Pretenders, entrepreneurs, and mercurians: An ethnohistorical approach to conceptualizing diplomacy

ABSTRACT

Despite being around for less than a century, institutional diplomats are usually considered indispensable to peaceful international relations. Unconventional actors outside the foreign services corps might be acknowledged for their occasional role in forging bilateral deals but are considered too unpredictable to ensure a stable global order. Challenging these assumptions, this article offers a new framework to conceptualize the repeated patterns and recurring logics of informal diplomats. As its primary case study, it draws on ethnographic interviews conducted in 2015 with Jumma Khan, a little-known stateless diplomat. Despite no institutional or state support Khan served as a consular, resident ambassador, ambassador-at-large, special envoy, and a delegate to multinational conferences from 1958 to 2002, when he retired. I argue that he achieved these feats by channelling three historically established diplomatic character-types: the pretender, the entrepreneur, and the mercurian. As a pretender, he mobilized support abroad to gain recognition back home. As an entrepreneur, he oversold scant connections to leverage a deal that made his exaggerations a reality. As a mercurian, he moved as familiar-stranger, able to quickly string new places into his dispersed personal network. The article substantiates each of these characters through comparable figures from across global history. Diplomatic actors from various places and times, enacting similar approaches and logics, collectively demonstrate that informal diplomats are not inimitable aberrations. They are instead ubiquitous, recurring features of international relations, and in many ways, more stable elements of transnational politics than institutional diplomats.

KEYWORDS:

• Informality
• transnationalism
• elite ethnography
• global history
• trickster
• internationalism
• state theory
• mobility
• past and present

Acknowledgements

Jumma Khan passed away on 12th June 2021. I dedicate this article in his memory. My sincerest gratitude to Jumma Khan and his family for their hospitality and openness in sharing their story. Ahmed Al-Mazzmi first introduced me to Jumma Khan in Sharjah, and for this I thank him. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ‘Strongmen and Informal Diplomat Conference’ (NUS) and Pakistan Studies Workshop. I thank the participants for their invaluable feedback. Funding for this research was provided by the SSRC and AIPS. Last I thank my partner Ghazal Farrukhi for her moral and intellectual support.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS).