To be a diplomat abroad: Diplomatic practice at embassies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article shows that the simultaneous management of three different social roles – knowledge producer, representative of a government, and bureaucrat – defines the everyday work and practice of contemporary diplomats posted at embassies. This argument rests on an analysis of information gathering in Western embassies before, during and after the eighteen days of the revolt that ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. I first identify various practices influencing diplomatic knowledge and prompting the production of particular interpretations of the revolt in Egypt. I then analyze how actors manage multiple positions and dispositions within overlapping social fields. This point illustrates what practice theorists mean when they assert that agents are always speaking from a position. Overall, the article unravels what being a diplomat posted abroad actually consists of in practice, complementing existing studies on the diplomatic mode of knowledge production. I provide insights on the interactions between diplomats and non-state actors and show that diplomats’ social skills and analytic competence constantly require and support each other.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it