Postdoctoral research fellow Tobias Wille and Jack Snyder have a two-year research project entitled, “DIPLOWAR: Hybrid Practices of Diplomacy and Warfare.” Hybrid Practices of Diplomacy and Warfare (DIPLOWAR) is a transdisciplinary research project that aims to shed light on the changing relationship between diplomacy and war. An important analytical move of the project is to understand diplomacy and war not primarily as political or legal relations between states, but as structuring principles of peaceful and violent political practices. This reconceptualization makes it possible to bring together insights from research on the “new diplomacy” and research on the “new wars”, two literatures that have not yet been systematically linked to each other.
Through two explorative case studies of foreign policy decision-making
processes in the United States and (West) Germany from 1945 to the present, the project will trace how practices of diplomacy and warfare, which were previously clearly separated, have increasingly formed hybrid constellations. DIPLOWAR seeks to both sharpen our analytical vocabulary and deepen our empirical understanding of these processes of hybridization to help scholars, practitioners, and the public to better grasp the new realities of war and peace.