Making Sense of Citizen Diplomats: The People of Duluth, Minnesota, as International Actors

What is citizen diplomacy and how do we assess its significance? These are important questions because of the recent upsurge in international activity of this kind, and because how we answer them says a great deal about how we "do IR." By examining citizen diplomacy in Duluth, Minnesota, this paper offers a typology of citizen diplomats organized around the ideas of who or what they are representing and to whom. Assessing the significance of citizen diplomacy is a more difficult problem since individuals tend to generate a priori answers to it based on our respective theoretical orientations to IR as a whole. As a solution to this problem, the paper proposes a "diplomatic" approach which focuses on both the representation of differences to one another and the professional commitment which diplomats have to maintaining the practices and institutions which make such relations possible.