globe to meet personally with friends and adversaries just as their counterparts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did. Indeed the stasis of diplomacy arguably goes back to antiquity and has changed only on the margins.² Peculiarly, teleconferencing and Internet communication technologies (ICTs) have fundamentally changed the way that business and other types of social interaction are conducted (Denstadli, Julsrud and Hjoprthol 2012), yet the basic process of negotiating while looking the other in the eye continues to dominate diplomacy efforts, both bilaterally and multilaterally. With the advent of these new communication tools, some have questioned whether these tête-à-têtes are necessary. Consider the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Political pundits astutely observed the irony in negotiators travelling thousands of miles in high-emissions aircraft in order to discuss how best to reduce overall emissions. Similar criticisms have been levied at other multilateral conferences, such as the G-20 Summit. Critics of the 2010Toronto conference asked whether it was wise for statespeople to engage in costly extravagant meetings at a time of global recession.³ These concerns are important and go beyond partisan rankle. They are indicative of an important theoretical puzzle: why has diplomacy not been affected by the technological revolution?

One answer is that it actually has. While perhaps not affecting a core aspect of traditional diplomacy – the personal meeting – technology has affected the ways in which foreign ministries and departments of state do business. A survey of OECD countries’ foreign ministries, public diplomacy scholarship and popular press and media suggest that e-diplomacy is not only a cottage industry of academic study but also a strategy that states take seriously, often at considerable cost and attention. The United States, for instance, as of September 2012, had over 150 full-time staff members “working in twenty-five different ediplomacy nodes at Headquarters,” with over 900 individuals using ediplomacy at US missions abroad (Hanson 2012b). Other countries, diverse in terms of power, have followed suit, with the United Kingdom, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro and China all embracing some form of digital diplomacy strategy, typically including the use of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. According to press reports, around two-thirds of the 193 United Nations member states have Twitter accounts (though usage of those accounts varies considerably; Khazan 2012).

While it would be easy to dismiss such activities as a particularly thin version of diplomacy – forms of marketing or epiphenomenal activities to the core processes of international politics – recent political events and scandals, such as the Benghazi embassy attack and Edward Snowden leaks, suggest a more prominent and central role for ICTs in politics. Furthermore, as analysts of digital diplomacy have pointed out, ICTs, if nothing else, have facilitated communication between foreign ministries and diplomats in the field as well as communication between foreign ministries and local populations (Hanson 2012b). One of the insights from the 1998 East Africa US embassies attacks was the lack of effective communication channels within the State department (Hanson 2012b, 10). Similarly 9/11 highlighted the need for the diplomatic and intelligence communities to have access to each other, and pooled data, in order to perform effectively. The benefits of constructing ICTs to aid in this type of information-sharing was seen recently in the Boston marathon bombings. During the attack, the earliest information about the incident was being shared via social media nine minutes before it was reported by major news organizations (Rogers 2013). Today, the State Department maintains over seventy “communities” of information sharing, typically interagency in nature, that are used to provide a platform for analysis for policymakers at home and diplomats on the ground.

The existence of these activities and use of ICTs by foreign ministries raises deep theoretical questions. Are these examples of using ICTs by government tantamount to a new form of diplomacy? Or, alternately, are they simply moving existing processes online, with the fundamental meaning and significance of diplomacy remaining unchanged? Secretary of State John Kerry seems to share this view, having argued in May 2013 that “the term digital diplomacy is almost redundant – it’s just diplomacy, period” (Kerry 2013). Nevertheless, even if he is right, what do technologies such as the Facebook, Twitter and secure networking interfaces mean for diplomacy, if anything? This chapter will argue that these questions can only be assessed by examining the nature of diplomacy itself. Whether or not the tools and technologies of diplomacy indicate transformation or have the potential to transform diplomacy depends first and foremost on what diplomacy is. What is digital diplomacy? Put another way, it is difficult to adjudicate whether Kerry is right or wrong and understand how digital diplomacy differs from traditional diplomacy without first examining what diplomacy, and diplomatic activity, is fundamentally about.

This chapter will build upon recent work that views diplomacy broadly as, among other things, a form of change management in the international system. Change is conceptualized here in two basic forms: top-down exogenous shocks and bottom-up endogenous incremental shifting.⁴ Diplomacy helps to manage both sources of change, though there is variation in process and tool effectiveness depending on the type of change that states are actively managing. Digital diplomacy is defined as a strategy of managing change through digital tools and virtual collaboration. I argue that the tools of this collaboration, specifically ICTs and online communities, are most valuable for bottom-up incremental shifting, though under certain conditions they can be helpful for exogenous shocks as well. Contrarily, traditional diplomacy, specifically face-to-face interpersonal meetings, are most valuable for managing change that occurs through exogenous shock, though it can also be helpful for incremental change under certain conditions. I base my argument on insights from social psychology and practice theory, which present conditions for change as well as conditions for when change management will be most successful. In creating this argument, I hope to add to an existing and useful debate on the nature of diplomacy and e-varieties thereof, but from a different angle. As will be discussed below, the existing literature on digital diplomacy has tended to view its activities as the realm of public diplomacy. This is a welcomed move, but it has overshadowed other uses of ICTs in diplomacy. Put simply, to reduce digital diplomacy to public diplomacy is to miss much of the power and capacity that ICTs, such as social media, provide to states and other actors.

In what follows, I briefly review arguments regarding the nature of diplomacy and suggest that digital diplomacy has typically been understood as a form of public diplomacy. I problematize this characterization by turning to practice theory and examining sources of change that occur in the international system. I then develop conditions under which traditional diplomacy, the personal face-to-face meetings that have tended to dominate diplomatic activity through the ages, and digital diplomacy, the use of digital tools and virtual collaboration to further state interests, will be most useful in managing particular types of change. I utilize interviews conducted with current and retired high-level diplomats to intersperse empirical observations of the field with the theoretical argument I construct.⁵ I conclude by suggesting what the analysis in this chapter might mean for the study of diplomacy and, in particular, predictive theory.

The renaissance of diplomacy and digital varieties

Diplomacy in practice (and theory)

Diplomacy has traditionally been dismissed in structural accounts of international politics as irrelevant, and as such, “rigorous theoretical and careful empirical work on diplomacy in international relations is extremely sparse” (Rathbun 2014, 22). Structural theories, at least since Waltz, typically overtly or subtly reduce diplomacy, and its inherent dynamics, to the distribution of power, understood typically as the distribution of capabilities (Waltz 1979). This is the source of leverage for states and is, by and large, outside the scope of agency for any particular diplomat. Stronger states from a power perspective will have the advantage in a bargaining situation, whereas weaker states will typically be in a position where they must compromise. As such, negotiating power and the strategies that diplomats pursue are endogenous to the structure of the system. Diplomats are more or less along for the ride. While states may be able to send costly signals that convey their resolve, this is largely outside the realm of the activities of diplomats (Fearon 1994; Fearon 1995; Schultz 2001). Even worse, because individuals have strong incentives to deceive, or at the very least cloak their true views and intentions, diplomacy is often dismissed as cheap talk at best and potentially quite dangerous. Indeed, one need not look far for examples of diplomacy resulting in suboptimal outcomes for certain states. In addition, the actors of diplomacy, the diplomats, tend not to be imbued with the power of other important actors, such as statespeople. As Iver Neumann has argued, the diplomat is not a hero in international relations (IR) theory (Neumann 2012). States-people are understood as participating in the conveyer belt of power in international politics; the diplomat simply plays a supporting, perhaps even nonessential, role.

Further distancing diplomacy from mainstream IR is that the study of diplomacy has typically been undertaken by practitioners of diplomacy or historians of diplomatic practice. As Jönsson and Hall as well as Der Derian have argued, this means that diplomacy has been relatively resistant to theory-building, since practitioners and historians take a different perspective, typically a practice-oriented view, on diplomacy (Der Derian 1987; Jönsson and Hall 2005). IR scholars, on the other hand, have tended to be theory-focused, largely resistant to analyzing the discrete practices of diplomats for reasons mentioned above. The result of this is a relatively strict division, or dualism, between the theory and practice of diplomacy (Bjola 2013). Prediction follows theory in neopositivist models; consequently, it is difficult to make predictions about diplomatic practices.

Recently, however, this dualism and separation has been problematized and reexamined for a number of reasons. First, most generally, there has been growing recognition that structural theories alone have difficulty accounting for change in the international system.⁶ The failure of IR to predict the end of the Cold War is often cited as a salient moment of recognition for IR theory (Bjola 2013, 5), which predictably led to reexamination of core assumptions and approaches of extant theory, including advances in neorealism, neoliberalism and constructivism (Cornago 2013). For instance, structure gained an intersubjective/ideational component to complement the existing material conceptualization (Wendt 1999). In addition to looking at structural factors such as diminishing capabilities or a dwindling economy that may have contributed to particular outcomes, such as the end of the Cold War, scholars have complicated the picture by investigating the diplomatic practices that accompanied the change itself. In this particular example, some have suggested that interpersonal meetings between Mikhail Gorbachev and his United States counterparts, first in Ronald Reagan and then in George H. W. Bush, clarified intentions and made the transition out of the Cold War a smooth one (Hall and Yarhi-Milo 2012; Holmes 2013; Yarhi-Milo 2013). Put another way, there is growing recognition that diplomacy can help to increase empathy, develop trust and ultimately transform conflict (Booth and Wheeler 2008; Wheeler 2008; 2013).

Therefore, in addition to revisiting core concepts such as structure, anarchy and so forth, there has also been a Gestalt shift with respect to the role of individuals in IR, and specifically practices of individuals in world politics. Practice theory, which emerged out of the “practice turn in social theory,” including Goff-man, Bourdieu, Giddens, Dewey and so forth, seeks to bridge many of the dualist positions that obtained from constructivist approaches. International practices are defined as competent, usually patterned, performances of individuals and collections of individuals (Adler and Pouliot 2011). For example, international practices arguably “close the traditional divide between ideas and matter” (Adler and Pouliot 2011, 13). Practices are material in the sense that they are things that take place in and on the world, engaging the environment and structuring the environment at the same time, thus “changing ideas that individually or collectively people hold about [the world]” (Adler and Pouliot 2011, 14; Holmes 2013). Similarly, practices are both agential and structural at the same time, since practices, either individually or collectively, are an exercise in agency while constrained by structure in the form of standards of competence (Adler and Pouliot 2011, 15).

The link between practice theory and diplomacy has been particularly fruitful in a number of different areas. First, practice theory reorients questions about diplomacy’s ontology away from understanding diplomacy through the lens of structural theories. Rather than viewing diplomacy as something epiphenomenal to power politics, examining diplomacy as a discrete practice illustrates its productivity in the international system. One of the important aspects of practice theory is the reemphasis not just of the individual and humanism (Constantinou 2013), but ...