Assembling geographies of diplomacy under neoliberalism

Abstract

There is an enormous gap in our understanding of the state's role in the construction of international markets. Specifically, diplomacy's position in the contemporary entanglement of state and markets has been overlooked. Increasingly, diplomacy's on‐going adaptation to support neoliberalism has led to diplomats operating in a “twilight world” between diplomacy and business. Using assemblage thinking, we investigate the codings, capacities and tendencies emerging in the social spaces of diplomatic possibility in this “twilight world”. Drawing on comprehensive empirical materials on the UK–India diplomatic relationship, we show how the material and expressive components of the UK Foreign Office assemblage are being deployed to champion state goals in global markets. We illustrate the ways in which diplomacy struggles in the name of the state's international competitiveness. In particular, we argue that these social spaces of possibility are structured by both diplomatic and business calculations that have the capacity to create new and unpredictable courses that render both an uncertainty and fuzziness to the agential interactions between assemblages.

Rethinking mechanism and process in the geographical analysis of uneven development

“…This realist conception of necessary relations differs from the kind of assemblage thinking in human geography today in which necessary relations are deemed socially constructed and contingently framed through specific historical processes. But causation in this assemblage thinking remains vague and indeterminant due to its social ontological commitment to unravelling processes of assembling a wide range of heterogenous social entities to form wholes or assemblages (Allen and Cochrane, 2010; Higgins and Larner, 2017; Jones and Clark, 2018; Ouma, 2015).…”

“… 1. Such process-based thinking in human geography is manifested explicitly in the current interest in ‘capitalist variegation’ (Aalbers, 2017; Dixon, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2007; Zhang and Peck, 2016), ‘conjunctural conception’ (Pickles et al, 2016; Werner, 2016) and ‘spatial assemblages’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2010; Higgins and Larner, 2017; Jones and Clark, 2018; Ouma, 2015) in the political-economic analyses of geographical uneven development. These approaches are often sensitive to geographical variations and historical contexts in their theorization of the diverse processes of socio-spatial change at multiple scales.…”

Political geography II: Institutions

“…In keeping with the greater emphasis on micro-practices, recent studies focus on politics not only between but also within institutions. These practices are analysed in terms of the neoliberalization of state and non-state institutions and the blending of private and public institutions (Harris, 2017; Jones and Clark, 2018; Kuus, 2018; Moisio, 2018; Otsuki et al, 2016). Geographers illuminate the relations among different branches of the state: the growing role of local government activism as well as the courts in many countries (Braverman et al, 2014; Jeffrey and Jakala, 2015; Pike et al, 2016).…”

“…It tackles the flows of norms and traditions that underpin institutional arrangements but are sometimes obscured by them. It combines political geography with sociology, anthropology, and IR in studies of specific fields, such as children’s rights (Kallio, 2018), investment promotion (Sellar, 2018) or diplomacy (Jones and Clark, 2018; Kuus, 2018; McConnell, 2018), to illuminate the struggles for power and authority within professional realms. These struggles are fundamentally geographical as they involve different geographical imaginaries and different spatial patterns in the flows of ideas and influence.…”

Transnationalizing bureaucracies through investment promotion: The case of Informest

“…Most obviously, there is a subject matter differentiation between economic geography’s focus on firms as pivotal actors in the modern economy, and political geography’s attention to organizations involved in politics (Müller, 2015: 302). Even though a growing scholarship is investigating the entanglement between states and markets (Birch and Siemiatycki, 2016; Jones and Clark, 2017: 1; Moisio, 2018), boundaries between the subdisciplines create obstacles to analyze the direct and indirect political role played by firms in shaping and re-shaping the political geographies of the nation-state (Agnew, 2010; Jessop, 2001). Lacking a disciplinary home, the efforts to develop conceptual tools to analyze firms as political actors may prove particularly difficult.…”