New books published

In January 2012 the third edition of The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy was published. This is greatly expanded and has also benefited from the addition to the editorial consultants of former US ambassador Laurence E. Pope and former Indian ambassador Kishan S. Rana. Find out more about it here. Also, in February, my latest monograph was published by Continuum. This is Embassies in Armed Conflict. Read more about this one here.
[13 March 2012]

Turkish edition of Fitzmaurice

I am pleased to announce that my biography of Gerald Fitzmaurice (1865-1939), Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy in Turkey is to be translated into Turkish and published by the Istanbul house, Kırmızı Kedi. Furthermore, it will include as an appendix The Letters to George Lloyd, 1906-1915, which were first published as Tilkidom and the Ottoman Empire. I have taken the opportunity of this projected translation to update the biography in light of later research and make the corrections to my transcriptions of the letters which are listed at the bottom of this page.
[22 July 2011]

Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq

The public hearings of the officially-inspired inquiry into the British involvement in the US-led military attack on Iraq in March 2003, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, have generated a wealth of evidence of interest to students of diplomacy. This comes chiefly from the interviews with the foreign policy advisers to the prime minister, the senior officials with responsibility for Iraq policy in the FCO, and the succession of British ambassadors and consuls appointed to Iraq following the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Fortunately, the Inquiry Committee also has a first-rate website and I have spent some time sifting through the transcripts posted here in an attempt to find the most interesting items. I have added these to the appropriate Online Updating pages of Diplomacy: Theory and Practice. Most of the Chilcot evidence I have identified will be found on the pages for Chapter 1 (The MFA) and Chapter 7 (Embassies).
[10 July 2010]

Latest book review

Kishan S. Rana, 21st Century Diplomacy: A practitioner’s guide (Continuum: London and New York, 2011)
[review]
[16 January 2012]

Foreign language translations

My textbook, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice, is available in Chinese, translated by Dr Pang Zhongying, Director of the Institute of Global Issues at Nankai University and published by Peking University Press (PUP); in Croatian, translated by Ksenija Jurišic and published in the Political Thought Series (Biblioteka Politicka Misao) of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb; and in Greek, published by Editions Tourikis. Translations into Serbian, Albanian, and Macedonian are in the pipeline.
[01 July 2009]

Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger was published in Croatian by Biblioteka Politicka Misao in October 2005, and is also to be published in Albanian by Libraria 'Dukagjini'.
 

 A Dictionary of Diplomacy was published in Chinese by Peking University Press in May 2008, and

 

Diplomatic Classics: Selected texts from Commynes to Vattel was published in English by Peking University Press in 2009.
 

Elisa Risquez of Palgrave-Macmillan, would be pleased to hear from anyone interested in undertaking or promoting translations of these works into other languages.
[01 July 2009]

New MA in Diplomacy by Research

An interesting new educational development is heralded by the announcement of the University of Buckingham that in September 2012 it will be launching an MA in Diplomacy by research. There will be thirteen seminars held at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in central London, three of which will be on research techniques and ten on special subjects given by guest lecturers, among them senior former diplomats and diplomatic correspondents. But the core vehicle for teaching and only one for assessment will be a dissertation. The formula has already been proven by the success of the University’s MA in Military History by research. The current plan is that I shall be teaching one of the research seminars and also one of the others. For further information, please email Professor David Armstrong.
 

New articles now on this site

From now on I shall be publishing on this site – and nowhere else – any new articles I write. This will not only make them much more accessible but also enable me to launch them as soon as they are finished (it can take a year or more to get an article into a good academic journal). In taking this decision I have also taken to heart some of the points made by George Monbiot about ‘The Lairds of Learning’. The first of my articles published on this platform is ‘The British Interests Section in Kampala, 1976-7’. To read this, simply click on ‘Articles’ in the column at the left-hand side of this page. When I have added a second article, ‘Articles’ will link to an introductory page to this new section.
[19 January 2012]

Tilkidom and the Ottoman Empire: Observations of Pamela Button

Mrs Pamela Button, R. P. S. I., is a freelance Home Office-approved interpreter for Turkish and Greek and great-granddaughter of Joseph Bowman, who was second messenger and gaoler at the British consulate-general in Constantinople in the four years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I and returned in 1919 to become marshall of the supreme consular court, a post he held until 1924. Some time ago she kindly sent me some extremely valuable observations on Tilkidom, my edited collection of letters to George Lloyd from Gerald Fitzmaurice – who for a time overlapped with Bowman at the British diplomatic mission in the Ottoman capital – and I have finally got round to integrating them into the list of ‘Corrections and Further Clarifications’ here.
[23 February 2011]

More US Diplomatic Archives Online

I have recently discovered that two more important sources for the study of US diplomacy are now (selectively) online. The first and most valuable is the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), which is available here. The second is the Register of the Department of State – supplemented over many years by the Foreign Service List – which is available via the ‘Internet Archive’. Key the title desired into the search box on the home page, and then sift through the list; most of these publications are on pages 4 and 5. In due course I shall shift this item to the Resources page and fill it out with some guidance.
[25 October 2010]

Five best books on diplomacy

On 5 July 2010, at the beginning of a week devoted to ‘Diplomacy’ by the ‘Five Best Books on Everything’ site, I was interviewed on my own choice of the five best books on this subject. You can read the interview here.
[25 July 2010]

Need an MA dissertation or PhD thesis topic?

As regular visitors will know, I have a page on this site called Postgraduate research required on contemporary diplomacy. This has proved one of the most popular pages, so I have just overhauled and expanded it. However, I should add two cautions. First, the list of topics is not meant to be exhaustive: it is just a list of topics that have occurred to me as being under or poorly researched. Secondly, there is of course always room for a fresh (‘revisionist’) look at topics which may seem adequately or even ‘over researched’. After all, knowledge advances via the constant challenging of conventional wisdom, either on internal grounds or in the light of newly discovered source material – or, more usually, both.
[12 October 2007]