Abstract Since the signing of their strategic partnership, the European Union and Brazil have been long-standing partners in the UN Human Rights Council. However, with the election of Jair Bolsonaro, this political partnership came to a standstill between Brussels and Brasília due to his challenging the international human rights regime and the European Union’s role in it. Yet, in Geneva, their co-operation in co-sponsoring resolutions continued. Against this background, this article asks, how did European and Brazilian diplomats continue their bilateral co-operation in the United Nations Human Rights Council during the government of Jair Bolsonaro? To trace the logic of relational practicality behind how Brazilian and European frontline diplomats continued their co-operation despite contestation, this article draws on an analysis of 157 co-sponsored resolutions between 2007 and 2022, along with thirteen semi-structured interviews with European and Brazilian diplomats.
Abstract As artificial intelligence ( AI ) becomes increasingly relevant to diplomacy, both as a governance issue and as a practical tool, the question is no longer whether diplomats need to engage with AI , but what kind of literacy such engagement requires. Yet within diplomatic training, AI literacy often remains underdefined and too narrowly framed as technical know-how. This article develops a practice-oriented definition of AI literacy for diplomats that includes conceptual understanding, professional use, governance and negotiation literacy, and critical ethical judgement. Drawing on the authors’ experience designing and delivering executive training for diplomats, it combines conceptual analysis with comparative case studies from initiatives in Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom. The article identifies key pedagogical patterns and institutional constraints and proposes a practice-informed framework for diplomatic AI training. It clarifies what diplomats need to learn, how such learning can be organised and what conditions shape whether AI literacy becomes usable in practice.
Abstract After the Second World War, the United Nations emblematised a new, liberal political order of which many post-colonial states wanted to be authors. India chose to do this by championing the cause of overcoming racial discrimination, launching a strong campaign against South Africa to position itself as the spokesperson of the Afro-Asian bloc. This article revisits India’s otherwise well-known campaign for legal protections against racial discrimination at three treaty bodies – the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; and the International Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination – to map the Brahminical vocabularies the state devised to justify its refusal to proscribe caste-based discrimination. To this end, the article undertakes an ethno-diplomatic study of India’s cosmopolitan delegates at United Nations treaty bodies to show how their selection was a confirmation of the inherent Brahminism of international law. In so doing, the article shows how Brahminism feeds the governing structures of Euromodern international law. Through this study, the article also excavates the key discursive and legal strategies employed by India to transition from an advocate of racial equality to being a staunch critic of international legal interventions on caste discrimination.
Abstract Over the past three decades, the feminization of diplomacy has attracted increasing scholarly attention, yet we still know little about how women and men are distributed across diplomatic assignments. The existing quantitative research focuses on ambassadors, emphasizing two perspectives: the persistence of a glass ceiling and the assignment of women as diplomatic signals of gender equality. In our contribution, we focus on all career diplomats, not just ambassadors, revealing three neglected gendered patterns: a distance effect (women are posted closer to home), regional specializations and posting path dependency (women join other women). We use a new dataset covering all French career diplomats from 2000 to 2020 (12,024 assignments across 286 cities, with only 17.1 per cent held by women). We add two additional frameworks: a work-life balance perspective (how it affects women more than men) and an apparatus perspective (how MFA assign diplomats abroad). While centred on the French case, these mechanisms likely operate across other ministries of foreign affairs, calling for further comparative work.
Abstract During his European tour of 1962, Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda took the bold initiative to establish a strategic partnership with Europe. By seeking Japan’s membership in the European-centred Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, he intended to strengthen Japan–Europe relations, which he considered a weak link in the Western camp against the Soviet Union’s wedge-striking tactics. This political initiative was deeply rooted in his larger strategic view of the Cold War and Japan’s place in it, which was essentially realist. Debunking the traditional view of Ikeda as a promoter of the economic-centred Yoshida Doctrine, the present article develops these arguments by analysing two Japanese primary sources: the articles authored by Ikeda himself and the diplomatic archives of Ikeda’s meetings with his European counterparts.
