Effective bilateral diplomacy is essential to advancing a country’s external interests.
Bilateral diplomacy is a key building block of international relations, covering relationships between the home country and individual foreign states, one at a time. It is the very core of managing foreign relations. This course has been redesigned from its original 2000 version, with five new and three extensively rewritten lecture texts.
The lectures incorporate new developments in modes of diplomatic representation and the functions of diplomatic institutions that are now visible on the international canvas. The course looks at the increased impact of regional and multilateral diplomacy on bilateral diplomacy, the salience of national security issues, the role of non-state agencies, and the intercultural dimension, including diplomatic signalling.
Offering a practitioner’s view, the course examines how concepts operate in the real world, including the tools used to analyse international affairs through the tradecraft of diplomacy. The course’s author is Ambassador Kishan S Rana, and lectured by Ambassador Asoke Mukerji. The Canadian Foreign Service Institute and the British Foreign Office have used adaptations of this Course, in a self-learning format.