At Home with the Diplomats

Iver B. Neumann is Professor and Director of Research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of Uses of the Other: The "East" in European Identity Formation and coauthor most recently of Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality.

• Introduction: Who Are They and Where Do They Come From?Chapter 1. Abroad: The Emergence of Permanent DiplomacyChapter 2. At Home: The Emergence of the Foreign MinistryChapter 3. The Bureaucratic Mode of Knowledge ProductionChapter 4. To Be a DiplomatChapter 5. Diplomats Gendered and ClassedConclusion: Diplomatic KnowledgeReferencesIndex

... Iver Neumann presents a bold new approach: the study of diplomacy as anthropology.... Neumann is well suited to parsing the grammar of this shared culture as a participant-observer of the diplomatic tribe.... By retrieving what this world looks and feels like, Neumann's work poses a series of questions that point the way to an exciting agenda for further research.- Nigel Gould-Davis (International Affairs) With this bookNeumannthe recently appointed Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Sciencetakes on the ambitious task of providing a 'historically informed ethnography of diplomacyin which I ask what diplomats do and how they come to do it'. Based primarily on his experience at the Norwegian MFAand deploying an anthropologist's perspectivethe result is a readableslim volume that is informativeintriguing and thought-provoking.... At Home with the Diplomats is in many ways a ground-breaking book.... And it is fun at the same time. If that is not a sin, then this is a book worth reading.- Jeremy Cresswell (The Hague Journal of Diplomacy)