Strongmen and informal diplomats: Toward an anthropology of international relations

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from transnational networks of diasporas, religious communities, and trade. Flagging this partnership as the key to understanding the changing twenty-first century international order, we follow how informal diplomats provide strongmen much-needed flexibility and openness in their foreign dealings. This agility, we suggest, is afforded by their earned status in the moral economy of ‘network societies’. Held together by interpersonal bonds rather than abstract national belonging, trust rather than law, and patronage rather than taxation, network societies conjure a state-society covenant markedly different from one between a liberal state and its citizen. By shifting the focus from state institutions to the social life of networks, we place the strongman-informal diplomat partnership within longer histories of diasporic networks and imperial brokerage. Combining this long durée approach with a granular reading of everyday politics, we develop an ethnographically and historically informed inquiry into the two ubiquitous figures of twenty-first-century and lay out a programmatic agenda towards an anthropology of international relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Strongman
• diplomacy
• network
• sovereignty
• transnationalism
• diaspora
• populism
• authoritarianism

Acknowledgements

This special issue comes out of selected papers presented at Strongmen and Networks conference held at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore on 11–12 December 2018, organized with funding and support from the Muhammad Alagil Chair in Arabia-Asia Studies and the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. The authors wish to thank their co-organisers Engseng Ho and Hyeju Jeong and the conference participants for suggestions and comments. We also thank Naoko Shimazu, Deepak Nair, Elaine Ho and the participants at the Rethinking Asian Diplomacy workshop held at the Asia Research Institute, the National University of Singapore on 1 August 2019, for their valuable insights on elements of the strongman-informal diplomat partnership. Thanks also to Thomas Blom Hansen, the anonymous reviewers and the Editor of History and Anthropology for their observations and remarks which have greatly helped us in broadening the scope of the argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).