Diplomacy as an Institution Embedded in Environments, Structures and Practices

Abstract

As discussed in the previous chapter, most contributions to the scholarly debate on diplomacy and its role in international relations would explicitly or implicitly recognize its character as an institution or an established set of rules and norms regulating relations between actors and entities in world politics. Somewhat surprisingly, there are only a few contributions which actually apply broader social scientific theorizing on institutions and apply it to analyze diplomacy as an institution (but see Bátora 2005, 2008; Jönsson and Hall 2005; Curtin and Egeberg 2008). In this chapter, we build on these contributions and apply an organization theory oriented new institutionalist approach to conceptualize diplomacy as an institution.