International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   A list of topics to treat under the heading of geography and diplomacy should be easy to imagine as the two are closely related. Geography deals with state and territory. The state system is based on a territorial order ( Taylor 1994 ; Sassen 2006 ). Statecraft, the domain of diplomacy, is about the management of that order. Nonetheless, the geography of diplomacy is not a familiar sign under which scholars congregate like diplomatic history. Recent political geography textbooks, the repositories of the ordered stock of knowledge of the relevant subdiscipline, treat the subject of diplomacy sparingly, if at all. The subject hardly figures in their indexes. Similarly, diplomats and diplomacy never figure in the titles of articles published in Political Geography and Geopolitics (with one exception: Campbell 1999 ). Significantly, in a Dictionary of Geopolitics ( O'Loughlin 1994 ), mainly written by geographers, diplomacy does not have its own entry, but three composite concepts in which diplomacy figures, do: atomic diplomacy, dollar diplomacy, and gunboat diplomacy. It expresses the preference for a metaphorical use of the concept suppressing its potential as a relevant force in the evolution of international relations. This is the complete opposite of Sharp's defense of the study of diplomacy in a historical perspective as the “engine room of ... log in or subscribe to read full text