Animals and diplomacy: on the prospect for interspecies diplomacy
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231191292 |
| Author | Tore Fougner |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231191292
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(3) 449 –474
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178231191292
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Animals and diplomacy:
on the prospect for
interspecies diplomacy
Tore Fougner
Bilkent University
Abstract
If diplomacy is considered an alternative to war, can the ongoing human ‘war against animals’
be replaced with diplomacy between humans and other animals? While many scholars and
practitioners of diplomacy can be expected to dismiss such an idea out of hand, this essay
encourages us to think more seriously and thoroughly about what it might imply to engage
diplomatically with nonhuman animals. Doing so requires a somewhat unconventional conception
of diplomacy, and some scholars have already done much to rethink diplomacy in suitable
ways (despite the persistent anthropocentrism). Combining such work with political science
scholarship on human-animal relations, indigenous peoples’ relations with animals, various
notions of animal ambassadorship and the study of animal behaviour in natural settings, the essay
argues that interspecies diplomacy is possible and urges scholars to further explore this and how
the possibility in question can be translated into reality.
Keywords
animals, diplomacy, human-animal relations, interspecies diplomacy
Introduction
If a key issue in diplomacy is ‘how far we are willing to extend diplomatic experimenta-
tion, skill and innovation’,1 then why should we not challenge the anthropocentrism of
Diplomatic Studies (DS) and start contemplating what it might imply to engage diplo-
matically with non-human animals? In the light of both the planet’s multiple ecological
crises and the extreme violence characterizing contemporary human-animal relations,
Corresponding author:
Tore Fougner, Department of International Relations, Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara 06800, Turkey.
Email: fougner@bilkent.edu.tr
1191292IRE0010.1177/00471178231191292International RelationsFougner
research-article2023
Article
450 International Relations 37(3)
doing so seems both ethically correct and in accordance with the following call for
‘sustainable diplomacy’:
diplomacy should not only be concerned with advocacy, policy implementation and public
relations but also – and more crucially – with innovation and creativity, experimentation in
finding ways and terms under which rival entities and ways of living can co-exist and flourish
(including biodiversity and future generations). The major challenge with regard to diplomacy
[. . .] is how to engender normative, yet pragmatic change, how to make possible a shift from
practices concerned with preserving specific, and perhaps unsustainable, ways of living [. . .]
to practices that are more cosmopolitan and accommodating of alterity, practices that emphasize
self-knowledge and are open to identity transformation.2
In this spirit, the present essay explores the possibility and prospect for diplomacy as it
concerns human relations with other animals. Towards this end, the next section brings
out the limitations of existing work on animals and diplomacy through a focus on what
is currently the most comprehensive DS engagement with animals – namely, Leira
and Neumann’s article on ‘beastly diplomacy’.3 In search for openings that can enable
animals being taken more seriously in the study and practice of diplomacy, the second
section engages with critical efforts within DS to rethink what diplomacy is or can be all
about. Based on an understanding of diplomacy as the ‘mediation of estrangement’4 and
a practice responding to ‘the challenge of how we can live together in difference’,5 the
third section engages with various ideas and bodies of thought that can stimulate our
diplomatic imagination and contribute to make interspecies diplomacy and less violent
human-animal relations possible. The conclusion encourages scholars of DS and
International Relations (IR) to not only further explore this possibility and how it can be
translated into reality, but also take the underlying conception of animals as agential
subjects seriously in studies on international relations more generally.
Animals and/in the study of diplomacy
Overall, animals have received little attention by DS and IR scholars, and this was the
background for Leira and Neumann’s call for ‘a more serious engagement with beastly
diplomacy’.6 In this connection, they focused on four ways in which animals matter in
diplomacy, with the first concerning their ‘ontic status’ or ‘what animals are in various
situations and cultures’.7 This includes ‘the very distinction between man and animal’,
and while acknowledging that ‘defining what counts as human and what counts as beastly
is a thoroughly political move’, they argue that ‘the uneasy divide between beast and man
has been a key complicating factor for the existence of diplomacy’, and ‘if the “other” is
beastly, diplomacy cannot take place’.8 The issue of ontic status also includes the diplo-
matic complications that can follow from particular animals having a certain status within
a particular socio-cultural context. In this connection, they mention the need for foreign
diplomats to pay due respect to the holy status that monkeys and cows have in India, the
difficulties that can follow from diplomatic encounters in which participants have differ-
ent conceptions of the same animal (e.g. dogs as family members vs dogs as unclean), and
religious taboos related to particular animals being consumed as food.
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