A complete list of publications

Rebecca Adler-Nissen & Kristin Eggeling (2022). Blended Diplomacy: The Entanglement and Contestation of Digital Technologies in Everyday Diplomatic Practice. European Journal of International Relations, Online First, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211055217

This article develops a new theoretical approach to digitalisation in diplomacy, resituating conventional understandings of the relationship between diplomacy and technological transformation. Challenging the conception that ‘traditional’ diplomacy is being supplemented or challenged by new forms of ‘digital diplomacy’, we show how the ubiquity of digital devices and technologies makes disentangling analogue from digital diplomatic practices practically impossible today. The argument is developed through ethnographic observations of everyday diplomatic work in the European Union (EU) multilateral setting in Brussels as well as interviews with ambassadors, attachés, seconded diplomats, spokespersons and interpreters. To understand the place of digital technologies in diplomatic work, we develop the concept of blended diplomacy by which we mean the dual process of the entanglement of technical and social doings and the contestation regarding how this entanglement impacts professional diplomatic imaginaries and relations. Drawing on insights from practice theory and the sociology of science, technology and professions, we show how diplomatic actors demarcate their professional territory and protect their positions through boundary work. They draw horizontal boundaries between what they see as ‘real’ diplomatic work and distractions and vertical boundaries between themselves and other diplomatic actors, ranking people around status and skills. Overall, digital technologies are implicated in deeper struggles regarding what it means to be a diplomat. A focus on the blended character of diplomatic practice opens new avenues for research on how digitalisation, in contradictory and uneven ways, shapes norms, identities, and social relations and how it – through reflexivity, anxieties and contestation – may shape international politics.

Kristin Eggeling (2022). Embracing the ‘inverted commas’, or How COVID-19 can show us new directions for ethnographic ‘fieldwork’. Qualitative Research, Online First, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941221096594

Qualitative researchers often refer to the sites they study as a ‘field’ and the work they do there as ‘fieldwork’. Setting both terms in inverted commas implies that their meaning stretches beyond clean categorisation of places or methods. Taking the example of ethnographic research during the coronavirus pandemic, I argue that embracing this excess meaning opens new research perspectives when fieldwork gets disrupted. As a more hopeful intervention into a debate currently focused on lost access, immobility and professional frustration, this article puts forward alternative readings of ‘fieldwork’ as a relational and emergent process in which proximity and knowledge production are bound to sensitive research practice more than to physical (co)presence. By tragic serendipity, I argue, COVID-19 has the potential to normalise such readings against the traditional gold standard of fieldwork as extended (and often expensive) research stays in places far-away from ‘home’.

Kristin Eggeling (2021). At Work with Practice Theory, ‘Failed’ Fieldwork, or How to See International Politics in An Empty Chair. Millennium, 50(1), 149–173. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211055217

IR practice theorists advocate studying international relations through its manifold practices. On the question of methodology, they thus promote a simple slogan: start with practices! But how do we first capture an international practice? Surprisingly, this crucial question often remains abstract or hidden in methodological metaphors like ‘leaving the armchair’. Reflecting on a supposedly failed fieldwork experiment, I introduce two heuristics in this article on how to make this hidden work transparent. In particular, I argue that capturing practice happens through abductive movements between site, scrap, screen, and seminar work that is similarly enabled and constrained by practical, epistemic, professional, and political positionalities. Using this vocabulary will advance IR practice research in three ways: first, pedagogically, in transferring a more accurate impression of what the approach entails; second, normatively, in accounting for where our arguments come from; and third, epistemically, to avoid only seeing what we were looking for.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Kristin Eggeling & Patrice Wangen (2021). Machine Anthropology: A View of from International Relations. Big Data & Society, 1-6. DOI: 10.1177/20539517211063690
International relations are made up of thick layers of meaning and big streams of data. How can we capture the nuances and scales of increasingly digitalised world politics, taking advantage of the possibilities that come with ‘big data’ and ‘digital methods’ in our discipline of International Relations (IR)? What is needed, we argue, is a methodological twin-move of making big data thick and thick data big. Taking diplomacy, one of IR's core practices as our case, we illustrate how anthropological and computational approaches can be merged in IR research. We report from our experiences with the project DIPLOFACE: Diplomatic Face-Work between Confidential Negotiations and Public Display, investigating how digital communication technologies influence both the study and conduct of age-old and traditionally analogue practices of inter-state diplomacy.

Yevgeniy Golovchenko (2021). Fighting Propaganda with Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media. Journal of Politics, 38(3). DOI: 10.1086/716949 

Many states have become concerned with Russian cyberattacks and online propaganda. The Ukrainian government responded to the information threat in 2017 by blocking access to several Russian websites, including VKontakte, one of the most popular social media websites in Ukraine. By exploiting a natural experiment in Ukraine, I find that the sudden censorship policy reduced activity on VKontakte, despite the fact that a vast majority of the users were legally and technically able to bypass the ban. Users with strong political and social affiliations to Russia were at least as likely to be affected by the ban as those with weak affiliations. I argue that the ease of access to online media not political attitudes toward the state was the main mechanism behind the users response to the ban. These findings suggest that this pragmatic view on the effects of censorship holds, even in the highly politicized military conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Kristin Eggeling & Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2021). The Synthetic Situation in Diplomacy: Scopic Media and the Digital Mediation of Estrangement. Global Studies Quarterly, 1(2), 1-14. DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab005

What happens to the diplomatic encounter when it is digitally mediated? This article investigates how multilateral diplomats, who understand themselves as bringing people and polities together, cope with and resist the move to online settings, replacing handshakes with touchless greetings in videoconferences. Our starting point is the Covid-19 pandemic, but the article theorizes the effects of digital technological mediation already under way years before. Translating Knorr Cetina's notion of “synthetic situation” into the discipline of international relations (IR), we address how the very composition of diplomatic interaction is undergoing transformation. Building on immersive and remote fieldwork, among ambassadors, attachés, interpreters, and journalists constituting the field of European Union diplomacy, our argument speaks to IR debates on international practice, face-to-face interactions, digital technologies, and the political sociology of diplomacy. We show how practicing diplomacy online and with restrictions on in-person meetings involves (re)constructions of its dramaturgy, props, symbols, and authenticity as well as “heroic” fantasies of duty and exceptionalism; we analyze how diplomacy is practiced in “screen worlds” through scopic media enabling “response presence” or virtual co-presence across geographic and professional/private sites; and we trace how resistance to syntheticism emerges as screen fatigue spreads. Overall, we find that the pandemic has accelerated the ongoing transformation of diplomacy from “naked” face-to-face interactions to digitally mediated “synthetic situations,” producing new interpretations of who is “essential” in diplomacy. We conclude by questioning the term “digital diplomacy,” suggesting that virtual practices are in fact not simply “online” but embodied offline, and sometimes actively resisted. In the screen world, diplomats’ bodies (and home offices) become key sites of IR.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen & Ayşe Zarakol (2021). Struggles for Recognition: The Liberal International Order and the Merger of Its Discontents. International Organization, 75(2), 611-634. DOI: 10.1017/S0020818320000454

The Liberal International Order (LIO) is currently being undermined not only by states such as Russia but also by voters in the West. We argue that both veins of discontent are driven by resentment toward the LIO's status hierarchy, rather than simply by economic grievances. Approaching discontent historically and sociologically, we show that there are two strains of recognition struggles against the LIO: one in the core of the West, driven by populist politicians and their voters, and one on the semiperiphery, fueled by competitively authoritarian governments and their supporters. At this particular moment in history, these struggles are digitally, ideologically, and organizationally interconnected in their criticism of LIO institutions, amplifying each other. The LIO is thus being hollowed out from within at a time when it is also facing some of its greatest external challenges.

Lene Hansen, Rebecca Adler-Nissen & Katrine Emilie Andersen (2021). The visual international politics of the European refugee crisis: Tragedy, humanitarianism, borders. Cooperation and Conflict. DOI: 10.1177/0010836721989363 

The European refugee crisis has been communicated visually through images such as those of Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach, by body bags on the harbor front of Lampedusa, by people walking through Europe and by border guards and fences. This article examines the broader visual environment within which EU policy-making took place from October 2013 to October 2015. It identifies ‘tragedy’ as the key term used by the EU to explain its actions and decisions and points out that discourses of humanitarianism and border control were both in place. The article provides a theoretical account of how humanitarianism and border control might be visualized by news photography. Adopting a multi-method design and analyzing a dataset of more than 1000 photos, the article presents a visual discourse analysis of five generic iconic motifs and a quantitative visual content analysis of shifts and continuity across four moments in time. The article connects these visual analyses to the policies and discourses of the EU holding that the ambiguity of the EU’s discourse was mirrored by the wider visual environment.

Yevgeniy Golovchenko (2020). Measuring the scope of pro-Kremlin disinformation on Twitter. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 7(1), 1–11. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-020-00659-9

This article examines the scope of pro-Kremlin disinformation about Crimea. I deploy content analysis and a social network approach to analyze tweets related to the region. I find that pro-Kremlin disinformation partially penetrated the Twitter debates about Crimea. However, these disinformation narratives are accompanied by a much larger wave of information that disagrees with the disinformation and are less prevalent in relative terms. The impact of Russian state-controlled news outlets—which are frequent sources of pro-Kremlin disinformation—is concentrated in one, highly popular news outlet, RT. The few, popular Russian news media have to compete with many popular Western media outlets. As a result, the combined impact of Russian state-controlled outlets is relatively low when comparing to its Western alternatives.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2020). Face-to-Face Diplomacy: Social Neuroscience and International Relations. Book review. Perspectives on Politics, 18(1), 337-339. DOI: 10.1017/S1537592719004328
Marcus Holmes opens his important and well-written book on face-to-face diplomacy with a fundamental question: Why do leaders and diplomats ascribe so much importance to face-to-face meetings? Holmes argues that face-to-face diplomacy shapes outcomes and helps foster cooperation. He develops a theoretical answer as to why this is the case based in social neuroscience, the interdisciplinary field dedicated to how biological systems shape social behavior and processes. Using process tracing and counterfactual analysis, Holmes seeks to isolate the causal effect of face-to-face encounters. He shows that when political leaders and diplomats engage in face-to-face interactions they generally understand their counterparts’ intentions better than if they had only interacted from afar. After reading this original book, I am convinced that face-to-face diplomacy matters and that it can reduce uncertainty about state intentions, but I am less persuaded that the mirror system in the brain plays such a crucial role in this process. I will get to why—and why I still think this book is an absolute must-read—after a summary of the argument.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Katrine Emilie Andersen and Lene Hansen (2019). 'Images, emotions, and international politics: The death of Alan Kurdi'. Review of International Studies, 1-21. doi:10.1017/S0260210519000317

How are images, emotions, and international politics connected? This article develops a theoretical framework contributing to visuality and emotions research in International Relations. Correcting the understanding that images cause particular emotional responses, this article claims that emotionally laden responses to images should be seen as performed in foreign policy discourses. We theorise images as objects of interpretation and contestation, and emotions as socially constituted rather than as individual ‘inner states’. Emotional bundling – the coupling of different emotions in discourse – helps constitute political subjectivities that both politicise and depoliticise. Through emotional bundling political leaders express their experiences of feelings shared by all humans, and simultaneously articulate themselves in authoritative and gendered subject positions such as ‘the father’. We illustrate the value of our framework by analysing the photographs of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy who drowned in September 2015. ‘Kurdi’ became an instant global icon of the Syrian refugee crisis. World leaders expressed their personal grief and determination to act, but within a year, policies adopted with direct reference to Kurdi's tragic death changed from an open-door approach to attempts to stop refugees from arriving. A discursive-performative approach opens up new avenues for research on visuality, emotionality, and world politics.

Øyvind Svendsen & Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2019). Differentiated (dis)integration in practice: The diplomacy of Brexit and the “low” politics of “high” politics. Journal of Common Market Studies, 57(6), 1419-1430. DOI: 10.1111/jcms.12960
This article advances a practice approach to differentiated (dis)integration in European security and defence in light of Brexit. We propose that understanding how differentiation in the area of security and defence is given meaning on the ground requires examining the everyday social practices of officials and military professionals. Therefore, we focus on the ‘low politics’ of security and defence cooperation in Europe. We do so by entering the diplomatic engine room in the EU's Political and Security Committee (PSC). We show how arguments that Brexit will either be the ultimate death blow to the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) or that it will be the catalyst for deeper military cooperation fail to take account of the social dynamics and the historical path of security and military cooperation in Europe. Future research on differentiation should pay particular attention to how such dynamics play out in the everyday social negotiation of meaning among practitioners.

Kristin Anabel Eggeling (2019). 'The digitalization of public diplomacy'. Book review. Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

In The digitalization of public diplomacy, Ilan Manor describes how the emergence of digital communication and social media has impacted the institutions and practice of public diplomacy over the last two decades. The book begins with the assertion that existing academic concepts, such as ‘public diplomacy 2.0’, ‘virtual diplomacy’ or ‘digital diplomacy’, do not adequately capture ‘the impact of digital technologies on the conduct of public diplomacy’ (14). What they fail to identify, Manor argues, is that diplomatic institutions neither exist in a ‘binary state’ of being either digital or non-digital, nor can be separated into those which have and have not digitalized their diplomatic activities (14). As an alternative, Manor introduces the term ‘the digitalization of public diplomacy’ to capture the long-term process through which digital technologies are influencing the ‘norms, values, working routines and structures of diplomatic institutions, as well as the self-narratives and metaphors diplomats employ to conceptualize their craft’ (15). While Manor acknowledges early on that the digitalization of public diplomacy is ‘not uniform across all MFAs [ministries of foreign affairs]’, he nevertheless attempts to build generalized arguments about the conduct of public diplomacy in the digital age by drawing on a range of empirical contexts and examples. In line with the ambitions of the book series in which this monograph appears (the Palgrave Macmillan Series on Global Public Diplomacy), Manor seeks to advance understanding on public diplomacy from a global perspective, looking at concepts, policies and practices in various regions of the world.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alena Drieschova (2019). 'Track-change diplomacy: Technology, affordances and the practice of international negotiations'. International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming. 

How does technology influence international negotiations? This article explores ‘track-change diplomacy’ – how diplomats use information and communication technology (ICT) such as word processing software and mobile devices to collaboratively edit and negotiate documents. To analyze the widespread but understudied phenomenon of track-change diplomacy, the article adopts a practice-oriented approach to technology, developing the concept of affordance: the way a tool or technology simultaneously enables and constrains the tasks users can possibly perform with it. The article shows how digital ICT affords shareability, visualization and immediacy of information, thus shaping the temporality and power dynamics of international negotiations. These three affordances have significant consequences for how states construct and promote national interests; how diplomats reach compromises among a large number of states (as text edits in collective drafting exercises); and how power plays out in international negotiations. Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation of negotiations between the EU’s member states as well as in-depth interviews, the analysis casts new light on these negotiations, where documents become the site of both semantic and political struggle. Rather than delivering on the technology’s promise of keeping track and reinforcing national oversight in negotiations, we argue that track-change diplomacy can in fact lead to a loss of control, challenging existing understandings of diplomacy.

Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Mareike Hartmann and Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2018) 'State, media and civil society in the information warfare over Ukraine: citizen curators of digital disinformation.' International Affairs, pp. 975-994. 

This article explores the dynamics of digital (dis)information in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. International Relations scholars have presented the online debate in terms of ‘information warfare’ - that is, a number of strategic campaigns to win over local and global public opinion, largely orchestrated by the Kremlin and pro-western authorities. However, this way of describing the online debate reduces civil society to a mere target for manipulation. This article presents a different understanding of the debate. By examining the social media engagement generated by one of the conflict's most important events—the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over Ukraine—we explore how competing claims about the cause of the plane crash are disseminated by the state, media and civil society. By analysing approximately 950,000 tweets, the article demonstrates how individual citizens are more than purveyors of government messages; they are the most active drivers of both disinformation and attempts to counter such information. These citizen curators actively shape competing narratives about why MH17 crashed and citizens, as a group, are four times more likely to be retweeted than any other type of user. Our findings challenge conceptualizations of a state-orchestrated information war over Ukraine, and point to the importance of citizen activity in the struggle over truths during international conflicts.

Alexei Tsinovoi & Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2018). Inversion of the 'Duty of Care': Diplomacy and the Protection of Citizens Abroad, from Pastoral Care to Neoliberal Governmentality. Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 13(2), 211-232. DOI: 10.1163/1871191X-11302017
The concept of ‘duty of care’ for citizens abroad is grounded in a political rationality where the population is seen as an object for protection by the state. In today’s globalised world, however, this rationality is challenged by increased citizen mobility, budget cuts, new information technologies and the proliferation of new security threats. In recent years the state’s duty of care has received fresh political and scholarly attention, but Diplomatic Studies have so far overlooked how the recent waves of neoliberal reforms have introduced a new political rationality into policy-making circles, where the population is not seen only as an object for protection, but also as a resource for mobilisation. Developing insights from studies of governmentality, this article argues that when this neoliberal political rationality becomes predominant in diplomatic circles, it leads to inversion of the duty of care through new citizen-based practices, steered at a distance by the state.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alexei Tsinovoi (2018) 'International Misrecognition: The Politics of Humour and National Identity in Israel’s Public Diplomacy.'  European Journal of International Relations, pp. 1-27. 

Recognition, or the lack of it, is a central concern in International Relations. However, how states cope with international misrecognition has so far not been thoroughly explored in International Relations scholarship. To address this, the article presents a theoretical framework for understanding international misrecognition by drawing on discursive and psychoanalytical theories of collective identity formation and humour studies. The article conceptualises international misrecognition as a gap between the dominant narrative of a national Self and the way in which this national Self is reflected in the ‘mirror’ of the international Other. We argue that humour offers an important way of coping with misrecognition by ridiculing and thereby downplaying international criticism. The significance for international relations is illustrated through an analysis of the public diplomacy campaign ‘Presenting Israel’, which, through parodying video clips, mobilised ordinary Israeli citizens to engage in peer-to-peer public diplomacy when travelling abroad. Public diplomacy campaigns are commonly seen by scholars and
practitioners as attempts to improve the nation’s image and smoothen or normalise international Self–Other relations. However, after analysing the discursive and visual components of the campaign — which parodied how European media portrayed Israel as primitive, violent and exotic — this article observes that in the context of international misrecognition, such coping attempts can actually contribute to further international estrangement.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2017) 'Are we 'Nazi Germans' or 'Lazy Greeks'? Negotiating International Hierarchies in the Euro Crisis.' In A. Zarakol (Ed.), Hierarchies in World Politics (pp. 189-218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This chapter argues that to understand international hierarchies, we need to examine not only forms of hierarchy but also processes of internalisation of – and resistance to – hierarchies. We will then discover that many hierarchies are not simply imposed from above but that subordinate actors are often complicit in the ongoing production and negotiation of hierarchies.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Charlotte Galpin & Ben Rosamond (2017). Performing Brexit: How a Post-Brexit World is Imagined Outside the UK. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19(3), 573-591.
Theresa May’s claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit' demonstrates the malleability of the concept. The referendum campaign showed that ‘Brexit’ can be articulated to a variety of post-Brexit scenarios. While it is important to analyse how Brexit gives rise to contestation in the UK, Brexit is also constructed from the outside. Brexit signifies more than the technical complexities of the UK withdrawing from the European Union. It works both as a promise of a different future and performatively to establish a particular past. Brexit works as a frame with potential to shape perceptions in three domains. The first is identity. How does ‘Brexit' shape national and European identities in distinct national environments? The second is how Brexit shapes understandings of geopolitical reality and influences conceptions of what is diplomatically possible. Third is the global economy. How does ‘Brexit' work within intersubjective frames about the nature of global economic order?
Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2017). The Social Self In International Relations: Identity, Power and the Rediscovery of Constructivism’s Symbolic Interactionist Roots. European Review of International Studies, 3(3), 27-39. DOI: 10.3224/eris.v3i3.27340
This article argues that the symbolic interactionist sources of the first generation of constructivists in IR theory are worth recovering because of their ability to address what constructivists have always wanted to understand – the social construction of world politics. Symbolic interactionism is more or less implicit in key claims of canonical works of the first generation of constructivism in International Relations (IR) theory. However, constructivism lost some of its potential to address everyday experiences and performances of world politics when it turned to norm diffusion and socialisation. The second generation of constructivists generated rich insights on the construction of national identities and on patterns of foreign policy, but did not fully exploit constructivism's analytical potentials. Contrary to what most IR scholars have come to believe, symbolic interactionists saw the self as a deeply social – not a psychological or biological – phenomenon. Symbolic interactionism is interested in how inherently incomplete and fragile selves are constructed and deconstructed through processes of inclusion, exclusion and shaming. Today, third generation constructivists are returning to the sociology of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel and other symbolic interactionists to address problems of identity, power and deviance in international politics.
Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2016). Diplomatic agency. In C. Constantinou, P. Kerr, & P. Sharp (Eds.), SAGE Handbook of Diplomacy (pp. 92-103). SAGE Publications.
Diplomatic agency is intriguing. On the one hand, diplomats are crucial to the management of day-to-day international relations and the negotiation of war and peace. On the other hand, most diplomatic action is highly constrained or invisible. This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which diplomatic agency has been conceptualized in International Relations theory (English School, game theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, constructivism, practice theory, post-positivism) before presenting and exemplifying major and overlapping types of diplomatic agency, including communication, negotiation and advocacy. It analyzes how professionalization, legalization, personalization and popularization of diplomacy have shaped diplomatic agency including how international law, bureaucracy, public diplomacy and new information technologies have impacted the scope and content of diplomatic agency. Finally, it discusses how diplomatic agency is linked to conceptions of diplomatic representation and legitimacy in its actual, functional and symbolic forms.
Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2016). The Vocal Euro-outsider: The UK in a Two-speed Europe. The Political Quarterly, 87(2), 238–246. DOI: 10.1111/1467-923X.12265 
The EU is divided between member states that have adopted the euro and those that have not. This article looks at the issue of differentiated integration with particular reference to eurozone integration and the euro-outsiders. I explore the recent public debate in the UK on euro-outsiderness, comparing this with debates in Denmark. The article highlights some striking differences between the UK and Denmark when it comes to the actual management of euro-outsiderness in Brussels as well as some of the dilemmas facing euro-outsiders such as the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Poland as the EU struggles to exit its crises. Finally, I discuss the future of two-speed European integration and the UK's possible exit from the EU. The UK cannot escape the dilemma of favouring either influence or autonomy; whether the UK remains in or leaves the EU, it will need to allow the eurozone to proceed in order to prevent further eurozone crises.
Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2016). Towards a Practice Turn in EU Studies: The Everyday of European Integration. Journal of Common Market Studies, 54(1), 87-103.
This article explores how practice theory can be recruited for the study of European integration. New generations of EU researchers are fascinated by the prospect of leaving the armchair and studying the people and artefacts that make the EU on an everyday level. This article surveys key practice-oriented, anthropological and micro-sociological studies of the EU and European integration and shows how their findings challenge more traditional understandings of the dynamics of European integration. Moving beyond a stock-taking, the article distinguishes between ‘order- ing’ and ‘disordering’ practices and explores the potential of a practice turn in EU studies for both theory (overcoming dualism, replacing substantialism with processualism and rethinking power) and methods (including unstructured interviews, fieldwork and participant observation). A practice turn will force us to rethink core assumptions about the EU and allow us to grasp otherwise uncharted performances and social activities that are crucial for European integration.