Questão 741717

Text to answer questions 40 and 41.

Debating Diplomacy

1 In the first decade of the twenty-first century,

diplomacy came to be widely debated not only by

practitioners, policy experts, and academics but also in the

4 popular press and among the general public. One of the

most significant debates concerned whether diplomacy had

been or would be successful in preventing the Iraqi

7 government of Saddam Hussein from possessing (or

continuing to possess) weapons of mass destruction.

Between 2001 and 2003, it appeared that most of the

10 global public who were in a position to read a newspaper,

watch television, or surf the Internet had formed an

opinion, irrespective of whether they knew who was

13 involved or how the diplomacy in question was being

conducted. The US government of President George W.

Bush and US allies, including the United Kingdom and

16 Italy, were criticized by numerous other governments and

civil society organizations for deciding on their own that

multilateral diplomacy under the aegis of the United

19 Nations (UN) had failed and hence to take military action

against Iraq.

This debate about diplomacy raises a number of

22 questions that point to underlying, scholarly debates about

contemporary diplomacy that have significant implications

for how it will be practiced in the future. The first question

25 is a definitional issue with epistemological underpinnings:

What is to count as diplomacy, and what is not? That these

questions are fundamental to the study of diplomacy

28 shows that the longstanding consensus about “what we

mean by diplomacy” is now breaking down. The second,

overlapping debate is about the extent to which diplomacy

31 in the contemporary period has changed and is different

from, or similar to, diplomacy in the past. Key to

unpacking this debate is an understanding of what

34 constitutes continuity and change. The third debate

concerns the role of theory in diplomacy: What is the

relationship between theorizing and practicing diplomacy?

37 The most intellectually challenging of the three debates, it

perhaps has the most far-reaching implications for how we

understand and engage in diplomacy in the contemporary

40 environment.

That these questions engender debate rather than

consensus is a result of different sorts of knowledge and

43 understanding being apposite to different issues. Some

issues have emerged because of new empirical information

that challenges previously held understandings. Others

46 have arisen as a result of competing modes of analysis of

information. Yet others, such as the theory and practice

debate, arise when more radically different and

49 incompatible theoretical and epistemological approaches

50 come into contention.

PIGMAN, Geoffrey Allen. Debates about Contemporary and Future

Diplomacy. In: KERR, Pauline; WISEMAN, Geoffrey. Diplomacy in a

Globalizing World. Theories and Practices. New York/Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2018, p. 72–89. (adapted)

Regarding the vocabulary of the text, mark the statements below as right (C) or wrong (E).

The word “apposite” (line 43) could be replaced by opposed without changing the meaning of the sentence.