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A diplomat's textbook

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Nitin Pai
THE CONTEMPORARY EMBASSY
Paths to Diplomatic Excellence
Kishan S Rana
Macmillan
168 pages; Rs 800

When we started the Takshashila Institution with the mission to build the intellectual foundations of an India that has global interests, we were confronted with a hard challenge: there are very few good textbooks and case studies on public policy written for India. Fewer still are written from India for the world. Many "textbooks" in the market seem to be published for the sole purpose of preparing undergraduate students for their university examinations. Few of these are written by practitioners. When practitioners do write books, they are more in the nature of memoirs; accounts of events past than analyses that teach subsequent generations how to think about the issues they discuss.

Which is why Kishan S Rana's The Contemporary Embassy: Paths to Diplomatic Excellence stands out. It is the one of the few books that institutions like Takshashila can immediately recommend to anyone interested in international relations, whether to analyse foreign policy or, indeed, to engage in it. It is as relevant to a person who aspires to be a diplomat anywhere in the world as it is to a journalist or corporate executive who needs to deal with foreign countries and governments. It is lucid but succinct; insightful but thin; pedagogical but not preachy. It has anecdotes but not too many. And it has a beautiful cover that makes it a pleasure to hold.

In six chapters, Mr Rana covers the role of diplomats and embassies in their entirety. If you are a newly independent state wanting to set up your embassy, this book is all that you need. It tells you what diplomacy is, why it is important, and how it is conducted. The author connects age-old diplomatic traditions to the dynamics of the present day, where globalisation, technology, communications and political awareness are transforming the citizen-government relationship. For instance, five years ago, India's Ministry of External Affairs, under the leadership of then foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and then joint secretary (and now India's High Commissioner to Australia) Navdeep Suri put social media engagement at the heart of public diplomacy. The idea that foreign ministries must directly engage the public, much less in real-time on social media, would have appeared strange to career diplomats even a decade ago. The index shows that Mr Rana refers to the internet, Twitter and related themes 29 times, and the references are spread throughout the book.

The book starts with an analysis of the context in which diplomats operate: the balance between carrying out the policy directions from headquarters and deciding on the approach that works best on the ground. With usually a small staff, diplomatic missions must be able to carry out political, economic and public diplomacy as the baseline. With the expansion in the number and type of stakeholders a mission must engage -"omnidirectional" in the author's words - this has become more complicated. Today's diplomats must be as competent in their core roles as their predecessors, but must be able to carry out economic tasks like investment promotion, political outreach to sub-state actors and non-governmental organisations, manage disbursement of aid and be technologically savvy.

Mr Rana argues that diplomacy has become a lot more domesticised: globalisation not only involves "contrasting sets of home and external factors" but has also opened the doors to domestic politics, and its co-traveller, the domestic media, into foreign policy. New pressures have arisen on embassies which must take a "whole of government" approach in their dealings with foreign governments. The author claims that this has resulted in the embassy being the best source of comprehensive information on the foreign country. This is debatable. If foreign ministries rely on embassies alone for authoritative information, they risk being blindsided, late or, worse, trapped in the perspective of the ambassador. Even with a "dissent channel", a foreign ministry's effectiveness will be hamstrung if it, in turn, is unable to systematically process information from different sources. Embassies might not like the sound of this, but there are contemporary examples in India's own neighbourhood where foreign policy has suffered the consequences of over-relying on embassy reports.

The most interesting part of the book is when the author shows the reader what lies under the hood of a diplomatic mission: where spies, local employees, consular staff, interns, military attaches, trade representatives and others find themselves under one roof. I can imagine using this book to set a practical assignment for my foreign policy class: go to an embassy event and find out who does what, with extra points for correctly identifying the resident spy. More seriously, as the famous Raymond Davis case involving a US covert operative in Pakistan showed, the apparently simple task of determining who is a diplomat and who is not is complicated enough for a head of state to, er, lie. The book notes how security considerations have changed processes and, indeed, the architecture of missions. Many embassies look like the formidable fortresses that they are. This cannot be without cost to the impression they create among locals.

In the author's view, embassies will evolve to meet the challenges of effectiveness and public expectation. Mr Rana tantalisingly mentions the idea of a networked embassy, without fleshing out how these might work. This is a powerful idea: transforming hierarchies into networks is likely to be the leitmotif of 21st century governments, and the foreign ministry is well placed to be the harbinger of change.

The reviewer is co-founder and director of the Takshashila Institution, an independent think tank and school of public policy
 

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First Published: Aug 18 2015 | 9:25 PM IST

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