Analytical methods and the wild side of diplomatic knowledge production

Analytical methods and the wild side of diplomatic knowledge production

How do diplomatic practices produce knowledge for the benefit of leaders back at the capital? This talk explores the method developed by the author to discern how diplomatic practices of reporting, prioritising, communication and analysis describe subjects, space and time. This is an empirical method powered by critical theory that has been applied to a number of cases, including the diplomatic dimension of contemporary conflicts in North Africa and of the 1945-54 First Vietnam War. Drawing on the work of his latest journal article and his upcoming book The Road to Vietnam, the talk will briefly describe the method developed and explore its findings so far. It will then discuss the relevance of these findings to diplomacy, its knowledge production practices, and more broadly policymaking and international politics: for this is what is at stake when a state tries to understand and describe on paper whom it is talking to and dealing with.

BIO

Dr Pablo de Orellana is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. His research focuses on identity in two distinct interdisciplinary sites. Firstly, at the level of the state and its practices, how diplomacy describes the political identity of those subjects, contexts and politics it meets and reports about. Pablo's second strand of research explores how identity is produced in nationalist discourses and, crucially, how it powers nationalist theories that, on the basis of identity, constitute hierarchies, gender, politics and propose a new vision of international relations.