The New Diplomacy: Evolution of a Revolution

The continued rise of the non-state actor in twenty-first century international politics issues a potent challenge to state primacy in the area of diplomacy. Diplomacy's statist tradition, once the bedrock organising institution for pursuing international politics, is ceding influence to non-state actors—the “new” diplomats—who have displayed impressive skill at shaping policy through means that foreign ministries fail to grasp. To the chagrin of established scholars and practitioners, this paper claims that nothing has transpired to suggest the diplomatic profession is doing anything but pluralising. Furthermore, the process by which the foreign ministry opens itself to the public increasingly resides with the latter. Does this revolution mean the evolution of the “new diplomacy” has materialised? The contents in the following pages suggest so, and the main reason for this is built upon a radical view of agency: the age of diplomacy as an institution is giving way to an age of diplomacy as a behaviour. Yet despite who dominates in the art of influence, caveats remain and it appears likely that each side will need the other to achieve successful statecraft in the years to come.     

Oslo and Its Aftermath: Lessons Learned from Track Two Diplomacy

Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the violence that followed, many scholars have reflected upon the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Most of this analysis has focused on official negotiations without considering the substantial role that unofficial peace efforts have played in peacebuilding, both prior to and after Oslo. This article, in contrast, seeks to better understand the application of “track two” diplomacy to the Israeli–Palestinian case. It reports on a self‐reflection effort by numerous Israeli–Palestinian peace practitioners to better understand what has worked, what has not, and how new initiatives could be more effectively organized and carried out in the future. The research presented is based on an inventory of seventy‐nine track two projects that occurred between Israelis and Palestinians between 1992 and 2004, personal interviews with many of those who organized and oversaw these projects, and two focus group meetings that brought together a total of forty practitioners. In this article, we seek to better understand two issues: (1) how track two initiatives have changed in scope, organization, and intent; and (2) how track two practitioners have sought to disseminate their work beyond the participants of those initiatives. Our findings present an overall picture of the Israeli–Palestinian second track practice and identify a number of trends and common types of practice. Among the trends we have identified are the following: during the peace process years, more track two initiatives were undertaken with elite/professional participants than with representatives of the grassroots, but in the subsequent decade‐and‐a‐half, Israeli–Palestinian grassroots, track two initiatives gradually replaced senior‐level track two exchanges; most of the grassroots initiatives we studied were relationship focused, whereas those involving elite participants are outcome focused; the track two community subscribes to a set of theoretical propositions about which conditions and contexts facilitate the transmission of track two insights and ideas to the political process, but these propositions have yet to be validated; and track two specialists do little strategic planning about ways to most effectively transfer track two insights and ideas to the political process. Our research also identified four distinct, but not mutually exclusive, approaches to practice: the psychological, the constructivist, the capacity building, and the realistic interest.     

From Hasbara to the Palestine-Israel Sport Conflict

This analysis highlights the role of sport—particularly football—in nation-building. Using netnographic techniques, it focuses on the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and nationhood through the efforts of the Palestinian Football Association [PFA] to challenge Israeli hegemony and function independently of Israeli surveillance in a sovereign Palestinian nation-state. It explains how the PFA has attempted to harness its status, manifested in its Fédération Internationale de Football Association [FIFA] membership, to threaten Israel’s own FIFA membership and its international image. The value of this analysis stems from the way it embeds the empirical narrative within a broader international relations analytical/theoretical framework that problematises the central concept of “soft power” that has predominated the current “sports and international relations” literature.     

Ingredients of a Successful Track Two Negotiation

During three days in 2003, an Israeli–Palestinian group met in London to negotiate the draft of the “Geneva Initiative,” which offered a potential final status agreement between Israel and Palestine. In this article, I analyze the video recording of these unofficial negotiations and examine how the framing and conduct of the talks enabled significant progress toward reaching an agreement. I describe six main framing techniques used by the mediators: calling the meetings an “exercise,” which reduced restraints on the participants and enhanced their flexibility, avoiding deep historical issues to focus solely on future‐oriented pragmatic solutions, allowing the participants to discuss any topic they chose while deliberately avoiding crucial narrative issues, convincing the participants that this track two negotiation was crucial for the future of official Israeli–Palestinian relations, accentuating the parties' understandings and agreements with each other, and building a sense of superordinate group identity among the participants, to encourage cooperation. These components were the key “ingredients” for the first — and still the only — (unofficial) detailed proposal for an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. They provide lessons that could improve the success of other track two negotiations.     

Europe under occupation: the European diplomatic community of practice in the Jerusalem area

ABSTRACT

This article shows how the existence of a community of European practitioners in the Jerusalem area gives substance to the European stance on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The often-stated European Union (EU) support for a two-state solution could appear meaningless in the absence of peace negotiations. However, European diplomats (i.e. diplomats of EU member states and EU officials) in the East Jerusalem–Ramallah area are committed to specific practices of political resistance to Israeli occupation and recognition of Palestinian institutions. These practices have led not only to a specific political geography of diplomacy, but also to a community of practice, composed of European diplomats and based on their daily experience of resisting occupation and bestowing recognition. It is this group of officials who represent and actively “do” Europe’s position and under occupation.     

Sport and Diplomacy: A Global Diplomacy Framework

ABSTRACT

The actors, or “players,” involved in the transactions of diplomacy occasioned by sport are manifold. In the case of the world’s “global game”—association football—they include but are not limited to individual footballers, football clubs, national leagues, national associations, football’s international governance structures, multi-national sponsors, and numerous hangers on. Importantly for this analysis, such a panoply of actors creates an architecture, replicated across other sports, which speak to the necessity of furthering the understanding of the relationship between sport and diplomacy. These two phenomena share a long-standing similarity in global affairs; both having been over-looked as means of comprehending relations between different polities otherwise centred on the nation-state. This exegesis advances our understanding in two areas. First, it addresses the parameters of the discussion of “sport and diplomacy” and problematises the discourse between the two with a note on language; and second, it utilises a framework provided by an appreciation of “global diplomacy” to explore concepts of communication, representation, and negotiation in sport and diplomacy.     

Abba Eban and the Development of American–Israeli Relations, 1950–1959

Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador in Washington and representative at the United Nations from 1950 to 1959, had a central role in the transformation of American–Israeli relations during a period of frequent discord over key strategic issues. This analysis examines the influence of one prominent actor upon bilateral ties that would eventually become the American–Israeli “special relationship.” Eban’s oratory talent, linguistic skills, and effective style of diplomacy augmented both Israel’s image in the view of the American public and relations with official Washington. The article explores several critical elements of these relations during the 1950s, re-examining both Eban’s involvement in events such as Israel’s approach toward the problem of borders, its policy of military retaliation, and the response to severe American pressure following the 1956 Sinai campaign. Whilst not attributing the development of close relations between the two Powers solely to the works of a single individual, evidence suggests that Eban was the right man in the right place and time to provide the necessary foundations for the elevation of American–Israeli relations to “special” in the following decade.     

Visa Diplomacy

The consular element of national diplomatic power plays an essential, but often overlooked role in international relations. This is unfortunate, since the process of globalization places increasing importance on so-called “low politics”—trade, commerce, tourism, migration—all traditional consular areas of interest. This study examines the visa component of consular diplomacy as an integral device in the conduct of international relations. The simple visa serves an important purpose in international relations and is a well-used, but little studied, instrument of foreign policy in today’s system of sovereign states.

In this article, “visa diplomacy” is defined as the use of visa issuance or denial at an individual, group, and interstate level, to influence another state’s policies. Although possessing limitations, visa diplomacy is an available signaling and retorsion instrument which makes it a viable policy option in the arena of international affairs. At the operative level, it links an individual or group to its sovereign country and respective national policies. Denial or issuance at the individual or group level can have outcomes on overall interstate interactions as illustrated in the cases selected for this study. The conclusion assesses where the use of visa diplomacy seems most effective in international relations.     

Translating Technical Diplomacy: The Participation of Civil Society Organisations in International Standardisation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the participation of civil society organisations (CSO) in the various arenas of global governance with focus on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). While diverse studies recognise the difficulty of CSOs’ participation despite the growing importance of standards in the organisation of markets, little attention has been paid to how such involvement is likely to be reinforced in what we call “technical diplomacy”, the negotiating processes involving states and non-state actors geared toward setting specifications claiming to be based on scientific knowledge. Drawing upon scholarship in new forms of regulation in organisational studies, international relations, and science and technology studies, the paper argues that CSOs’ participation depends on multiple translation practices between lay- and expert-knowledge. Findings are based on an action-research project, INTERNORM, pooling academic and CSO participation in ISO technical committees. It suggests some promising directions for addressing the democratic deficit of technical diplomacy.     

Influencing Negotiation Willingness in the Middle East: The Potential Contributions of Private Actors

Numerous efforts to solve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through diplomacy have taken place over the last four decades. To shed light on this dilemma in this article, the role that private actors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can play to enhance the negotiation willingness of nonstate armed groups was examined. It was argued that the NGOs in particular could play key roles in promoting the negotiation willingness of nonstate actors and also in influencing their internal dynamics and increasing their cohesion. Specifically, we examine two pairs of efforts to resolve the conflict in Israel and Palestine: the “Road Map” and the track two Geneva Initiative of 2003, and the Olmert Peace Plan and Jimmy Carter's visit to the Middle East in 2008. In the first pair, NGO efforts yielded unexpected results. The Palestinians were ready to compromise even though the deal offered by the Israelis did not seem very generous. In the second pair, the reaction of the Palestinians to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's generous peace offer seemed especially puzzling, illustrating, the internal dynamics between the Palestinian factions. Negotiation willingness was closely related to cohesion, and that cohesion plays an important role in conflict negotiations. President Jimmy Carter's efforts in 2008 to enhance cohesion among the Palestinians illustrated the potential that NGOs have to complement official negotiations.     

The Emergence of Citizen Diplomacy in European Union–China Relations: Principles,Pillars, Pioneers,Paradoxes

This analysis considers the phenomenon of citizen diplomacy in European Union [EU]–China relations. It begins by engaging with the global discourse about “new” diplomacy and outlines how society-centric citizen diplomacy differs from state-centric public diplomacy. After revealing that European policy-makers are only reluctantly acknowledging the role of laymen in foreign policy-making vis-à-vis China, it shows that whilst citizen diplomacy may be a new concept in EU–China relations, it is actually not a new practice. The empirical part of the exegesis traces the experiential learning amongst 12 European citizen diplomats who have engaged China in the activity fields of disability; psychoanalysis; non-governmental organisation twinning; human rights; climate change mitigation; welfare of orphans, abandoned disabled children and young people; youth dialogue; public participation; animal welfare; and inclusive performing arts. The final part makes use of the newly developed hexagon of intercultural communication and collaboration competence to reveal how the European citizen diplomats have managed to navigate the sometimes-treacherous political-administrative landscape in mainland China. European citizen diplomats have made manifold and often surprising contributions to China’s multifaceted development.     

Change Nobody Believes In: Obama and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Despite the promise of ‘change’ in President Barack Obama's early dealings with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the policy that has since emanated from the White House was in fact commensurate with those of preceding administrations. Rather than heralding a new direction for American engagement with the conflict, the Obama Administration had displayed more patterns of continuity than change in its dealings with both parties. Specifically, by continuing to act as “Israel's attorney” during negotiations, the Obama team had in effect negated the president's early pledges to act as an honest broker in the conflict. In assessing the (in)effectiveness of the Administration's management of the Israeli–Palestinian issue, it seems that on-going mediation efforts to revive the moribund peace process have exhausted their potential. Arbitration may be explored as a more effective method to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian territorial dispute.     

Relative Political and Value Proximity in Mediated Public Diplomacy: The Effect of State-Level Homophily on International Frame Building

This article applies the homophily thesis to public diplomacy and offers an empirical examination of a country's success in its mediated public diplomacy efforts. It analyzes international frame building, the process of creating or changing media frames in the international communications arena, by applying it to the case of Israeli mediated public diplomacy efforts during the war in Gaza in the winter of 2008–2009. The article claims that one way to use the homophily thesis in empirical analyses of international frame-building campaigns in conflicts is to measure the political and value proximity of a country promoting frames to other countries. Yet, proximity should be measured relatively rather than in absolute terms. Therefore, one should look not only at the dyadic proximity between two actors (i.e., Country A that attempts to promote its frames to Country C), but at the relative proximity between Countries A and C considering the proximity between the rival Country B and the target Country C. The study proposes a model and a method to facilitate empirical analysis of this claim. Using sophisticated computerized content analysis, our analyses demonstrate that relative proximity is related to successful international frame building in the hypothesized direction: The closer the relative proximity between Israel and a foreign country, the greater the acceptance of Israel's views.     

积极开创新时代民间外交工作新局面

一、民间外交的定位和历史贡献周恩来总理指出:“中国的外交是官方的、半官方的和民间的三者结合起来的外交。”习近平总书记强调:“民间外交是增进人民友谊、促进国家关系发展的基础性工作,是国家总体外交的重要组成部分。”可见,民间外交也是外交,也是国家行为,根本目的是为了推动中外民相亲、心相通。对外工作中,除了官方的、半官方的,其他包括友好城市、企业、智库、媒体、社会组织和青年、妇女等自然人等都属于民间外交范畴和主体。民间外交具有主体多、领域广、资源丰、接地气、打基础等主要特点。     

Ballots,Bargains, and Bombs: Terrorist Targeting of Spoiler Opportunities

Benjamin Netanyahu's come-from-behind victory over Shimon Peres in the Israeli national elections of May 1996, following an apparent intensification of Palestinian terrorism over the course of that spring, reminded observers of the political ramifications of terrorism. Since May 1996 was also the month in which Israel reentered Final Status negotiations with a Palestinian delegation in Taba, Egypt, the timing of this surge in violence encourages us to ask if terrorists regularly conceive of elections and rounds of negotiations as “spoiler opportunities,” or opportune times to undermine peaceful political processes. We address this question in the context of Israel's long‐running experience with elections, negotiations, and terrorism. We hypothesize that attacks resulting in fatalities are likely to increase in periods immediately surrounding Israeli general elections and key rounds of negotiations affecting the fate of the Palestinian population. Negative binomial event count analyses of the period 1970–2007 suggest that violent opponents indeed viewed the periods preceding negotiations and the ends of electoral cycles as “spoiler opportunities.”     

Grassroots Diplomacy in Battles for Legitimacy: The Transnational Advocacy Network for the Brazilian Recognition of the Palestinian State

Few grassroots-based coalitions from a “peripheral” region have affected high international politics to the degree of creating a global domino effect. However, the process that led to Brazil’s declaration of Palestinian state recognition on 3 December 2010, followed by regional and worldwide echoes of similar actions, provides a pertinent illustration. This analysis examines the winding road to the declaration, focusing on the domestic circumstances that conditioned this Brazilian policy. Using process tracing and content analysis techniques, it describes how a pro-Palestinian Transnational Advocacy Network grew in its degree of institutionalisation, political access, and popular mobilisation, managing to constrain Brazilian policy-makers’ preferences. The findings suggest some novel insights about the changing nature of diplomacy and the role of civil societies in the “Battles for Legitimacy” that characterise contemporary global politics.     

Nuclear Weapons in Britain's Policy towards France, 1960–1974

This article will attempt to draw attention to the Anglo–French nuclear weapons negotiations that ran alongside the British applications to join the EEC during the years 1960–1974. It suggests that the prospect of an entente nucléaire was an issue that played a unique role in the UK's negotiating strategy. It will argue that three successive Prime Minister's—Macmillan, Wilson and Heath—attempted to forge an agreement in the hope of overcoming French objections to Britain's entry, albeit for different reasons. All three were hampered by the “special nuclear relationship” with the Americans and this eventually precluded a mutually beneficial resolution.     

Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers to Combat Terrorism: The Israeli-Palestinian Case

ABSTRACT

Using informers is a basic tool in preventing terror attacks and the nature of current terror threats makes it even more crucial. This use, however, often leads to human rights violations, both of the informers and by them, and to many problematic ethical questions. Drawing on the Israeli–Palestinian example—where a main strategy of Israeli intelligence activity in the Palestinian areas has been an extensive use of informers—this article presents the main human rights dilemmas in the field, divided into three stages: recruitment, operation and post-operation obligations, and also points to the possible counter-productive consequences of such a use.     

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

In the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.     

International relations scholarship,academic institutions and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

This paper explores the role of academic scholarship and practice in constituting, aggravating, and resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The first section of the paper examines how scholarly discourse and methods of analysis contribute to shaping (mis)understandings of on-the-ground conflict dynamics. To demonstrate this point, the paper first overviews conventional social science methods used in mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship that tend to reify, freeze and homogenize ‘the conflict’ as well as conflict parties and then uses a different scholarly approach—namely a processual, peace-studies-oriented methodology—that provides a very different ‘picture’ of the conflict, its parties and appropriate strategies of engagement in the pursuit of peace. The second section of the paper uses three brief case studies to demonstrate how Israeli and Palestinian academics help constitute ‘the conflict’ and its parties not only through their scholarship but also through their ‘practice’. These examples also show the importance of re-evaluating analytical models to include contextual dynamics such as time, place and sources of available power as well as to recognize the diversity of Palestinian and Israeli views regarding the sources of—and best approaches for addressing—‘the conflict’.