Rehoming diplomacy: Privilege and possibility in the international law of diplomatic relations

Abstract

Inspired by Karen Knop’s distinctive approach to international legal scholarship, and by her writings on gender and diplomacy, this article explores the centrality of households and household hierarchies in the international law of diplomacy as well as their significance for understanding hierarchy and privilege in international law more broadly. This argument is developed by attention, especially, to the negotiation history and text of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR). Diplomatic premises have been organized around hierarchy in ways that are apparent in the text and travaux préparatoires of the VCDR, the article shows, and the diplomatic premises so configured do work in international legal discourse beyond being expressly defined and protected by international law. Those premises afford a model of how statehood should be performed and how states should relate to one another, helping to normalize hierarchy within and between states, and to entrench gendered hierarchies (in combination with class and racial hierarchies) in diplomatic work. The article demonstrates how attention to the role of hierarchy ‘at home’ in diplomatic work, in the hybrid, public-private space of the diplomatic household, can elucidate international law’s deep investment in maintaining privilege. This it illustrates by examining a recent dispute between Equatorial Guinea and France before the International Court of Justice over the status of the Paris residence of one of Equatorial Guinea’s senior diplomatic representatives, viewed against the backdrop of France’s ongoing resistance to reparations claims against the French state for its practices of colonial pillage and enslavement. Yet its defence of privilege notwithstanding, diplomacy’s typical residential, state capital-based model is undergoing change and has in fact long been a focus of strategic re-articulation through protest. The article concludes by querying whether diplomatic households could be regarded, counter-intuitively, as legal spaces of possibility for the recomposition of relations on the international legal plane.