Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

No abstract provided.

Diplomacy is concomitant with humanity’s highest hopes and deepest

frustrations. Complex global problems demand—but might not receive

—deep understanding, skilled advocacy, and sustained negotiation and

innovation. Diplomatic method, this article argues, emerges by combining

advocacy and reflexivity, and in modernity as dialectic between

statecraft and humanism. Statecraft is currently dominant, but humanist

aspirations remain pertinent, if often repressed. By examining the issue

of diplomatic knowledge in functional and historical contexts—and crucially

by looking at it beyond information and intelligence gathering—

the article examines how humanism becomes a usable praxis in diplomacy.

Specifically, how humanist …

The recent uprisings in the Middle East have highlighted – once again and in dramatic fashion – the

confluence of understandings of security, representations of danger and practices of legitimation

that shape our variegated geopolitical landscape. The political landscape of the Middle East is

changing, and with it many of the rote certainties about how things are done or ought to be done in

and with the region. Local regimes of power can no longer justify to national constituencies and

international audiences the necessity of autocratic rule, states of emergency and suspension of

rights. ‘The West’ confronts the hypocrisies and …

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