‘I felt’: Intimate geographies of sentient diplomacy

Abstract

This paper explores feelings in diplomatic intimacies in the United Nations in New York. Drawing upon arguments in philosophy on emotional experience and supported by oral testimonies of diplomats, it supplements and complements the rich body of work on practices in diplomacy by exploring how feelings can reach out and be directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body and this is part of the phenomenology of everyday diplomatic lives. I set out three key interconnected goals in order to personify state diplomacy: First, I show how feelings are bound up with cognition and perception and are not the mere effects of these. Secondly, I link feelings with the affective context of the United Nations Security Council in order to expose everyday existential experiences of individual diplomats. Thirdly, I reveal the perceived importance of eliciting events in this geopolitical setting, and the personal meaning of these to diplomats as expressed through their own feelings as state representatives. This is a unique approach to understanding diplomacy in political geography, and also the first of its kind in the study of the intimate geopolitics of the UN.