Building relations: assembling an auto-geography of the diplomatic home

Abstract

Geographic literature on diplomatic spatiality has largely focused on the official sites of diplomacy, while neglecting the importance of the diplomatic home in everyday working life. Considering this gap in the literature, the present article extends the recent interest in critical geographies of home and considers its potential in furthering our understanding of interstate diplomacy. The paper assembles the affective atmospheres of the diplomatic home through a bottom-up perspective that combines the author’s personal experiences as a Finnish career diplomat inhabiting a middle-class Turkish apartment with the oral accounts of his houseguests. Attention is given to the creation of images of national culture and design through micro-scale country-branding efforts. The analysis shows that while home atmospheres can be manipulated for diplomatic ends, there are also disjunctures between idealised designs and the embodied experiences of diplomatic houseguests. The article ends by discussing the implications of the present study for the literature on critical geographies of diplomacy.

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