What do diplomats actually do? That is what this text seeks to answer by describing the various stages of a typical diplomat’s career. The book follows a fictional diplomat from his application to join the national diplomatic service through different postings at home and overseas, culminating with his appointment as ambassador and retirement. Each chapter contains case studies, based on the author’s thirty year experience as a diplomat, Ambassador, and High Commissioner. These illustrate such key issues as the role of the diplomat during emergency crises or working as part of a national delegation to a permanent conference as the United Nations. Rigorously academic in its coverage yet extremely lively and engaging, this unique work will serve as a primer to any students and junior diplomats wishing to grasp what the practice of diplomacy is actually like.

In his new book, Lessons from a Diplomatic Life: Watching Flowers from Horseback, retired State Department official and career diplomat Marshall P. Adair recounts and reflects on his time in the US Foreign Service. The story of his assignments throughout the world reveals important details about significant foreign policy issues and historic events, including Bosnia, American policy toward Tibet, the 1988 Burmese uprising, and the foundations of the current US-China relationship. It provides the reader with an inside look at the history of the US State Department, US diplomacy, and US foreign policy of recent decades, during what was often an unstable and uncertain time. This first-hand, detailed account of the author’s work with foreign governments and populations provides a unique outlook on US relations around the world that has critical policy implications for the situations we face today. Through this retelling, Adair illuminates how the depth and accuracy needed of diplomats and Foreign Service agents requires a close and intimate understanding of the cultures and governments they work with.

Inside a U.S. Embassy is widely recognized as the essential guide to the Foreign Service. This all-new third edition takes readers to more than fifty U.S. missions around the world, introducing Foreign Service professionals and providing detailed descriptions of their jobs and firsthand accounts of diplomacy in action. In addition to profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world-from the ambassador to the consular officer, the public diplomacy officer to the security specialist-is a selection from more than twenty countries of day-in-the-life accounts, each describing an actual day on.

What do the men and women of America's diplomatic corps do? William D. Morgan and Charles Stuart Kennedy, themselves career diplomats, culled over 1400 oral interviews with their Foreign Service peers to present forty excerpts covering events from the 1920s to the 1990s. Insiders recount what happens when a consul spies on Nazi Germany, Mao Tse-Tung drops by for a chat, the Cold War begins with the Berlin blockade, the Marshall Plan rescues Europe, Sukarno moves Indonesia into the communist camp, Khrushchev calls President Kennedy an SOB, and our ambassador is murdered in Kabul. "You are there" accounts deepen readers' understanding, as diplomatic and consular officers talk about the beginnings of Kremlinology, predicting a coup in Ecuador, Hemingway and the embassy in Havana, the secret formulation of the NATO treaty, Jerusalem after the British and the US recognition of Israel, fighting in the Congo over Katangan secession, dealing with an alcoholic foreign president, human rights work in Paraguay, the U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran, the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, helping families of the Pan Am 103 victims, Greece and Turkey at odds over a tiny island, embassy roles in Riyadh and Tel Aviv during Desert Storm, and many more.

This book seeks to identify a body or tradition of diplomatic thinking and construct a diplomatic theory of international relations from it.

The 2010 WikiLeaks release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables has made it eminently clear that there is a vast gulf between the public face of diplomacy and the opinions and actions that take place behind embassy doors. In At Home with the Diplomats, Iver B. Neumann offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a foreign ministry. Neumann worked for several years at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he had an up-close view of how diplomats conduct their business and how they perceive their own practices. In this book he shows us how diplomacy is conducted on a day-to-day basis. Approaching contemporary diplomacy from an anthropological perspective, Neumann examines the various aspects of diplomatic work and practice, including immunity, permanent representation, diplomatic sociability, accreditation, and issues of gender equality. Neumann shows that the diplomat working abroad and the diplomat at home are engaged in two different modes of knowledge production. Diplomats in the field focus primarily on gathering and processing information. In contrast, the diplomat based in his or her home capital is caught up in the seemingly endless production of texts: reports, speeches, position papers, and the like. Neumann leaves the reader with a keen sense of the practices of diplomacy: relations with foreign ministries, mediating between other people’s positions while integrating personal and professional into a cohesive whole, adherence to compulsory routines and agendas, and, above all, the generation of knowledge. Yet even as they come to master such quotidian tasks, diplomats are regularly called upon to do exceptional things, such as negotiating peace.

Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador and president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, called the second edition of Career Diplomacy a "must-read for those seeking understanding of today's foreign service." In this third edition Kopp and Naland, both of whom had distinguished careers in the field, provide an authoritative and candid account of the foreign service, exploring the five career tracks--consular, political, economic, management, and public diplomacy--through their own experience and through interviews with over one hundred current and former foreign service officials. The book includes significant revisions and updates from the previous edition, such as: Obama administration's use of the foreign service; a thorough discussion of the relationship of the foreign service and the Department of State to other agencies, and to the combatant commands; an expanded analysis of hiring procedures; commentary on challenging management issues in the Department of State, including the proliferation of political appointments, the rapid growth in the number of high-level positions, and the difficulties of running an agency with employees in two personnel systems (civil service and foreign service); and a fresh examination of the changing nature and demographics of the foreign service. Includes a glossary, bibliography, and list of websites and blogs on the subject.