Description
What can we learn about international diplomacy by studying its practice through the eyes and body of an intern? This article argues that in order to understand the making of diplomacy’s background dispositions, tacit rules, and situated know-how, researchers ought to consider apprenticeship as both an object and mode of social enquiry. This argument is based on ethnographic observations from my five-month internship at the Danish Delegation to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD. By translating Loïc Wacquant’s notions of “carnal connections” and “apprenticeship” into a context of diplomacy, I illustrate how the diplomatic intern is schooled—at a foundational, embodied level—to adopt codes of (diplomatic) professionalism during the course of their training: from initiation, through participation in everyday work, to subsequent assessment. In locating the intern theoretically and epistemologically, I point, more broadly, to the ways novice identities enable us to grasp core aspects of a practice’s making and transmission. I argue that the practices of novice identities, which have received scant attention in International Relations (IR) and Diplomatic Studies provide important insights into the making and sustenance of diplomatic practices and–in turn—offer a rich source of critique of the process of (not) becoming diplomat. In advancing this argument, I extend on and bridge two sets of literatures: practice theoretical scholarship on the everyday enactment of international diplomacy; and epistemological-methodological work on ethnographies that explore the Self as a source of knowledge in IR.
Keywords: Carnal Apprenticeship, Diplomacy, Intern, OECD, Practice Theory, Wacquant
