How can documents speak about practices? Practice tracing, the Wikileaks cables, and diplomatic culture

AuthorJérémie Cornut,Nicolas de Zamaróczy
Published date01 September 2021
Date01 September 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720972426
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720972426
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(3) 328 –345
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720972426
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How can documents speak
about practices? Practice
tracing, the Wikileaks cables,
and diplomatic culture
Jérémie Cornut and Nicolas de Zamaróczy*
Abstract
Practice theorists favor interviews and participant observations in their study. Using insights from
anthropological works on bureaucratic texts, in this article we develop methodological tools to
complement these interpretive methods of data collection. We suggest a way to trace practices
by systematically looking through both the content of documents and their form. We probe this
approach with an analysis of 408 diplomatic cables sent by the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania in 2005–2009 and subsequently released by Wikileaks. We draw on these documents
to tell two related stories about diplomatic practices: the first about epistemic practices and how
the cables privilege certain voices and types of knowledge over others, and the second about
diplomatic culture, where the cables serve as evidence of the powerful socialization processes
that diplomats are subject to. This contributes to International Relations (IR) with a new approach
for systematically analyzing written documents to uncover international practices.
Keywords
diplomacy, documents, interpretivism, methodology, practice theory, Wikileaks
1 Introduction
The idea that organizations in global politics can exert powerful socializing effects on
their members is not new in the field of IR (Checkel, 1997, 2007; Flockhart, 2006;
Johnston, 2001, 2008). Documents play a central role in this process, particularly in
bureaucratic organizations like Ministries of Foreign Affairs. Documents serve as mate-
rial touchstones of a common culture, and anchor shared understandings and norms in a
*The names of the authors are put in alphabetical order, as both of them contributed equally.
Corresponding author:
Jérémie Cornut, Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby,
BC V5A 1S6, Canada.
Email: jcornut@sfu.ca
972426CAC0010.1177/0010836720972426Cooperation and ConflictCornut and de Zamaróczy
research-article2020
Article
Cornut and de Zamaróczy 329
durable way that reinforces ongoing socialization processes. Indeed, arguably ‘we can-
not understand government without understanding documents’ (Freeman and Maybin,
2011: 156).
However, the recent turn towards practice theory has been slow to embrace the study
of documents, instead giving methodological pride of place to interviews and participant
observation. We contend that there is a need for the development of new methodological
tools that allows for the tracing of practices through document analysis. We show herein
how we can analyze written documents to investigate culture, habits, and practices, tak-
ing US diplomatic cables as our example. Diplomats serving abroad convey their views
in codified ways that resonate with how insiders of the diplomatic fields express them-
selves. They speak to an audience of peers that have been socialized to expect specific
forms for the written communications between them. They deem some types of knowl-
edge as legitimate and worthy of inclusion in the official record, while ignoring other
types of equally available knowledge. We unravel these shared ways of thinking about
and acting on the world by both looking through the cables and analyzing the content of
the texts through which the collective institutional voice speaks, as well as at the format
of the cables, focusing on their specialized vocabulary, their use of pronouns, and their
distribution.
This study remains interpretive in nature. Even if our empirical investigation is based
on a systematic analysis of a sample of 408 cables issued by the US Embassy in Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2009, our interpretation of
these cables is informed by a 13-month-long participant observation in Dar es Salaam in
2008 and 2010. Our analysis of the cables is guided by our knowledge of the political
context in Tanzania, as well as our direct observations of diplomats’ ways of doing
things, including US diplomats, in Dar es Salaam. We followed an inductive path: before
beginning the analysis of the cables, our fieldwork gave us indications about which
cables we should analyze, and what to look for in these cables; during the analysis, the
fieldwork informed our interpretations of the results.1 In this way, we contribute to the
literature advocating the use of ‘neo-positivist methods combined with an interpretivist
epistemology’ (Hopf, 2017: 1) and quantitative tools to ‘effectively complement dis-
course analyses and other interpretive methods’ (Bayram and Ta, 2020: 4).
Our analysis is divided into five additional sections. We begin in Section 2 by review-
ing the current dominant approach to documents within the practice turn in IR. Then, in
Section 3, we develop our approach for uncovering the practices latent in documents,
focusing on two related techniques: looking through documents to infer the material,
bureaucratic, and epistemic conditions that permitted their creation; and looking at docu-
ments to establish how they serve as sites for powerful socialization processes. We pre-
sent our empirical analysis in the next two sections: in Section 4, we discuss how US
diplomatic cables are the result of a socially situated and politically-oriented perspective
that privileges elite ‘insider’ knowledge over non-elite, historical, and sociological forms
of knowledge. Then, in Section 5, we note several aspects of the cables’ form and content
which generate ‘we’ feelings and encourage American diplomats to identify more closely
with national and organizational interests than with their own personal views. We con-
clude in Section 6 by discussing what our findings tell about (American) diplomatic
culture.

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