Contested States, Hybrid Diplomatic Practices and the Everyday Quest for Recognition

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this record.This article examines contested state diplomatic practices with the aim to challenge structural legal-institutional accounts of these actors’ international engagement, which are unsatisfactory in explaining change and acknowledging their agency. Considering contested states as liminal international actors, their diplomatic practices stand out for their hybridity in transcending the state vs. non-state diplomacy dichotomy as well as their structure-generating properties in enabling social forms of international recognition – absent legal recognition. The concept is empirically applied to examine the everyday interaction between the representatives of Palestine and Western Sahara and the EU institutions in Brussels. It is argued that there has been a renewal and expansion of the Palestinian and Sahrawi repertoires of diplomatic practices vis-à-vis the EU, which has entailed growing hybridisation. Innovation originated in more “transformative” diplomatic practices capitalising on the contested states’ own political inbetweenness, which established relations that contributed to constituting and endogenously empowering them in the Brussels milieu. The way was thus paved for more “reproductive” diplomatic practices that mimic traditional state diplomacy to gain prominence. The impact achieved on “high politics” demonstrates how bottom-up practice-led change may allow contested states to compensate for their meagre material capabilities and punch above their structural weight in international politics

Pore scale 3D modelling of heat and mass transfer in the gas diffusion layer and cathode channel of a PEM fuel cell

Flooding of the gas diffusion layer (GDL) of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells can be a bottleneck to the system’s efficiency and even durability under certain operating conditions. Due to the small scale and complex geometry of the materials involved, detailed insight into the pore scale phenomena that take place are difficult to measure or simulate. In the present effort, a direct 3D microscale model of a portion of the PEM cathode channel and carbon cloth GDL is used to parametrically investigate local heat and fluid flow at the GDL’s pore scale and their effects on condensation of water vapour that leads to flooding. The 3D simulation through the microscale geometry is among the first appearing in the international literature. The Navier–Stokes, energy and water vapour transport equations are solved at steady state and in three-dimensional space for a range of inlet velocities and cloth fibre material properties, using a conjugate heat transfer approach to calculate the temperature field within the solid fibres. Psychrometric calculations are applied to provide indications of the conditions and areas most prone to condensation based on the calculated local temperatures and water vapour concentration