Since the beginning of modern diplomacy in the Renaissance, diplomatic communication has been marked by concern with linguistic precision and the words that make sense of political subjects and their contexts. This book is dedicated to how diplomacy makes, develops and trades in knowledge. It proposes an approach to examine how diplomatic knowledge production describes what diplomats see, how these descriptions develop, and whether they were convincing to one's own policymakers or even those of other actors.
Drawing on interpretive approaches, the volume explores how diplomatic text constitutes and promotes descriptions of subjects and their spatial, temporal and normative contexts. It develops a methodology to map diplomatic reporting, determine how its descriptions work, and trace its development. This approach is applied to the diplomatic communication of two case studies, the First Vietnam War and the Western Sahara conflict, demonstrating how descriptions of actors and their contexts evolve continually, responding to institutional, drafting and analysis practices and interaction with other diplomatic agents, texts and, most importantly, policy concerns. The book also conceptualises the conditions of practice, language, and discourse that make diplomatic descriptions convincing.
Diplomacy and policy constitute the world we inhabit based on what policymakers made of descriptions, assessments and analysis. Such is the power of knowing who we and the others are.