In this workshop, Haakon A. Ikonomou (University of Copenhagen) will give a talk on the diplomatic agency of international officials.
This paper will examine the diplomatic agency of international officials through the labour of three actors working in the field of minority rights, health and disarmament within the League of Nations Secretariat, respectively.
With offset in a broader reflection on the autonomy, norms and loyalties of international officials, the paper argues that framing their work as essentially diplomatic allows us to tease out what the officials were doing in a multilateral setting. Thus, what may seem like mere bureaucratic exercises, appear to have clear diplomatic purposes: whether de-politicising interstate conflicts through micro-diplomacy, creating trust for humanitarian and technocratic interventions on the state level, or preparing ‘diplomatic sites’ for multilateral understanding through statistics.
On the other hand, by focusing on individuals within institutional settings, the paper also argues for a carefully contextualised understanding of the officials’ diplomatic agency as neither pre-determined by bureaucratic norms nor as unrestrained, transnational networking. The biographical approach, the paper concludes, can be a useful vehicle to get this balance right, and thus write the history of the multifarious diplomatic work of international public administrations from below.
Speaker bio:
Dr Haakon Andreas Ikonomou is a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and a Gerda Henkel Fellow in the research project European Security in a Changing World: General disarmament between international organisation & state sovereignty, 1890s-1930s. He is currently preparing a co-edited volume on Global Biographies as well as a monograph entitled The International Bureaucrat in the Twentieth Century: A Global Biography of Thanassis Aghnides.
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