Corneliu Bjola

Security communities and the habitus of restraint: Germany and the United States on Iraq

Borrowing from Norbert Elias, we introduce the habitus of restraint to the study of security communities. This habitus constitutes a key dimension of the glue that holds security communities together. The perceived compatibility of practices emanating from the habitus that members hold fosters the collective identity upon which a security community is built. The violation of a members habitus by the practices of another member, however, disrupts the reproduction of collective identity and triggers a crisis of the security community. Our analysis of Germanys reaction to Washingtons case for war against Iraq provides empirical evidence for the salience of the habitus for the internal dynamics of security communities.

Understanding International Diplomacy : Theory, Practice and Ethics

Introduction PART I: TRACING DIPLOMACY 1. Historical Evolution 2. The New Diplomacy after World War I 3. Global Diplomacy PART II: MAPPING THE DIPLOMATIC FIELD 4. Contexts of Global Diplomacy 5. Tasks of Global Diplomacy PART III: EXPLAINING DIPLOMACY 6 The Making of Decisions 7. The Making of Relations 8. The Making of the World PART IV: DISCUSSING NORMATIVE APPROACHES 9. Re-making the Diplomat 10. Re-making States 11. The Peaceful Re-making of the World Conclusion: Towards Inclusive Diplomacy

Understanding Enmity and Friendship in World Politics: The Case for a Diplomatic Approach

Summary This article invites diplomatic scholars to a debate about the identity of diplomacy as a field of study and the contributions that it can make to our understanding of world politics relative to international relations theory (IR) or foreign policy analysis (FPA). To this end, the article argues that the study of diplomacy as a method of building and managing relationships of enmity and friendship in world politics can most successfully firm up the identity of the discipline. More specifically, diplomacy offers a specialized form of knowledge for understanding how to draw distinctions between potential allies versus rivals, and how to make and unmake relationships of enmity and friendship in world politics.

Digital containment: Revisiting containment strategy in the digital age

Since the Ukraine conflict began in 2014, there has been an increased awareness of the threat to EU interests posed by Russia. In early 2015, the EEAS created the East StratCom Team to respond by promoting the EU’s soft power, strengthen media resilience, and catalogue disinformation. This article categorizes several examples of Russian disinformation in order to conceptualize the conduct of digital warfare and suggest how it might be contained. We argue that Russian disinformation earns its effectiveness by focusing upon efforts to exploit differences between EU media systems (strategic asymmetry), the targeting of disenfranchised or vulnerable audiences (tactical flexibility), and the ability to mask the sources of disinformation (plausible deniability). We argue that the EU and NATO’s response should be informed by a strategy of digital containment based on the tenets of supporting media literacy and source criticism, encouraging institutional resilience, and promoting a clear and coherent strategic narrative capable of containing the threat from inconsistent counter-messaging.

Digital diplomacy – the state of the art

When Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani held the first direct talks between American and Iranian leaders since the 1979 Islamic revolution, news about the conversation reached the public not through a press report or a TV channel, but through social media, the new information medium of the twenty-first century. Minutes after the phone call, President Hassan Rouhani sent a series of tweets that signalled a remarkably swift rapprochement between the two countries: “In phone convo, President #Rouhani and President @BarackObama expressed their mutual political #will to rapidly solve the #nuclear issue” (Pfeiffer, 2013).

Getting digital diplomacy right: what quantum theory can teach us about measuring impact

The issue of maximizing the impact and effectiveness of digital diplomacy has become high on the agenda of many ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs). What impact means in the digital context, how to capture it and how best to make use of it are questions that nevertheless remain poorly understood. Drawing heuristically on quantum theory, the article argues that the nature of the impact and the method of measuring it are two facets of the same ontological construct. The very act of measuring shapes the type of impact we may seek to capture. Getting digital diplomacy right on paper cannot therefore be reduced to an exercise of fine-tuning quantitative metrics. It involves a more complex approach that takes into account active listening to online conversations, careful prioritization of short and long-term objectives, hybridization of online/offline diplomatic agendas, mixed modes of engagement and creative mechanisms of adaptation.

Using Momentum Analysis to Explain and Forecast the Outcome of International Negotiations

Drawing on the literature of technical analysis in financial markets, this article introduces an original framework and methodology for explaining and forecasting the outcome of international negotiations based on two concepts: the relative strength negotiation index (rsni) and the negotiation contextual conduciveness index (ncci). By comparing the parties’ levels of interest in the negotiations, rsni serves as a powerful indicator of the direction and intensity of the momentum accompanying international negotiations. ncci, on the other hand, helps to explain why certain potential breakthroughs may fail to materialize. These insights are being asessed empirically in the case of climate change negotiations, first, by testing retrospectively the viability of the model to explain the outcomes of past climate meetings and, second, by forecasting the likelihood that a breakthrough will be achieved in the next rounds of climate talks.

Negotiation Breakthrough Analysis: The Case of Climate Negotiations

AbstractThe article addresses an important gap in the literature on climate negotiations, namely, the question of breakthroughs: what exactly counts as breakthroughs in climate negotiations, how do you measure them empirically, and what practical implications do they have for the negotiation process? To address these questions, the article draws on market trading theory and develops a framework of negotiation breakthrough analysis for defining, recognizing and measuring negotiation breakthroughs. The article argues that breakthroughs in climate negotiations occur when the outcomes breach the resistance or support level of parties’ expectations regarding the results of climate talks. It concludes with a discussion of the broader contributions that technical analysis can make to the theory and practice of international negotiations.

Keeping the Arctic ‘Cold’: The Rise of Plurilateral Diplomacy?

At a time when the Arctic region faces significant climatic transformations, a triple governance gap threatens to fuel major diplomatic tensions among regional actors over natural resources, navigation rights and fishery management. This article argues that a plurilateral diplomatic approach could help close these gaps by establishing an effective ‘web of contracts’ involving institutional networks defined around the Arctic Council as the central node of Arctic governance and NATO, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) / the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as supporting agencies. In so doing, the article makes a twofold contribution to the literature on global governance. It explains how governance gaps could be closed in a manner that does not require extensive institutional frameworks or rigid legal mandates, and it highlights the role of institutional networks in sustaining regional and global governance.

Revisiting Putnam’s two-level game theory in the digital age: domestic digital diplomacy and the Iran nuclear deal

Abstract Few studies to date have investigated the impact of digitalization on Putnam’s two-level game theory. Such an investigation is warranted given that state and non-state actors can employ digital tools to influence decision-making processes at both national and international levels. This study advances a new theoretical concept, Domestic Digital Diplomacy, which refers to the use of social media by a government to build domestic support for its foreign policy. This model is introduced through the case study of the @TheIranDeal twitter channel, a social media account launched by the Obama White House to rally domestic support for the ratification of the Iran Nuclear Agreement. The study demonstrates that digitalization has complicated the two-level game by democratizing access to foreign policy decisions and increasing interactions between the national and international levels of diplomacy.