A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office looks at the inner workings of the Victorian Foreign Office through a social history lens.Instead of examining the Foreign Office archives for dealings of ministers, secretaries, and undersecretaries, Hamilton instead centers his narrative on the labor of domestic servants, librarians, and messengers who worked (and lived) in the Foreign Office from 1782-1914.Drawing primarily upon sources from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Library and Crown Copyright documents available at the National Archives, Kew, Hamilton brings forth names, occupations, and concerns of the staff members of the Foreign Office, from King's and Queen's messengers to housekeepers, to shine a different light on the story of diplomacy, thus providing examples of how to find these little-known and forgotten people in the archives.Instead of a story about foreign policy and the Foreign Office, Servants of Diplomacy offers a bottom-up social history about the actual, physical Foreign Office itself as a workplace for those who worked and lived within and around the Foreign Office, and how their labor provided structure for others -the ministers, secretaries, and clerks -also working in the Foreign Office.The Foreign Office becomes not just a synecdoche for the workings of British diplomacy, but rather becomes an actual place with many different classes of people moving in, out, and around it.The book is divided chronologically.The first three chapters begin in the late-eighteenth century, and continue into the mid-nineteenth century.The last three chapters begin in the mid-nineteenth century and end in 1914.In addition to being divided chronologically, the book is also divided by the who of these "servants of diplomacy," based on differences of class and status.Hamilton makes it clear that the Foreign Office workers who interest him are not the clerks and the bureaucrats, but domestic servants, librarians, and Diplomatica 5 (2023) 149-166

Abstract The term “water diplomacy” has gained currency among policy makers and academics. It reflects an awareness that the use, management, and protection of transboundary water resources is intrinsically political and often embedded in complex political settings. Based on a review of academic and policy documents, we analyze the variety of understandings and common patterns in the definition of water diplomacy. We also analyze tools, tracks, and levels through which and at which water diplomacy is conducted or analyzed. With our own definition of water diplomacy as deliberative political processes and practices of preventing, mitigating, and resolving disputes over transboundary water resources and developing joint water governance arrangements by applying foreign policy means which are embedded in bi- and/or multilateral relations beyond the water sector and taking place at different tracks and scales, we aim to advance the discourse on water diplomacy both in the academic and policy realms.

If “diplomacy” captures highly heterogeneous events – an inter-state conference on climate change with thousands of participants is as much “diplomacy” as a cocktail party in a small embassy – then how can it be that society recognizes the very same ‘diplomacy’ in such dissimilar occurrences? Ramy Youssef’s book offers the most complex and yet harmonious response to this question, a response nourished by Luhmannian systems theory, attaining a degree of abstraction so high that it covers an astounding repertoire of both world-significant and seemingly trifle matters. The book raises the bar for further theorization of diplomacy to a yet

This volume gathers the results of a roundtable held during the XXIIIeCongrès international des Études Byzantines in Belgrade, in August 2016. The title of the conference was slightly different (Les relations diplomatiques byzantines (Ve-XVesiècle): Permanences et/ou changement) but the two curators, Nicolas Drocort and Élisabeth Malamut, keep the interplay of permanence and change at the heart of their work. The focus of the volume is indeed on permanence and change in diplomatic practices and cultures during the millennium of Byzantine history. The exceptionality of such a longue durée –