Business Diplomacy from an IR Perspective

In spite of globalization and the concomitant increasing importance of nonstate actors, including Transnational Corporations (tncs), the role of business in world affairs still is a relatively small topic within the discipline of international relations (IR) and in the sub-fields of foreign policy analysis (fpa) and International Political Economy (ipe). A quick scan of several text books on IR, show that coverage of tncs as actors in world politics is still limited compared to other actors, including states, International Governmental Organizations (igos) and Non-Governmental Organizations (ngos).1 Moreover, there is hardly any attempt to incorporate businesses in the theoretical approaches. This seems odd, given the widespread view that tncs have become political actors that influence government policies. But instead of focusing on tncs and other businesses as actors, most attention seems to go to the more abstract forces of the free market that are pushing globalization.2 The lack of attention for businesses as political actors also means that the idea of businesses as diplomatic actors has not really been taken up yet; in spite of an emerging body of literature focusing on business diplomacy. Business diplomacy, also called corporate diplomacy or corporate business diplomacy in the literature, refers to activities undertaken by commercial actors (and is thus not limited to tncs) that resemble diplomacy in the traditional meaning of the term. In a special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy it has been defined as “an approach to geopolitical and non-commercial risk