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Governments, Non-governmental Organisations and the Re-calibration of Diplomacy

As the pattern of interaction between governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) becomes more intense, challenges are posed to both sets of actors operating in policy arenas where the boundaries between issues and roles have become increasingly unclear. Not surprisingly, this changing dynamic has been viewed through a variety of lenses and is the subject of differing interpretations. These interpretative tensions are clearly exhibited in the context of that sub-area of international relations concerned with diplomacy and identied as diplomatic studies. Relating the concerns and activities of NGOs to a concept which, by historical development and common denition, is closely identied with the state and patterns of intergovernmental relations, underscores many of the paradigmatic dilemmas and conicts inherent in the study of international relations. Most commonly, these differences are expressed in terms of exclusivity. State and non-state actors are viewed as inhabiting different environments, working to different rule-books and occupying very different positions on the scale of importance in world politics. They exist, therefore, in two solitudes with little or no interaction between their worlds. For those adhering to state-centred assumptions, the role of NGOs is likely to be, at best, of secondary importance to that of national governments. Whatever their activities, they hardly relate to the world of diplomacy whose inherent characteristics (despite oft-noted conicts of usage) are dened in terms of a particular brand of government ofcial—the professional diplomat. Some choose to ignore the phenomenon: others continue to relegate NGOs—or indeed any other challenger to state-centred assumptions—to the margins of discussion. As Alan James has bluntly put this orthodox case: “the study of diplomacy makes it very clear that, at the international level, the state is, at any one moment, deemed to speak with a single voice. It could hardly be otherwise”.