Diplomacy as Economic Consultancy

Our common picture of formal diplomatic relations between modern states is a historical abnormality. It is derived from a Eurocentric conception of formal and public inter-state relations that has been built from the Westphalian myth (de Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson, 2011). The popular imagining of diplomacy centers on negotiations between officials from foreign ministries, secretly discussing conflicts related to questions of sovereignty, the balance of power, and international order (Kissinger 1994; Wight 1977). While ministries of foreign affairs and trade are still the traditional locations for formal economic diplomacy, there is much greater heterogeneity in who is ‘doing diplomacy’ than we may think. In this chapter I explore the emergence of diplomacy via economic consultancy. The chapter focuses on professionals who conduct ‘political work’ as third parties under an economic consultancy model of working – providing international best practice services for clients in return for fees to the arranging organization for profit and/or the costs of service provision.  The emergence of these professionals is a response to the rigidities of the current international order, and how formal diplomacy is conducted within it, and the entrepreneurs who have pushed forward diplomacy via economic consultancy both reinforce the current system while also seeking means to subvert it in many ways.  Their role can be understood as ‘brokers’ who are using their ideas about how to conduct diplomacy through forms of economic consultancies as filling ‘structural holes’ within political networks in the current international order (Burt 2004; Goddard 2009).This chapter discusses how these brokers have emerged and what positions they occupy in formal and informal diplomacy, including public diplomacy. I contend that these professionals matter for the evolution of diplomacy because their claims to authority are non-territorial and embedded in norms associated with humanitarian values and/or professional services firms. The mix of humanitarian values and professional services firms will strike many as odd, but is the combination of different forms of professional knowledge that permits these brokers to provide diplomacy as economic consultancy and occupy unique positions within political networks. Often this brokering role is between established states and populations seeking recognition from the interstate system or mobility. I suggest that humanitarian and professional service firm norms take prominence over specific states or official organizational bodies and integrate market logics into diplomatic and humanitarian work, be they through the front door or the back door.