Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DIPLOFACE (Diplomatic Face-Work - between confidential negotiations and public display)

Teaser

The rise of social media, coupled with demands for more transparency and democracy in world politics, brings new challenges to international diplomacy. State leaders and diplomats continue to react to traditional media, but now also attempt to present themselves proactively...

Summary

The rise of social media, coupled with demands for more transparency and democracy in world politics, brings new challenges to international diplomacy. State leaders and diplomats continue to react to traditional media, but now also attempt to present themselves proactively through tweets and public diplomacy. These efforts often interfere directly with closed-door negotiations and their codes of restraint, discretion and secrecy.

The DIPLOFACE project explores the relationship between diplomatic negotiations and the public, taking the concept of ‘face-work’ to the international level. DIPLOFACE combines participant observation, interviews and social data science, generating new knowledge about how the information revolution challenges and transforms diplomacy, how leaders and diplomats handle new media, and the role of face-saving and face-threatening strategies in international relations.

DIPLOFACE seeks to advance our understanding of diplomacy in the 21st century beyond existing international relations scholarship and diplomatic theory.

Work performed

The research has so far led to a number of important publications, providing new insights on the nature of diplomacy, the relationship between off- and online international relations and the importance of face-work in international negotations.

The project publications have reached a very wide readership, thus the article published in International Affairs (published September 2018) was the most-read article in the journal for many weeks. Results were also picked up by newspapers (including the Washington Post where we contributed with a blogpost) and the paper received widespread attention on social media.

In addition, the DIPLOFACE project has been widely dissiminated and communicated across a range of platforms, reaching a wide and diverse audience. The PI has engaged in radio, TV, newspaper and magazine coverage of the main ideas as well as presented the project in TEDx talks and at public lectures, key-note lectures, academic conferences and PhD schools. As such, the project is already well-established and on the radar of both academic and non-academic audiences.

Final results

So far, the key publications emerging from DIPLOFACE have taken us significantly beyond state-of-the-art by developing new concepts, methods and approaches to understanding the interplay between diplomacy and public display. Below are a few concrete publication examples of how DIPLOFACE breaks new scientific ground.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alena Drieschova (2019). \'Track-change diplomacy: Technology, affordances and the practice of international negotiations\'. International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming.

How does technology influence international negotiations? This article explores ‘track-change diplomacy’ – how diplomats use information and communication technology (ICT) such as word processing software and mobile devices to collaboratively edit and negotiate documents. To analyze the widespread but understudied phenomenon of track-change diplomacy, the article adopts a practice-oriented approach to technology, developing the concept of affordance: the way a tool or technology simultaneously enables and constrains the tasks users can possibly perform with it. The article shows how digital ICT affords shareability, visualization and immediacy of information, thus shaping the temporality and power dynamics of international negotiations. These three affordances have significant consequences for how states construct and promote national interests; how diplomats reach compromises among a large number of states (as text edits in collective drafting exercises); and how power plays out in international negotiations. Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation of negotiations between the EU’s member states as well as in-depth interviews, the analysis casts new light on these negotiations, where documents become the site of both semantic and political struggle. Rather than delivering on the technology’s promise of keeping track and reinforcing national oversight in negotiations, we argue that track-change diplomacy can in fact lead to a loss of control, challenging existing understandings of diplomacy.

Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Mareike Hartmann and Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2018) \'State, media and civil society in the information warfare over Ukraine: citizen curators of digital disinformation.\' International Affairs, pp. 975-994.

This article explores the dynamics of digital (dis)information in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. International Relations scholars have presented the online debate in terms of ‘information warfare’—that is, a number of strategic campaigns to win over local and global public opinion, largely orchestrated by the Kremlin and pro-western authorities. However, this way of describing the online debate reduces civil society to a mere target for manipulation. This article presents a different understanding of the debate. By examining the social media engagement generated by one of the conflict\'s most important events—the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over Ukraine—we explore how competing claims about the cause of the plane crash are disseminated by the state, media and civil society. By analysing approximately 950,000 tweets, the article demonstrates how individual citizens are more than purveyors of government messages; they are the most active drivers of both disinformation and attempts to counter such information. These citizen curators actively shape competing narratives about why MH17 crashed and citizens, as a group, are four times more likely to be retweeted than any other type of user. Our findings challenge conceptualizations of a state-orchestrated information war over Ukraine, and point to the importance of citizen activity in the struggle over truths during international conflicts.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alexei Tsinovoi (2018) \'International Misrecognition: The Politics of Humour and National Identity in Israel’s Public Diplomacy.\' European Journal of International Relations, pp. 1-27.

The article presents a theoretical fram

Website & more info

More info: https://www.diploface.ku.dk.