Hand of the Prince

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the International Relations Working Group features a presentation by Pablo De Orellana.

How does diplomacy describe what it sees? The stakes could not be higher: actors can be recognised as allies or enemies, gain assistance, or be excluded, violence can be legitimated or condemned, war or peace decided. Pablo de Orellana's research explores how diplomatic text constitutes and promotes descriptions of subjects and their spatial, temporal, and normative contexts. It develops a methodology to map, analyse, and trace the development of diplomatic descriptions, which is then applied to two case studies, the First Vietnam War and the Western Sahara conflict, before conceptualising the conditions of practice, language, and discourse that make diplomatic descriptions convincing. 

Speaking to varied analytical interests about how the state produces and manages knowledge –whether instrument of the Prince, constitutive institution, or contingent identity-making practice– this approach reveals how diplomacy is implicated in constituting how the world is understood. This method cracks open the secrets carried in diplomatic texts because, ultimately, such is the power of knowing whom we and the Other are.