As McConnell, Moreau, and Dittmer ( 2012) note, diplomatic interactions are assumed to exist in the realm of “high politics” between states which afford one another legitimising recognition as peers and thus exclude non-sovereign others. Second, diplomacy is said to be carried out among states. The actors, processes, materials, and sites of diplomatic practice including diplomats themselves, their day-to-day interactions, the physical treaties and agreements which they produce, and the foreign ministries which house their offices are perceived to be tightly controlled and governed by the authority of the state. While there has been plentiful discussion in the academic literature about the rise of “new” non-state diplomacies, including that of substate regions (paradiplomacy), the popular framing of diplomacy remains attached to the state in two key ways. It is argued that by building on methodological insights from critical readings of geopolitics, it is possible to offer a multi-scalar analysis of paradiplomacy which contributes to an ongoing project of political geography-to unsettle and challenge ingrained imaginaries which underpin our understandings of the region, the state, and the international political system.ĭefining diplomacy is becoming an increasingly difficult task as the widely held and deeply ingrained statist perspective is challenged by the growing significance of alternative actors in the international political system.

The final section exemplifies this through an exploration of the geopolitics of substate diplomacy.

This is followed by an examination of the dynamic evolution of the term “paradiplomacy.” The paper goes on to suggest how theoretical and methodological insights from political geography could be productively interwoven with the study of paradiplomacy. It begins by introducing the increasingly plural understandings of diplomacy that have challenged dominant state-centric discourse and foregrounded the inherent spatiality of diplomatic practices. This paper brings debates surrounding the nature and practices of paradiplomacy into conversation with recent political geography scholarship on diplomacy and, in particular, geopolitics. Despite this growing interest, the term paradiplomacy, referring to the international activities of substate regions, has not featured heavily in the geographical literature. Political geographers have increasingly engaged with “alternative” diplomatic practices, actors, cultures, and sites which transcend traditional state-centric modalities.

Endless space 2 diplomacy