In November of 1815, a Philadelphian servant girl, Eliza Alexander, accused the Russian Consul General, Andrei Kozlov, of rape. Eliza's accusation of Kozlov's sexual violation-and his ensuing arrest and trial-challenged both American and Russian views of diplomatic inviolability. It also caused a serious breach in U.S.-Russian relations. The Kozlov Affair shows how the backdrop of the diplomatic household not only served but challenged the emerging ius gentium of the early nineteenth century. As Eliza's accusation became local, then national, and then international news, different men in power (from jurymen to judges; from diplomats to foreign ministers; from presidents to tsars) used the accusation for their own ends. The happenings in Kozlov's household became not only a geopolitical concern, but one of emerging American identity and the boundaries of U.S. sovereignty-especially the rights and welfare of U.S. citizens who worked for foreign diplomats. As such, the Kozlov Affair offers a microcosm of conflicting ideas about power, privileges, and protection-not only at the level of the household, but also national and international levels from Philadelphia to Washington City to St. Petersburg.
This article reinterprets the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference not as a reactive initiative born of the post-Gulf War order, but as the culmination of a longer trajectory in U.S. foreign policy. It argues that Madrid reflected a deeper continuity in American diplomacy, driven by the belief that peace-particularly in the Middle East-is both achievable and a moral obligation that the United States is uniquely positioned to pursue. Focusing on Secretary of State James Baker, the article explores how a figure often cast as a cautious realist came to embody this persistent ideological pattern. It shows that many features of the Madrid process-direct negotiations, the dual-track framework, and the sidelining of the PLO-had already begun to take shape by 1989. Madrid was not simply a diplomatic opportunity seized after the Gulf War, but an expression of the enduring American impulse to export peace.
This Forum Discussion explores the notion of slow diplomacy via an engagement with the tradition of diplomatic epistolography. Specifically, it examines an overlooked aspect of diplomatic practice operating beyond the instrumental, fast-paced, and solution-based exchanges of diplomatic communication. Our focus on epistolography shifts from letters as static artifacts and correspondences to letters as "silent envoys" and iterative performances that unfold over time and contribute to the communication of ideas as well as the formation of identity. We consider how the memory and relational awareness of the epistolary exchange open space wherein the diplomatic Self and Other unflatten, are reflected upon, and reimagined. We are also interested in the reception and generative influence these epistles have exerted through ideational awareness and recursive readings over time, shaping worlds by revisiting aspects of identity. In short, we aim to recover forms of diplomatic writing that have not been exhausted by speed and immediacy, and indeed forms of writing that work through time, often unpredictably and enduringly.
The life of Rachel Crowdy - British nurse, social worker, and highest ranking woman in the League of Nations - shines a unique light on the inner workings of the League. She joined the international organization from its beginnings and was therefore able to shape its practices. Her changing role at the League reflects how it developed from an idealistic organization to a crisis manager, a development with distinctly gendered elements that points to the importance of studying individuals. Using a broad array of primary source material, this article contributes to the practice turn and provides new insights into the role of women in the League of Nations by exploring various strategies that allowed Crowdy to exercise agency as a woman in the male-dominated organization. After having left the League, she emerged again in the context of the United Nations, which demonstrates the links between the two.
At a moment when diplomacy keeps failing, new visions for a global diplomatic history are gaining urgency. How can New Diplomatic History become genuinely global rather than implicitly Western? This article argues that premodern East Asia offers not just additional case studies but alternative diplomatic logics, concepts, and archives to reshape the field. Focusing on collective poetry composition at envoy banquets-an East Asian lingua franca poetica-it expands literary-diplomatic studies through two data-rich early modern case studies: envoy poetry from Ming China's missions to Choson Korea, and from Choson Korea's missions to Tokugawa Japan. The article highlights the promise of a comparative New Diplomatic History as a master discipline for studying human interaction in deep historical time and diverse cultural settings, and on the potential relevance of cultural diplomacy for mitigating conflict in a fragmented world-to make diplomatic history matter beyond historical and academic purposes.
International tensions remained high in South America during Jimmy Carter's term, with the danger of war reaching unprecedented heights in the post-World War II era. Consequently, the Carter administration had to direct its diplomatic efforts to the preservation of peace in the region. These efforts belonged in a larger policy framework whose tenets were the promotion of human rights, restraint in conventional arms transfers, and a new approach to U.S. relations with Latin America. While the Carter administration's efforts to curb an arms race in South America did not have the desired results, the diplomatic approach to the territorial disputes in the region, which combined the moral and ideological convictions held by the president with a realistic understanding of the limits to what the United States could do, at least added a dose of moderation to a volatile regional situation.
While memory has become an established element in research of West German domestic and social policy, especially regarding the Holocaust and the Second World War, it has played a limited role in research on West German foreign policy. This article shows that diplomacy between West Germany and the Arab states in times of crisis between 1964 and 1965 was influenced by several different layers of memory. They fulfilled an instrumental or a causal role in foreign policy. It is shown that instrumentalizing memory as a legitimization strategy undermined the West German position in the Middle East and contradicted its pragmatic interests. In addition, the memory of the Holocaust, colonial pasts, national unity, and a shared traditional friendship competed against one another. Their themes and the questions of their interpretation were entangled. In addition, memory as a part of national identity had a gatekeeping role in accessing the diplomatic stage.
This essay reflects on the critical role of language in diplomacy, as highlighted in the manifesto "Provincializing New Diplomatic History." It discusses the potential for literary scholars and diplomacy scholars to work together; and the affordances of literature as a kind of "diplomatic technology," from the insights literature offers into the nature of diplomacy (e.g. in British envoy George Macartney's 1793-94 China travel journal), to literary texts themselves as sites of diplomatic encounter (e.g. in Turkish writer Halide Edib's 1953 play Masks or Souls?, or Italo Calvino's 1976 novel Invisible Cities). More broadly, the essay considers the open-ended invitation extended in the manifesto as an opportunity to find new ways of co-reading and co-writing diplomacy across disciplines, guided by Calvino's ethos of "multiplicity."
This brief response to the interdisciplinary manifesto "Provincializing `New' Diplomatic History" traces family resemblances between discussions in diplomatic history and in the history of international law, and the shared implication of these discussions in larger questions of how we understand projects of international, global or transnational history. The response probes the Manifesto's framing of a new "new" diplomatic history, arguing for an approach which is less about drawing lines in new places, further out from a Eurocentric institutional touchstone, and more able to put the multifaceted nature of terms like "diplomacy" in issue as a permanent structural question. In closing, the response explores some of the methodological suggestions made in the Manifesto, including what is at stake in imagining scholarly cooperation itself as diplomacy.
Re-centering late-fifteenth-century* diplomacy on King Ferrante I of Naples (r. 1458-94), this essay reconstructs a resilient Anglo-Neapolitan axis that subtly rebalanced power against France across two thousand nautical miles. Engaging the manifesto "Provincializing `New' Diplomatic History," it applies three injunctions - geographical decentering, scalar analysis, and sub-elite agency - through a combined micro-macro reading of archival traces. Three interlocked infrastructures emerge: chivalric ritual, exemplified by Ferrante's 1464 Garter investiture; the alum trade linking Neapolitan mines to England's cloth economy; and "urban diplomacy" enacted by captains, aldermen, and litigating merchants who moved credit and intelligence between Bruges, Southampton, and London. This polycentric network collapses binaries of court/market, formal/informal, and core/periphery, casting Naples as an agile nexus between Mediterranean and North Sea. By weaving ritual, commerce, and litigation into a unified circuitry, this essay answers the Manifesto's call to rethink Middle Ages and early modern periodization, dissolving inherited chronological fault lines.
In our contribution, we reflect on two challenges the Manifesto identifies in conducting diplomatic history. The first challenge is how to expand and diversify New Diplomatic History (NDH) while keeping its identity intact, while the second has to do with overcoming Eurocentrism. To resolve these dilemmas, we propose turning the ethos of diplomacy into an ethos of academic conduct, suggesting that just as the diplomat mediates between home and away, the scholar-diplomat mediates between history and theory, the particular and the universal. We believe the Manifesto's laudable goals regarding the diversification of the NDH are better served by studying diplomacy diplomatically than by achieving globality.
