What is the role of the diplomat in the digital age? In Naked Diplomacy: Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age, Tom Fletcher – former British ambassador to Lebanon and the youngest to be appointed in 200 years – draws upon his own experiences to outline a progressive vision of contemporary diplomacy that challenges top-down or one-way models of communication between diplomats and citizens to instead focus on direct engagement through the use of tools such as social media. In this review roundtable, introduced by LSE’s Nicholas Kitchen, five experts – Alexis Wichowski, Lina Khatib, Iver Neumann, Alaa Murabit and Robert Kelley – respond to Fletcher’s vision of a ‘naked diplomacy’ for the 21st century

Kelley, Robert

Khatib, Lina

Kitchen, Nicholas

Murabit, Alaa

Neumann, Iver B.

Wichowski, Alexis

LSE Research Online

Review Roundtable: Naked Diplomacy: Power and Statecraft inthe Digital Age by Tom Fletcherblogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/07/18/review-roundtable-naked-diplomacy-power-and-statecraft-in-the-digital-age-by-tom-fletcher/What is the role of the diplomat in the digital age? In Naked Diplomacy: Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age ,Tom Fletcher – former British ambassador to Lebanon and the youngest to be appointed in 200 years – draws uponhis own experiences to outline a progressive vision of contemporary diplomacy that challenges top-down or one-waymodels of communication between diplomats and citizens to instead focus on direct engagement through the use oftools such as social media. In this review roundtable, introduced by LSE’s Nicholas Kitchen, five experts – AlexisWichowski, Lina Khatib, Iver Neumann, Alaa Murabit and Robert Kelley – respond to Fletcher’s vision of a‘naked diplomacy’ for the 21st century. Naked Diplomacy: Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age . Tom Fletcher. William Collins. 2016. Find this book: What are diplomats for? It’s not an obvious question to answer.When LSE IDEAS put together the LSE Commission onDiplomacy, a project born of disquiet among the UK diplomaticcommunity surrounding the purpose of British foreign policy, wehad an instinct that diplomacy should be important, but weren’texactly clear how. The Ferrero Rocher image of the diplomaticservice had always been an exaggeration, but budget cuts hadrendered elite-to-elite links still less glamorous. With thepressures being a diplomat places on family life, oneCommissioner wondered, why would anyone in their right mindwant to do the job?But diplomacy is changing. It has always been acommunications vocation, but the proliferation of media outletsacross more pluralistic societies has demanded that thediplomat engages more widely. A word in the ear of elitesremains a useful instrument in the diplomatic toolkit, but all thebetter if that message is reinforced by a wider conversation.This is public diplomacy, the idea that diplomats are the face ofthe nation they represent to the public of the country in whichthey are posted. But rather than that communication be one-way, conducted in staid set-piece events or mediated by TVnews anchors, social media can provide diplomats with theability to communicate direct.The author of the book that is the subject of this review roundtable, Tom Fletcher, embraced socialmedia as a diplomat in Lebanon. He is a passionate advocate for the power of direct diplomaticengagement on social media. As the responses below point out, being a ‘Naked Diplomat’ is nopanacea. A Twitter account is not the same thing as influence: the messages diplomats carry can bejust as unwelcome in 140 characters. It is the act of diplomacy – of communicating with others,explaining, understanding – that is so important in sustaining relationships and addressing shared challenges.Whatever tools diplomats use today and in the future, that fundamental purpose will remain.1/8Nicholas Kitchen is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow in the United States Centre. He is Executive Director ofthe LSE Diplomacy Commission, and leads the LSE IDEAS Power Shifts Project together with Michael Cox andDanny Quah. He is also Treasurer of the US Foreign Policy Working Group of the British International StudiesAssociation.So Long, Smoke and Mirrors! Digital Diplomats Wear No ClothesAlexis Wichowski served as a press officer in the US Department of State from2010-15. She currently teaches at Columbia University’s School of Internationaland Public Affairs. Her views and opinions are her own and do not reflect that of theUnited States government.Diplomacy used to be something of a magic trick. The real work was behind thescenes, officials scrambling to lock down deals by whatever means possible. Donewell, diplomats pulled off the seemingly impossible: agreement, even betweenbitterly opposing parties. The public would only be brought in afterwards, informedvia congratulatory headlines and staged handshake photos. Voila! Peace!Enter technology. In our viral video era, ‘behind the scenes’ is now hard to find.Even if officials relinquish their tech, post-Wikileaks the wise assume that someone,somewhere, is recording. So long, magic.Credentialed officials also aren’t the only players on the scene anymore: non-state actors, tech companies,multinationals, activists, hacktivists and yet-to-be-named dark elements want in. They’ve amassed sufficient force toknock traditional foreign policy politics off balance and even off course.Image Credit: (theilr CC 2.0)Fortunately, not all diplomats were left wrong-footed. As social media transformed from chatter ground to newssource in the early 2010s, a handful of diplomats caught on to its potential from the get-go. Fletcher was one.2/8Naked Diplomacy provides a well-observed, candid and refreshingly upbeat account of the state of diplomacy in thedigital era. The book is entertaining, smart, full of sage advice. But, most significantly, it documents Fletcher’s time-in-service at the vanguard of digital diplomacy.I have particular appreciation for Fletcher’s digital diplomatic statecraft during these years, because I was servingmy own government as social media adviser, studying officials across the globe as they gingerly tried out thisTwitter business. Circa 2011, Twitter was still largely regarded as the playground of gibber-jabberers, trolls andsyntactically-challenged bloggers. Few officials understood its potential as a communication tool, and theconsequences of one ill-advised tweet ranged from swift career termination to inadvertently launching a war. Thediplomats brave enough to test Twitter’s waters did so largely on tiptoes.Fletcher took the opposite approach: he dove in headfirst. Had he done so with less tact, care and wit, this couldhave ended up the diplomatic equivalent of running naked in the streets. Fletcher reminds the reader that NakedDiplomacy is no memoir, but his acts of digital statesmanship deserve memorialisation.Fletcher wasn’t the only ambassador to take on Twitter in its early days. I served under then-Ambassador SusanRice, one of the earliest social media-savvy US diplomats, and also profiled US ambassador for UN reform JoeTorsella. Fletcher, Rice, Torsella and others created something incredible: an alternative to smoke-and-mirrorsdiplomacy, the elite-to-elite nation-state relationship that had dominated for centuries. Unknowingly, tweet aftertweet, they introduced a new practice: ‘naked diplomacy’. Real, authentic, honest, person-to-person engagement:talking with, not at, the citizenry.Diplomats may find this isn’t easy to put into practice, especially when accustomed to mostly doing their work inrelative secrecy. But naked diplomacy is necessary. There is no audience in cyberspace, only other actors. We canengage with them, and hopefully build allies. We ignore or rebuff them at our peril.Lebanon’s First iDiplomatLina Khatib is Head of the Middle East/North Africa Programme, ChathamHouse.In 2013, when I got a job in Beirut, my Lebanese mother asked whether it wouldgive me the chance to meet the British Ambassador. ‘Tom Fletcher is great. Heis young and was serving meghleh [a Lebanese pudding traditionally made afterthe birth of a baby] to celebrate his new son,’ she said. For my mother, not onlywas Tom’s age a sign of British social progress, but meghleh also signified hiswarm embrace of Lebanese culture.Fletcher was Lebanon’s first iDiplomat. He engaged in Lebanese society enoughto know what actions would resonate with the public, and he used blogging,Twitter and the mainstream media to reach out to them. This cultivated a senseof personal connection, even among those who had never met him. My conversation with my mother emphasisesthat the persona of an ambassador matters, and that going the extra mile to reach out to the public matters evenmore.Naked Diplomacy draws on Fletcher’s experience in the diplomatic service to extrapolate the lessons that my motherintuitively concluded as a citizen and that underline the fundamental elements of diplomacy. Two of these areestablishing connection and cultivating a sense of authenticity. Fletcher’s time in Lebanon was spent putting theseinto practice with great flair, sending messages about the UK and Lebanon that balanced subtlety with the spotlight,without appearing preachy or self-centred.Fletcher was not just a bog-standard diplomat: he also became a tool of public diplomacy. Through swapping roles3/8with an Ethiopian domestic worker for a day, he had more impact on emphasising the UK’s values of equality andsocial inclusion and critiquing Lebanon’s marginalisation of the community of foreign labourers than any officialspeech. Putting himself ‘out there’ became his trademark for establishing connection and authenticity.Naked Diplomacy is therefore about the ‘how-to’ of engagement with the local context as well as innovation andcreativity in statecraft. It is about the necessary evolution of diplomacy in the digital age without abandoning theoffline for the sake of the online.The seamlessness that distinguishes Fletcher’s merger of communication technologies with offline diplomaticpractice, his strategic self-awareness and his critical reflections make Naked Diplomacy a refreshing book. It notonly demystifies diplomacy, but also nudges diplomats to be part of the evolution of a thoughtful, multidimensionaltake on statecraft.Open Tweets, Secretly Arrived AtIver Neumann is Montague Burton Professor in IR. Every Lent Term, he offers the firstcourse on diplomacy in the history of the School.If I could reclaim a month of my life, it would be the one spent reading a hundredautobiographies by diplomats. Almost all were long-winded, pompous affairs turning onthe splendour of some dinner party that should have been long forgotten. British onestend to have better prose and puns, but even in the UK the diplomat’s autobiographyshelf is an overcrowded one.Diplomats are better when, fresh into retirement, they write trade books on public affairs.It is important to write for a wider public; diplomats often bring an authentic feel thatreaders find pleasing. Yet these books, which invariably promise to tell the whole story,are typically timid. Having spent a life perfecting a cautious and circuitous style, theauthor ends up sounding just like the memos they used to write.Naked Diplomacy is a cross between the two. There are surprises – ‘Lebanon now has 1.2 million refugees, one infour people here is a refugee, it’s the equivalent of every Pole and every Romanian moving to Britain’ –  but they areoutnumbered by nice ‘Number 10’ anecdotes, Lawrence Durrell-like moments about life on the road and personalpassages on Lebanon.4/8Image Credit: (MarylandGovPics CC2.0)What makes the book is that the author has something that a diplomat rarely has: a personal agenda about how hisprofession should change. The title is a call for transparency. Not of the total kind – fellow diplomats are explicitlywarned against doing the full monty on social media – but enough for most people to be able to understand whatdiplomats are actually doing. The way to do that, Fletcher holds, is for diplomats to use social media. The bookexpands on his earlier celebration of the diplomatic tweet, or ‘twiplomacy’, giving the diplomat reader the fullestguide available on why, when, how and whom to tweet.The idea that the diplomat should be responsive to public debate goes back to the Enlightenment. It was celebratedduring the US, French and Russian revolutions. Woodrow Wilson blew the idea of what was called ‘new’ diplomacyout of all proportions with his call to aim for ‘open covenants, openly arrived at’. Anyone who has held a position on asports team or student’s union knows that for negotiations to be effective, they cannot be fully transparent.And yet, it follows logically from the idea that sovereignty should be popular that diplomacy has to engage thepopulace. Fletcher is right that, given the super-hot media situation of today, diplomats must actively shape theinformation stream. When I was a student thirty years ago, Western diplomats could sit back and wait for journaliststo come to them. If they try that reactive tack today, others will step in and create the narratives. This book should bewelcomed not only as a contribution on the state of the world and an exposé of how to conduct transparentdiplomacy, but also as a legitimising device for diplomacy as such.Remembering the Retweet: On Histories of Harm and Unilateral Diplomacy5/8Dr Alaa Murabit  is a medical physician. She was appointed as one of 17 UNSustainable Development Goal Global Advocates and a UN High LevelCommissioner on Health Employment and Economic Growth. She serves as atrustee for International Alert and Keeping Children Safe, and is an MIT DirectorsFellow and Ashoka Fellow.Fletcher’s accessible, dynamic language invites readers to share his vision of arelevant and interconnected ‘naked diplomacy’ injected with social media. However, as Millennials already know, it is not what you are connecting with, butwhom.  Fletcher talks of his tweets and ‘smart power’ initiatives, but where are hisretweets? To put it another way, social media interconnectedness is not only aboutthe digital territory you take up, but also the territory you share.Fletcher best illustrates the idea of ‘digital territory’ in sharing how ‘ISIL sent 40,000 tweets in one day as they tookMosul in 2014’ (223). He transforms ‘social media’ into a strategic framework for understanding modern-daydiplomacy and the lateral redistribution of power from state to social networks. Fletcher’s criticism of the status quoand his optimism for a ‘way to debate the world’s problems in a more transparent, meaningful and representativeway’ (77) are praiseworthy – until one realises they are little more than attractive sound bites.Image Credit: Facebook Connections (Michael Coghlan CC 2.0)The most glaring example is Fletcher’s praise of his efforts to promote the English language within the countries heserved. Teaching English is not always destructive; however, viewing it solely as a net positive manifests the culturalimperialism that has hurt the people with whom he claims to be ‘connected’. More frustratingly, Fletcher includes anexcerpt of his ‘open letter to Lebanon’ as ‘transparent’ and ‘authentic’ diplomacy. He glorifies the willingness ofBritain and the West to help Lebanon establish stronger internal security, but does not highlight local grassrootsefforts (137). Fletcher concedes that that he is ‘often harangued about Western cultural imperialism by students inPremiership football kits’ (138), but this condescending dismissal suggests his idea of social connectedness isrestricted to one-way dialogue and exchange.The most revolutionary idea is Fletcher’s mention of the role that big data can play in diplomacy through policy6/8planning and harvesting public opinion. He claims that ‘we will be able to predict where conflict is likeliest, tomeasure trends in human society, and even to show the likely consequences of policy decisions’ (112). Rather thanopen letters and tweets, it is this type of social media that has the potential to transform diplomacy. Yet, theemergence of big data in governance poses important questions regarding privacy and state surveillance. Fletchergives only ambiguous – dare I say, ‘diplomatic’ – solutions and leaves out the role of civil liberties groups.Beneath attractive phrases like ‘citizen diplomat’ and ‘global interconnectedness’, the central theme of NakedDiplomacy is the destructiveness of one-sided diplomacy. Social media injections will not foster greater trust,transparency and accountability because they cannot overwrite generations of mistrust and failed foreign policy.Until our diplomats admit to histories of harm, see their limitations and engage with local communities to findsolutions, diplomacy will remain elitist, disconnected and ineffective.Diplomatic Futurism: Danger and OpportunityRobert Kelley is Assistant Professor, School of International Service, American University.Across the literature on diplomacy, expertise long sprang from two profiles. The first is thepractitioner – the predominantly male ‘diplomat’ in the US or ‘diplomatist’ in the UK – whochronicles his time in the ministry or at post and all his tales of high politics. He holds history inhigh regard because he sees himself within it, but rarely wades into scholarly insights.Alternatively, there is the scholar, often an historian, who churns out the bulk of this literature,offering perspectives on diplomatic events and practices yet cannot claim first-hand experience.Fletcher places himself within the new breed of desperately needed scholar-practitioners: individuals with fieldexperience who can articulate what they’ve seen – or, in Fletcher’s case, what they see coming – with sharpanalytical acumen and demonstrated appreciation of the complexities of world politics. It is in light of thesecomplexities that scholar-practitioners writing on diplomacy today generally agree that this longstanding pillar ofsocial and political relations requires reinvention or else faces a future of irrelevance.Building upon his notable career, Fletcher has reinvented himself as a diplomatic futurist.  Considering myself one ofthese, I can speak to its opportunities and risks. The most promising opportunity is that guardians of the institutionare increasingly open to change. Foreign ministries – the most visionary of them anyway – are collecting ideas. TheForeign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) recently received the Future FCO report, authored by Fletcher,suggesting it is a good time to bet on imagined futures. Fletcher’s ideas in Future FCO assume a more plebeianvoice in Naked Diplomacy to reach a broader audience, but the essential messages remain. In the chapter ‘Envoy2025’, Fletcher walks us through the ‘ordinary’ day of a future diplomat filled with active participation on social mediaoutlets and virtual engagement with civil society. Buying into the scene, one can envision the airiness and lightnessof the open, transparent diplomatic space.Fletcher exhibits enormous faith in technology to herald diplomacy’s resurgence, just as telegrams and telephonesbecame standard issue in the communications kit. To those who say Google will wield more influence than Britain inthe twenty-first century, Fletcher wants to prove them wrong. And here is where the courtship of risk is mostpalpable: diplomatic futurism requires disrupting all that diplomats are and do. This is a scary thought for moreorthodox practitioners. Citizens everywhere are finding ways to act more like diplomats with aplomb. Fletchersuggests that diplomats learn to act more like citizens. This circles back to still unsettled questions of representationand credibility, and the implications for statism. The more diplomats act like citizens, the easier it becomes foroutsiders to ask why we need them at all.Thank you to Jenny Maukola for her key role in arranging and editing this review roundtable. Note: This review roundtable gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog,7/8or of the London School of Economics.  Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books8/8

Review roundtable: naked diplomacy: power and statecraft in the digital age by Tom Fletcher

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