The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY FEBRUARY 2015 39 The relationship between practicing diplomats and international relations academics is fraught, and they are certainly not on the same wavelength when it comes to teaching diplomacy. Does it matter? BY PAUL SHARP Paul Sharp, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, was founding co-chair of the Diplomatic Studies Section of the International Studies Association and is founding co-editor of e Hague Journal of Diplomacy. G enerally speaking, practitioners of diplomacy are not interested in what the people who study international relations have to say about them. When they do glance at an academic book on diplomacy, they will often be puzzled as to why so much time and space was required to make the point in question. A visit to an academic conference on international relations can be similarly fruitless. Good luck to practitioners who seek a panel on diplomacy as a safe haven in a sea of mathematical modeling and impenetrable discussions about how identities are constructed and constituted. ey are likely to nd instead a group of people who speak in tongues and beat their insights to death, talking about things which seem as remote from the world of ordinary diplomats as one could imagine. Fortunately (at least if one values symmetry in relationships), the diplomats’ lack of interest in academics is fully reciprocated. Within academia, diplomacy is not one of the hot research areas compared with, for example, international theory, international political economy, international organization or global gover- nance (although public diplomacy has made something of a showing recently). e subject of diplomacy does not even appear PRACTITIONERS, SCHOLARS AND The Study of Diplomacy FOCUS ON TEACHING DIPLOMACY in the index of many new international relations textbooks; and when it does, the listing usually directs readers to the briefest discussion of ideas like immunity and asylum, before moving them along to the much more developed sub elds of negotiation, mediation and bargaining. To add insult to injury, even the relatively few academics who are genuinely interested in diplomacy tend to spend their time investigating its declining importance and critiquing its estab- lished practices. ey argue that it must be overhauled to be of any use in a networked world where information is plentiful, cheap and easy to generate, and in which news travels fast among a host of new international, transnational and global actors. What these students of diplomacy do not do is spend a great deal of time actu- ally looking at professional diplomats and their work, or what they have to say about their chosen profession. With this in mind, e Hague Journal of Diplomacy , which I co-edit, has a section called “Practitioner’s Perspectives,” in which we ask diplomats to re ect on what they actu-