Towards a Critical Diplomacy

Abstract This essay reflects on the potential that deepened reflexivity around cultural diplomacy has to radicalize the study and practice of diplomacy through engagement with academics and practitioners in the field of cultural relations. It explores culture’s role in cultural diplomacy as an expression of Eurocentric dualist constructions of nature and culture that reproduce a Western episteme and reassert universalizing claims that deny other ways of knowing and relating to the world. It aims to unsettle settler diplomacy by engaging with contemporary artists who mobilize understandings of the wampum belt as a function of diplomatic relations to give voice to the political consciousness that animates the Indigenous practice of place-based internationalism. In so doing, it advances a methodology toward increased reflexivity and critical space for discussion across disciplinary formations that currently function to separate the cultural and the political in centering Western statist diplomacy as the taken-for-granted field of diplomatic activity.