Need a thesis topic?

Postgraduate research required on contemporary diplomacy

The following list of topics includes old subjects crying out for new interpretations as well as seriously under-researched subjects of more recent vintage.

Embassy branch offices
As far as I’m aware, there is no published research on this subject at all, so it’s a particularly good opportunity for a thesis. It’s true that there are probably only between 20 and 30 embassy branch offices or annexes* worldwide. But those that exist are usually important and very interesting; see for example my revised blog on US Embassy London’s Croughton annex in the English midlands and the secret deal signed by Russia and Israel reported in June 2023 for the opening of a Russian Embassy branch office in Jerusalem (possibly now on pause, I would have thought). Why were they established? How are they staffed? What, if any, special bilateral agreements between sending and receiving state govern their staffing? What are their advantages and disadvantages? The more modest project would focus on just one branch office, as I did in part in my blog just mentioned. A more ambitious one would cast the net wider with a view to identifying common patterns between them. Ideally, this would require choosing a sample, which would obviously require some thought and almost certainly be complicated by a great variation in the availability of source material between different branch offices. I would start by googling ‘embassy branch office’, make a list and take it from there.

* The usual term is ‘branch office’, although very occasionally ‘annex’ is used instead, as in the case of US Embassy London’s outlier by 74 miles at Croughton in the English Midlands: ‘London Annex Croughton’. But so-called embassy branch offices have to be examined carefully because this term is now sometimes used as a synonym for a purely consular post. The term ‘annex’ has the advantage of suggesting a more intimate connection with the embassy, which should reinforce its diplomatic privileges and immunities, and avoids any confusion with consular posts; but it is more commonly employed to describe a physically separate part of the embassy on its main site. The US State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual states that ‘Branch offices of an embassy are part of an embassy’s facility located and staffed in a city other than the capital of a country.’ I regret that we omitted to tackle this point in The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy. My own working definition is as follows: ‘Branch offices of an embassy are part of its facility located and staffed at some distance remote from the main site but [less there should be any misunderstanding], by definition, still entitled to full diplomatic privileges and immunities.’

Israel’s ‘permanent delegation’ in Iran
I learned recently from numerous secondary sources (easily found on the web, e.g. here and here) that Israel had been allowed a ‘permanent delegation’ in Tehran prior to the overthrow of the Shah and the inauguration of the Islamic Republic in 1979; and that at this juncture this was closed down and its premises handed over to the PLO. I have also seen it claimed that at some point before this ‘ambassadors’ had actually been exchanged. It would be extremely interesting to know a great deal more about this: the exact timeline, the size and character of the staffing, chief roles and so on. It would be equally interesting to know by what means relations between the two states were conducted when they quickly improved again following the outbreak of the terrible Iran –Iraq War in 1980. (Israel and Iran shared an interest in the defeat of Iraq and this war lasted until 1988.)  After exhausting the secondary sources, anyone interested in choosing this topic should turn to the primary sources pages of this website, especially Official Publications. I am not familiar with American archives but have just searched ‘Iran AND Israel’ in the British National Archives at Kew in London and brought up some very interesting looking folders. The online archives of The New York Times might also be worth a search, although it has a (low) paywall. Check out, too, the Tehran diplomatic lists to see if they record the ‘permanent delegation’, which is unlikely, although it should record the staff of the embassy if and when it was actually upgraded to this status (see Boxes 83 and 84 here, requiring a visit to KCL); ditto the Israeli lists in the KCL collection. This should be enough to get you going.

Honorary consuls

In a series of freely available articles (see Further reading on this page), ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have recently put the spotlight on the extent and seriousness of the abuse of this institution by some states. This has made me realize the need for more academic research on the subject in general, including its great value for smaller states in particular. How widespread is the use of such consuls? Do some states favour the appointment of persons in certain kinds of work rather than others? How much control – if any – do sending states have over the individuals they appoint? How do the privileges and immunities of honorary consuls compare with those of career consular officers, in law and in practice? These are the sort of questions that need to be answered.

I think it essential to begin by getting a handle on the legal position. Lee and Quigley’s Consular Law and Practice, 3rd ed (OUP 2008), is not a bad place to start but it has only 13 out of a total of 664 pages on honorary consuls and is in any case out of date. There is, therefore, really no substitute for making a start by grappling yourself with the papers produced by the ILC in the late 1950s and early 1960s that issued in the VCCR 1963. The ‘Comment’ that follows each draft article is particularly valuable in providing succinct insights into the thinking that went into them. The place to start is the Analytical Guide to the Work of the International Law Commission: Consular intercourse and immunities. It takes a bit of getting used to and the length of the documents to which the investigator is drawn look forbidding, but (a) only a small proportion of them deals with honorary as opposed to career consuls, and (b) they are searchable. Then start searching the web for articles on contemporary practice, e.g. by the Baltic states, before tightening your focus and digging deeper.

Secret hostages in Thai-PRC diplomacy, 1956-
In 1956, Sang Phathanothai, a senior Thai official and close confidante of his prime minister, secretly sent two of his children, a daughter of eight and a son of twelve, to live as privileged guests of the leadership of Communist China. Secrecy was essential because Thailand was publicly closely aligned with the United States in the Cold War and host to a massive American embassy and CIA contingent. The son, Wai, was deported during the notorious Cultural Revolution a decade later but the daughter, Sirin, remained in China until 1970. Albeit on Thai rather than Chinese initiative, this was an extraordinary resurrection of a key device of the tributary system of the old ‘middle kingdom’, which was designed to signify recognition by a lesser power of the status of the greater regional power and, in this instance, provide a personal guarantee of good conduct – or as good as was possible in the circumstances. The Thai hostages case was drawn to my attention by my Diplo colleague, Kishan Rana, who tells me that the same practice was employed on the subcontinent in relations between the Rajput maharajas and the Mughal court.

There were evidently other contacts between the PRC and Thailand, which had a very large Chinese community, so this would make an absorbing case study in diplomacy without diplomatic relations. Did the CIA know about Sirin and Wai? What role did they actually play in Chinese-Thai relations relative to other channels? Because it is the key primary source on Sirin and Wai, and also because it is readily accessible, the place to begin is Sirin’s fluent and absorbing memoir of the episode, The Dragon’s Pearl: Growing up among China’s elite (Simon & Schuster, 1994), written with the assistance of American historian James Peck.  What secondary sources there are on the subject I have no idea but online American primary sources which provide good contextual material and at the least clues to the questions I have posed, are abundant. See, for example:

ADST’s Thailand Country Reader. Among the few of the many interview transcripts here that I have read, I found the lengthy interview with Economic Officer Kempton B. Jenkins, Bangkok 1954-6, particularly useful. NB these oral history transcripts follow the long list of names of interviewees, which isn’t immediately obvious. They are also easily searchable using your own computer’s ‘Find on page’ function since the ‘reader’ is one huge page.

CIA docs on Thailand.

FRUS

Foreign Service List 1956. Shows great size of US Embassy Bangkok, and the names give clues to further research. Many lists for later years can also be found online.

Contact groups
At the end of May 2020 seven former British foreign secretaries suggested a contact group as the way forward in the crisis provoked by China’s threatening attitude to Hong Kong; see The Guardian 1 June 2020. However, in the 5th edition of my textbook, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice, I argued (pp. 262-3) that this diplomatic device had a fatal disadvantage. Was I wrong? [May 2020]

Health attachés
Among other questions: Why they are important, especially in a pandemic, and – despite this – why few embassies have them. This is a topical and seriously under-researched subject. See my blog of 20 May 2020 on this subject (‘Where have all the health attachés gone?’), which has links that should get you started. Hard work on online diplomatic lists will also pay dividends, as will the open files of some governments’ foreign and health ministries. [May 2020]

Diplomatic security: Security at British diplomatic posts
Diplomatic security is the term now usually preferred to ‘diplomatic protection’ for the steps taken by states to safeguard the fabric of their diplomatic and consular missions, the lives of their diplomatic and consular officers, and the integrity of their communications. It is an important subject but was largely neglected until this year, when Diplomatic Security: A Comparative Analysis, edited by Eugenio Cusumano and Christopher Kinsey, was published by Stanford University Press. However, while a useful first step, this volume of essays has marked limitations, as I argue in a review for H-Net. The upside of this is that it offers multiple launching points for further research. A case in point is British practice in providing mission security because the chapter on this by Kinsey is heavier on general reflexes, bureaucratic support at home, and the types of security personnel involved than on exactly how it is delivered in practice. It is true, as he says, that – for good reasons – all governments are tight-lipped on current security measures but some documents are availabIe at the National Archives in London up to the late 1980s which are sure to give some insight into the British tradition – and thus to likely echoes in current practice. With the exception of three documents, Kinsey has not done this research, as far as I can tell from his endnotes, so I opened the ‘Discovery’ page filtered for 1950+ and keyed the following terms into the Search box:

‘embassy defence’, ‘embassy compounds’, ‘diplomatic security’, and ‘diplomatic protection’. Excluding those on communications, which I ignored, the following are the likely looking files these searches turned up:

• FCO 58/4941: ‘Security and protection of diplomatic missions and representation’ (1988)

• FCO 58/3704: United Nations: protection of diplomats (1984)

• FCO 58/698: United Nations discussions on protection of diplomats (1972)

• FCO 98/682: European cooperation on protection of diplomats (1979)

• FCO 33/3848: ‘Security of UK diplomatic missions following assassination of Sir Richard Sykes, HM Ambassador, The Hague, March 1979 (1979)

• FO 1043/91: Potential break of diplomatic relations: defence of British Embassy (Addis Ababa) (1966)

• FCO 31/3527: New building: British Embassy compound, Addis Ababa (1982)

• FCO 7/3783: Embassy security in Bogota (1980)

• FO 371/180599: HM Embassy security (Vietnam) (1965)

• WORK/10/270: Embassy Security Measures (Baghdad) (1942-52)

• FO 366/3439: New embassy compound projected for Jedda (1965)

• FCO 8/3521: British Embassy in Abu Dhabi: development of compound (1980)

• FCO 17/1435: Safety of foreign embassies in Amman: grenade explosion in chancery compound of British Embassy, 18 June (1971)

• FCO 7/6520: Diplomatic representation of the UK in Argentina: security of British Interests Section, Buenos Aires (BISBA) (1986)

• FCO 79/546: Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) review of overseas representation: paper on security constraints (1976-7)

• FCO 8/1358: Reports on security inspections of political residences and agencies in Persian Gulf (1970)

• FCO 79/125: Report of the Review Committee on Overseas Representation under the Chairmanship of Sir Val Duncan, ‘Duncan Report’: Interdepartmental Steering Committee; Sub-Committee on security problems (1969)

• FCO 37/3323: Protection of diplomatic staff and property in Nepal (1983)

• FCO 58/2005: Terrorism, diplomatic hostage-taking and Nordic item on the protection of diplomats (1980)

• FCO 41/869: Consultations in WEU on protection of diplomats from kidnapping and terrorism (1971)

• FO 371/100324: Protection of non-diplomatic British staff at Iron Curtain posts; comment and suggestions on position of non-diplomatic staff at Moscow; US State Department attitude to the problem (1952)

If you are interested and are able to visit the archive, you could do worse than to check them out, bearing in mind that some will prove to be useless.

The following files were helpfully located and used by Kinsey, although the numbers are, of course, National Archives’ catalogue numbers used for ordering, not FCO file numbers, as suggested at his endnote 20:

• FCO 93/2447: British Embassy in Lebanon, including security of HM Ambassador (1980)

• FCO 31/2942: Inspection of British High Commission, Kampala, Uganda (1980)

• FCO 7/2760: Bomb explosion outside the British Ambassador’s house, Buenos Aires, 25 April 1975 (1975)

NB. When citing a document from one of these files, it should be preceded by ‘TNA’, the preferred acronym for The National Archives at Kew in London. For fuller, authoritative guidance on citing sources from this archives, see here.

Another freely available online resource on this subject, which Kinsey rightly uses, is this:
House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Annual Report 2003– 2004,  Eighth Report of Session 2003–04, Report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence, HC 745,  23 September 2004, pp. 29-33, Ev 78-80, and search ‘security’ in this document:

Representative offices: de facto embassies, quasi-embassies, or lobby groups?
I have posted here a lengthy Research Note (Project 2) under this heading which I hope will give ideas for both MA and PhD theses. I have placed it on my ‘Current Research’ page because it was the quickest way to get it up but I do not propose to do any further research in the area myself. A thesis could concentrate on just one representative office, a class of offices (e.g. those with no diplomatic status at all), a receiving state’s policy towards representative offices, the invention of the ‘mission’, and so on. There’s plenty of scope here, and it’s important because the separatist tendencies that produce representative offices show no signs of weakening. Even in the so-called ‘United Kingdom’ they are being stimulated dangerously by the lunatic fringe behind the Conservative Party government. Scotland voted strongly to remain in the EU but is being dragged out by the English-dominated Parliament. [10 February 2019]

The problem of  ‘sham diplomats’
‘Sham diplomats’ are individuals  (usually wealthy or influential in their own countries) who have no relevant qualifications whatever and secure diplomatic posts in order solely to obtain diplomatic immunity for personal reasons. They usually hold ranks below head of mission and are therefore not exposed to much scrutiny – or much, if any, work. (For these reasons, they are not identical to the ‘political appointees’ commonly made by US presidents to ambassadorships.) They present an important public policy question that became topical in the UK in 2016 with the Estrada v. Juffali case, and it is crying out for investigation. What is the size of the problem? Are some kinds of state more guilty of it than others? Is it usually easier to make ‘sham’ appointments to permanent missions to international organizations than to embassies to states and, if so, why? What can be done about the problem without breaking diplomatic law (see especially Articles 9 and 39.1 of the VCDR)? These seem to me to be the main questions to be tackled. The work of Professor Craig Barker is a good place to start. You would also need to study the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations (or ‘General Convention’) (1946) and the numerous more specialized conventions shaped so heavily by it: the various ‘headquarters agreements’ (plus later amendments) as well as the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the Specialized Agencies (1947) and national implementing legislation. An example of a headquarters agreement is that between the IMO and the UK (1968), see esp. Art. 7.

Interests sections in US-Cuba relations
US-Cuban relations have been much under scrutiny since their dramatic improvement beginning in 2014. Nevertheless, as far as I am aware, there has been no serious study of the working of the large interests sections that have been such a marked feature of this relationship since the time of the Carter administration in the late 1970s. This is the more surprising because the American materials for such a study are abundant. For example: the US Interests Section in Havana (USINT) has been the subject of a number of OIG Reports available on the Internet, most recently that of May 2014 (just google ‘OIG USINT’); and numerous US diplomats posted to it (including five chiefs of mission – there is a complete list of them here – and one DCM) have provided revealing accounts of its activities in the course of interviews for ADST’s oral history programme, to which I draw attention on the ‘Resources for Study’ page (the easiest way to find the relevant passages is to go to the ‘Cuba Country Reader’ page and then search ‘interests section’, which will also pick out the observations of Department of State officers on the operations of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington). Anyone contemplating a PhD thesis on this subject would ideally need to get at any Cuban, Swiss and Czech materials available as well. Having just read the astonishing account by James Cason, chief of mission at USINT in 2002-2005, of what he was allowed to get up to, I would be particularly interested to know something about the attitude to him of his nominal boss, the Swiss Ambassador at Havana! USINT is certainly a very unusual interests section.