Evocative Screens: Ethnographic Insights into the Digitalization of Diplomacy

Abstract

How is diplomacy, a profession long premised on face-to-face interactions, adjusting to life with and on the screen? In this article, I present insights from 5 years of fieldwork (2018–2023) focused on the diplomatic scene in Brussels. I approach this material through Sherry Turkle's concept of the “evocative object” to theorize how digitalization relates to diplomatic practice. In contrast to most existing scholarship that works with remotely collected digital data such as images or tweets, I work ethnographically and explore the associations screens evoke among diplomatic practitioners themselves. If in the form of a smartphone in a diplomat's hand or as a projection surface on a meeting room wall, I show how the screen emerges as an effective and an affective object that diplomats relate to in multiple ways. By paying attention to how diplomatic practitioners relate to the screen, we can capture pragmatic rituals, professional priorities, and formal procedures just as much as personal anxieties, power struggles, and informal relations of competence and trust. Overall, the article contributes detailed empirical insights into the lived experience of an otherwise largely closed-off world and nurtures a new theoretical language to make sense of the digitalization of international politics.