Forum on Recognition in Foreign Policy (Analysis) and (The Study of) Diplomacy

Abstract What if the quest for recognition, not power, rank or security, were the overriding objective of foreign policies? What if practices of recognition both empower and subjugate by fixing identities and reproducing the terms upon which agents become recognisable in the first place? Can recognition as encounter become the diplomatic task of, and condition for, a post-colonial international order? This Forum addresses some implications of putting recognition at the centre of foreign policy (analysis) and (the study of) diplomacy. A first intervention on recognition and domination provides the dual theoretical backdrop. On the one hand, theories of recognition are understood as a specific theory of action that remedies some of the shortcomings of rational choice theories within Foreign Policy Analysis. On the other hand, recognition can be the basis of a political theory of diplomacy co-constitutive of international order, where it corresponds to an ethical strategy both reproducing yet also addressing relations of domination. A second intervention exemplifies the implication for foreign policy analysis. It analyses the foreign policy of South Africa as a pursuit of relational recognition, in which the relevant circle of recognition is not that of great power status within international society at large, but the more immediate African environment in which also self-recognition is achieved. The concluding intervention places recognition into diplomatic theory. It analyses the necessity and yet inherent pitfalls of recognition without encounter through the colonial (non-)recognition practices, exemplified through the treatment of the Abyssinian Emperor Tewodros II by the British Empire.1