Trans-professional diplomacy

This work suggests that diplomacy is no longer restricted to a single vocation nor official diplomatic work implemented only through interaction amongst official representatives. In exploring the challenges that these transformations produce, it surveys firstly, the genealogy of diplomacy as a profession, tracing how it transformed from a civic duty into a vocation requiring training and the acquisition of specific knowledge and skills. Secondly, using the lens of the sociology of professions, the development of diplomacy as a distinctive profession is examined, including its importance for the consolidation of the power of modern nation-states. Thirdly, it examines how the landscape of professional diplomacy is being diversified and, we argue, enriched by a series of non-state actors, with their corresponding professionals, transforming the phenomenology of contemporary diplomacy. Rather than seeing this pluralization of diplomatic actors in negative terms as the deprofessionalization of diplomacy, we frame these trends as transprofessionalization, that is, as a productive development that reflects the expanded diplomatic space and intensified pace of global interconnections, networks and relationships, and the new possibilities they unleash for practising diplomacy in different milieus