 security studies. We're so pleased to welcome Pablo Oriana today, and he's a lecturer in international relations at the Department of War Studies. He's doing fascinating research. His talk today is based on a book chapter, but he does have a book forthcoming. So we'll have to watch, watch out for that virtual space. Can't wait to read the book. So Pablo himself, like I said, is a lecturer in international relations with war studies here. His research focuses on how diplomatic communication constitutes the representation representations upon which policy itself is actually made. He has published on diplomacy, North African politics, European affairs, nationalism and identity politics, art history, as well as reviews, essays and features on contemporary art in peer reviewed, and less formal publications. So his Pablo already is making a significant contribution to the field as an emerging scholar and a person to follow and watch. So today, again, Pablo is going to be talking about a book chapter that he's worked on. The brief abstract is before the beginning of the so called Arab Spring, Libya was considered a vital partner in the war on terror, one that was constructively reengaging with the international community. And over a few weeks in 2011, however, the regime came to be described as rogue, and predictions were made about the madman Gaddafi, you know, perpetrating genocide in Benghazi, what then brought about this spectacular turnaround in US perceptions of Libya in the early 2010s is really what what Pablo's chapter considers, researching how diplomacy describes and analyzes the identity of international actors allows for two new perspectives of relevance to diplomatic practice and analysis. Firstly, his chapter talks about how detailed analysis of diplomatic communication texts reveals how specific descriptive descriptions work, how it functions and what ideas, narratives and links it depends upon. And secondly, analysis of how representations of identities and their context are constituted reveals the dynamics of knowledge production of specific institution. So this allows for a constructive critique of information management analysis prioritization and role of dominant and sometimes global policy priorities. I will not say any more to give away I'll leave some in suspense for for Pablo to talk in much more detail about the innovative methodology. He applies to these texts and why people concerned with broader issues around global diplomacy, statecraft and all of that really need to pay attention to his analysis. So Pablo's agreed to talk for about 30 minutes, and then we'll open the floor to the audience for further engagement and commentary. So without further ado, Pablo, I'm going to hand the virtual floor over to you. Thank you so much, Amanda. And most of all, thank you so much for organizing this series. I think it's incredible to have this series of talks that then is realized as a series of short publications in AI. I think there's an incredible achievement and a wonderful way for our department's new work and ongoing work to keep influencing policy conversations. Hello, everyone else. Thank you so much for coming. I see some old friends here, former students, current students, absolutely wonderful to see you all. So I suppose that for quite some time now for about a decade, I have lived obsessed with one question. How do we know who we're talking to? Fine, we know that we did war in Vietnam to fight communism. Great. We started a war in Malaya to fight communism. Great, we started another war in so-and-so place to fight terrorism and the like. Fine. But this implies that we know who we're talking about, who we're talking to and what they are and their intentions really. These policy decisions are made on the basis of an understanding of someone, an actor, non-state actor, a state actor, a revolutionary actor, one of a variety. And so I've long been obsessed with what how do we know who we're talking to? Because we have this huge policy policy decisions in my last book, The Road to Vietnam. We want to fight war in Vietnam to fight communism and in fact stop the Vietnamese, you know, realizing a communist takeover of Southeast Asia, which was Stalin's plan. Well, how do we know that the communist rebels were not really anti-colonial that were communists? So I developed a method during my career and developed it since that essentially looks to see how this knowledge is built within institutions. Now, especially I've looked at mistakes that in hindsight is easy to see that terrible mistakes were made, like the Vietnam War, where the Pentagon papers themselves essentially acknowledged we misidentified who we were talking about so badly. And in fact, we got dragged into it by the French. In time, I came to see that this is something that happens quite a lot to American and British and French diplomacy, where for all their influence, there are policies, spaces where their influence and their policy is essentially deeply influenced by other actors and often very unexpected actors that do not have the classical attributes of great power and influence. The second poorest country in the entire world, Mali, essentially defined Sahel security policy for the United States for about 10 years, same with Morocco or Western Sahara with the culmination a couple of months ago of the American recognition of the occupation of the world's last colony. And so the focus of my work is essentially a method where I start from a big policy decision. In this case, Gaddafi. Gaddafi is evil. He's going to genocide the whole country. His opponents want to set up a democratic system of governance and we should help them. The decision essentially at the Security Council and our colleagues at the Nissan and Pugliotto wrote a brilliant paper called Power in Practice, where they interviewed hundreds of diplomats involved in the negotiations that led to the national to the Security Council resolution that essentially allowed for the intervention in Libya. But I was interested in the American side of it because we know quite a lot about the French side of it. Psychosis, we now know personal obsessions with making Gaddafi shut up because he paid for his second run for the presidency. But how about the American side? There is quite little knowledge. And the problem is that the character of Clinton here has made things very complicated, of course, because she was presidential candidate a few years later. And so I applied my method. And so my method to understand how diplomacy produces knowledge about specific actors essentially consists of three steps. The first defines the data for analysis on a conceptual basis. And I call it the diplomatic moment. This is based on the insight that diplomacy is a especially textual practice. Everything is written in diplomacy. It's hilarious. It's the most textual practice imaginable. Dear sir, I have carried out so and so Dimash to Amanda and handed in the letter you gave me on the ninth March. Everything is recorded to death. I have no end of hilarious anecdotes of which one is a favorite. And that is after Churchill met Stalin for the first time in 1941 in Moscow. They couldn't agree on how to cooperate against the Nazis. And after three meetings, Stalin invites Churchill for a personal dinner at his apartment in the Kremlin. And after apparently seven bottles of Georgian wine and an enormous amount of brandy, of which they were both very, very fond of, they came to an agreement. Now the next day we've got the hilarious image of Churchill throwing up into a bucket of the flight back to England. Very, very long and very, very shaky propeller plane flight whilst trying to dictate to his two assistants and Alec Douglas Hume is the person I kind of looked into for this. Essentially trying to recall what the agreement was and put it in text because Douglas Hume, foreign assistant to the foreign secretary, had to write this down so that he could enter the policy structure so that we knew that this was the decision so that it could be sent to Stalin for him to say yes, that's what we agreed on. And then both foreign policy establishments get on with it. Yeah, because there's a big difference is that we agree on 10,000 tanks or as many as we could per month. That makes a big difference, a very, very big difference. What is the basis of our agreement? And so everything has to be written down in diplomacy which provides with a fantastic opportunity to see exactly what they were saying at the time. We don't have to depend on their recollections or their opinions or the subsequent politics of events like the Vietnam War full of regret or the war on terror and so on and so forth where everyone essentially if you interview them now tells you yeah, but we were trying to save the world, you know, probably like, you know, don't don't place this burden on that. It's like, no, I'm interested in understanding how at that time in the 2000s, we came to understand this context in this way or this actor in this way. And so I use this insight, the diplomatic moment, the fact that all diplomatic knowledge has essentially to be submitted into an institutional process, a canon. And that is bureaucratically very flawless for us researchers because of course, all diplomatic text is an official submission into a centralized systems in Britain is called the diptel system, diplomatic cables in the United States and so on and so forth which this formalized system means that at the archive it's fantastic because you can see the entire chain of knowledge production from the guy on the ground saying I've just spoken to so-and-so tribal leader and he says this and that all the way to his political officer in the mission and then to the ambassador and then sent to the State Department analyzes it and eventually one line from that if that ends up with the system secretary of state and then the deputy secretary of state and then finally maybe the secretary of state and the grand heights of the White House. And so it's a process of knowledge production where Amanda's cable from her mission in Hanoi gets summarized, written down a few quotes taken out or maybe ignored altogether if it's not considered relevant and that too is part of my research. Why are some bits of information more relevant than others at any given time? And so once I have this body of text that I call the cascade of knowledge production from that your guys on the ground all the way to the to the president and then back down because of course these institutions go back to the diplomats and say oh I love hearing about that I want to know more about terrorists in the desert or no I don't care about that don't tell me more about that and so once I have this entire body of text going both ways both go verning knowledge production and doing knowledge production I analyze texts in extreme detail often in my publications I only give you analysis of two or three texts that set as examples but as I do the research I analyze most texts in extreme detail. A type of analysis that for code called archaeology is essentially a very extreme type of discursive analysis that I structure like Roland Barthes does which is essentially on a formalized commentary so that it makes all the texts and and sorry the analysis of all the texts comparable to one another. Once I understand how a text work works I have two crucial bits of insight one how does it represent it tells us for instance that Ho Chi Minh is a communist student he's of the Stalin school he's Asian yeah this bits of representation it gives me all the essentially it reveals the architecture of a description and descriptions have architecture yeah that's the most important thing and no representation is made of its own I've been speaking of representations rather than identity not because I don't think identity doesn't matter but rather because identity is an outcome of representation representation if you read your shall we say structuralist canon like Said and company can be taken apart into a representation of space there's a people it's a very very powerful set of ideas time they're backward race of course they're oriental or they're North African and so on and so forth and norms they're evil they're good what they want is right what they want is not right and so on and so forth and so I take apart these representations to understand how they work and what are the conditions of possibility what makes it possible to believe that Gaddafi really was going to slaughter everyone in Libya that did not agree with him what makes this believable what is the structure of this representation I would ask myself understanding this allows me to things in the one hand it allows me to confidently understand how Gaddafi was described but secondly understanding the architecture of a representation means that I can follow it across thousands endless numbers of text here really the only challenges manpower to go through all the diplomatic documentation it's quite laborious and slow research to do but fascinating because you see these representations evolve maybe Amanda gets involved and a few words get taken out and others get put in and this second step of my methodology is called broadly speaking in structuralist tradition a genealogy and mine is an IT genealogy in specific terms because it goes backwards I start from in this case the Security Council resolution and go back to Obama's accuses and Cameron's speeches and then I go backwards asking the question well how do we get here now and so the documents reveal themselves that's what makes this this method so very empirical because the documents are telling you I read this report from Amanda well you go and find the report from Amanda and the good thing about diplomatic communication is that it will always be properly referenced they're even more hysterical about it than us academics everything is referenced in extreme detail if you're lucky enough to be playing around with the weak leagues you actually click on the reference and it takes you to the other cable that is referencing right and so you can chase knowledge production wherever it may go wherever the representation came from you can find it because it empirically reveals itself in this method now enough about the method what does this tell us about Libya because the interesting thing here is that we may well as policymakers have made a very terrible mistake in Libya the the Libyan intervention was essentially predicated on the certainty that Gaddafi will slaughter everyone that did not agree with him and the majority of the population was thought the certainty that the rebels were a democratic western looking modern in western times type of rebel that wanted to establish regimes very much like ours and crucially the assumption that this was not an Islamist event which had been the focus of American foreign policy for the previous 12 years to be honest so this is an important question in fact the representation look at the security council resolutions was very much a simple binary we've got this madman using those words madman genocidal maniac that will kill everyone versus freedom fighters democrats uh non radicals americ freedom loving obama spoke off and so this seems like an obvious choice to make but this was a very contested choice uh representation of the state department and one that many of america's allies did not agree with either and there are many many contradictions in here one is of course and the most obvious taking Gaddafi's word as at face value that's ridiculous we had spent the previous 40 years not trusting a single word that Gaddafi said Gaddafi was notoriously prone to hyperbole he was going to blow up all of europe at one point propose that switzerland should be split up and that he would help pay for it and things like that taking Gaddafi at his word was a ridiculous choice because i mean if you had taken Gaddafi at his word in the 70s and 80s he was going to nuke all of western europe and you know that didn't happen and so on this time we chose to take him at his word when he said i'm going to slaughter all of my enemies and this is itself a contradiction because we have got thousands of cables from before this intervention where american diplomats are telling american politicians this in Gaddafi is very extreme when he speaks but he wants to do business with us so we had an understanding that Gaddafi was prone to hyperbole his death for us north african experts stemmed the flow of the best quotations ever for papers and talks unfortunately because he was very very funny his dying words were obama son of africa you have betrayed betrayed us and so taking Gaddafi at his word was a contradiction but crucially there were other problems here assumptions that were essentially not questioned to not tested and assumptions that were contradicted by why the state department already knew because one of the problems with diplomatic knowledge production is very often not not knowing enough but rejecting knowledge that already exists within the institution so american diplomats underground in libya had a fairly good idea of what was happening they knew the groups involved amongst the rebels including the two al-qaeda affiliates the one supported by qatar and others they knew quite a lot of detail and in fact that there are a couple of peoples that try to warn secretary clinton that the only groups we think are what they think they are are basically the old monarchy monarchist senesi sect which is itself much more religious than american foreign policy would have been comfortable with at the time and those are but the only major groups that were not islamist at the time which is a very energetic choice not to see these contradictions and crucially in the construction of the case for intervention we also have a case of alibian population that is essentially reduced to a very orientalized i think and genderized idea of vulnerability it will be slaughtered of raping destruction genocide they're unarmed and so on and so forth and gender is an important marker in all types of representation and analysis not just identity or gender itself gender is a vital marker in all study of representation all in all contexts for a very simple reason whenever gender emerges you can be absolutely certain that we're talking about claims on nature and this is very important nationalists are obsessed with gender not because it's an accessory to their cultural world and many people assume this because a claim to nature about race is very much the same ideological engine as a claim to nature about gender yeah your body produces your social role in its color in its gendering and in in its social functions as a result yeah and therefore the whenever you see gender emerge in a site that is not necessarily nationalist like diplomacy you are essentially being this is a bell saying nature ideas of nature are floating around ideas of nature are being delting here and it's not surprising because this intervention was very much written in a similar terms as Blair would have described the intervention of ganest and saving afghan women from the taliban things like that though that's not to say that afghan women were not having a hard time under the taliban but this specific gender lens actually reveals that there are two other claims of nature happening at the same time and here we have a hesitate to call it a neocolonial claim but there is definitely an element of quite old fashions or reentalism occurring in particularly how france britain america looked at described at the situation in north africa in the french context it's very interesting because they appealed back to 1850s ideas of north africa as barbaric constant being chaos and needing european power to be brought to bring it into order if you think that this is not an old story in america you might want to look at america's first ever non-western and i mean western hemisphere non-western intervention ever which was an alliance with the kingdom of morocco to smash the bible of pirates this is only six years after american independence so the first ever european war was actually against north africa and in algeria to be precise and then france used this to invade algeria afterwards and so we have a situation where we've got diplomats on the ground providing very very good thick data that understood the context rather well understood the groups involved but then this belies a lot of the shall we say the processes inside the state department because the information coming from the ground was good a lot of analysis was good if limited because they only had two analysts of the state department dedicated to north africa but we've got major problems with things that are downright lies so we've got essentially a colossal misunderstanding on salafism and i'm misunderstanding that was very unnecessary and misunderstanding that was produced essentially by denying the information from america's own diplomats coming up and here is what clinton and her own foreign policy establishment really matters because if we're going to ask the how question my genealogy might study of the diplomatic communication surrounded the libyan intervention which is illuminated by weak leaks on the one hand but the podesta emails the massive leak of clinton emails from the last presidential campaign in 2016 and i'm sorry that this did not help her when the election it was an absolute treat as a researcher to have a look at this diplomatic data 30 years before it would be declassified some of it would be declassified and the interesting thing is that unlike many bits of diplomatic data or other leaks like weak leaks which include quite little policy elite material the clinton leaks had the entire process but crucially they had all the private emails at the top the group of people that were discussing and essentially filtering information as you go along i'm talking about for instance cindy blumenthal a very important person in in clinton's circle even now i'm very influential in that side of democratic foreign policy in the united states uh right into clinton hey do you want to hear more about this and she's like yes yes yes please give me more information and so these people that were not part of the foreign policy establishments were vital in informing her a clinton about many things the greatest culprit here is cindy blumenthal that essentially turns speculation press conspiracy theories and the thinking of a few of his personal allies into the stream of information that is informing secretary clinton and you will see when this paper is published in new perspectives and diplomacy which is an edited volume coming up edited by jack spence our very own diplomacy doyen at war studies i look in a lot of detail at essentially how a lot of the information was global because really what happened here is a tragic case of clinton forcing the state department to tell her what she wanted to hear to see what they wanted to see and this was particularly catastrophic in the case of maybe i mean it's easy to speak in hindsight of more people have died in the ongoing civil war that then gadafi could ever have killed in 300 years of dictatorship or his own civil war which was less bloody than the current one um even though of course it's not nice but crucially there is also the influence of clinton's private network on the work of the state department and this is where it gets very interesting because someone that is vital to this process is right now has just been made national security advisor and is basically the voice of america foreign policy right now and its name is um jake sullivan and jake sullivan was a top state department official um deputy secretary at one point um in the clinton state department and he was in many occasions the link between shall we say the the private information and the state department information and and jakes sullivan had an awkward role where very often he had to process a lot of this information coming from journalists coming from other sources um that clinton was very um keen on for him for example the scholar and mary slater was extremely influential on this policy making um i used to think much higher about mary slater until i saw her emails to clinton essentially asking clinton to lie and say the public needs to see this war as Gaddafi versus freedom fighters do not say that they're armed and do not allow any other language in many ways this is the opposite of what i do if i study language to understand the politics this is using language to frame the politics in a very very specific way in a very very specific america version of our country becoming democratic their own stories seen elsewhere and in fact if you read obama's speech explaining why america will be involved in libya is very much off we empathize with freedom fighters everywhere else because our own experience was a revolution for freedom and so there was a choice to see this as the american revolution in many ways um even though that was not necessarily the case now at the confluence of this policy making and knowledge production there was also the rejection of all the contradictions and there were many the state department was very keen to let the secretary of state know that most of the rebels we knew about and we knew about in very very unhappy war on terror uh al-qaeda groups we knew the groups that were being supported by qatar who made a sponsor of international islamic terrorism knew the role of the syneesie we knew even two aspects that were very heavily ignored by clinton by shorts essentially because we have the email saying i don't want to hear about this anymore if this is not important and that is the two big roles that qaddafi played in the north africa system over the last 30 years and about which clinton was very specifically warned about the one is nomads nomadism is much larger in north africa than anyone imagines a huge proportion of the population is nomadic and a lot of the conflicts that we see emerging in north africa the mali western sahara and so on are because of the problem of nomadism being incompatible with the states created by the colony and the post colony and really fronts splitting the sahara most of all um and qaddafi was vital to containing the most aggressive twirec groups it is no coincidence that only six months after the death of qaddafi we have the biggest single twirec rebellion in 30 years which by the way is the 16th twirec rebellion since 1962 that's how keen they are to leave mali and the country is constructed by the colony and crucially qaddafi was able to contain them and qaddafi had engaged a lot with western countries and in containing these groups containing migration containing legal migration into italy especially to the point that qaddafi had become a border guard for italy in many regards by the late 2000s and was an enthusiastic collaborator of some of the shall we say less humane european programs to keep people out and you know retain fortress europe the second thing that was ignored was that qaddafi was actually a key factor in containing Islamic terrorism we forget that qaddafi was in many ways like salam hussein the equivalent of a communist in the Islamic world and even though he used religion a lot and wrote about it in his theory of the state the green book he had a very specific view of Islam that did not allow for good like iqaeda and even though only six months before this intervention the cia and many other major american institutions were enthusiastically collaborating with qaddafi and qaddafi had qaddafi had bring a great help in containing al qaeda and saudi and qaddafi sponsored Islamic activity in north africa this is another factor that was ignored and thirdly and this i find the most tragic were the overtures that qaddafi was making privately for peace qaddafi had spoken to frattini the then italian foreign secretary and was asking essentially for talks i'm not sure this means that he was honest about the talk so that he was going to give up power or give the protesters of foreign countries what they wanted but there was more of a willingness to engage than madman doing genocide would suggest now both means i'm not defending qaddafi there's no need to defend qaddafi because hindsight really shows us that we may have screwed up worse than qaddafi that's why this is a policy question really worth looking at because if we if we made a context worse than qaddafi could then if we are looking at a very catastrophic mistake especially in a case like now where it was entirely unenforced because we had enough diplomatic understanding not to have made this mistake what i'm essentially saying is that we need methods like these and approaches like this to understand how policy policymakers and knowledge production chose not to see certain things and chose to see others what what does this reveal about diplomacy and libya full stop and i'll leave it for questions i won't be long i'll leave it for questions so that then you can ask me more precise questions about the research perhaps in the libyan context the first lesson is the question we should be asking all the time who are we talking to it's a very old question of diplomacy since the beginning of diplomacy there's two first modern diplomatic practitioners Machiavelli and Caillère french and florentine ministries of foreign affairs respectively in the 1500s were already obsessed with their diplomats writing good reports back because they had to base their policy choices on this um this understanding of who we're talking to is deeply fragile because it's so subjective like identity it depends on so many discursive items so many existing knowledges existing prejudices existing ideas like gender race and so on that it is extremely fragile changing and subjective it is nuanced there are no simple answers to diplomatic knowledge if there is a simple answer you should be extremely suspicious if you get a representation of a war like Gaddafi the madman versus the freedom fighters one should be deeply suspicious because it lacks the very depth the diplomatic establishments themselves are able to produce this is the second problem that emerges a lot of good work has been done by diplomacy we keep not we keep choosing not to read it we keep choosing not to read the warnings of these American diplomats in Libya that we're telling us i'm not sure these rebels are that nice they just shot at us um you know maybe we should rethink this um thirdly the power of politics in entering diplomacy belies our assumptions about a neutral service service and diplomacy as a permanent unpolitical and unchanging institution of the state what i'm trying to say is that politicians have a lot more power to demand the diplomats show them what they want to see than i had imagined before very often diplomatic knowledge production as this is also the case in the Iraq war and the Vietnam war it's turned into tell me what i want to see and this is a problem this is a problem because it tells us that maybe we're not reacting but producing events much more than we expected so maybe the rebellion in Libya i'm trying to say was not just seen by diplomacy it may will have been co-produced by diplomatic knowledge and diplomatic practice for diplomacy overall i have five lessons i'm very very keen to share especially in the context of AI and speaking about diplomacy more broadly and really i'm being a bit of a naive and arse here because my five lessons are really five critiques that i think needs to be put in our pocket to do things better to do diplomacy better the first is as i've been told by countless diplomats can we please read the work of the diplomats that we are already paying for since we're paying this thousands of diplomats all over the world to write reports let's read what they will do that might be a good beginning there's a resource that is already there i mean in the British diplomatic system is all within a computer um database is searchable it's a searchable massive database of all knowledge produced by all British diplomats around the world it's ridiculous not to use it it's a total waste why the hell are we paying for it if that is the case well we might be paying for it for the wrong reasons symbolic reasons to say that we have three men in Libya rather than to use the work of these three men in Libya in other words we need to take diplomacy more seriously because some of its oldest works like just collecting information at that level that they leave that but it's not really espionage as much as i've spoken to the president and his advisor and between the two i think they think that that we need to take a lot more seriously um and this will prevent the problem of simplicity the problem of simple representations like Gaddafi the madman versus the freedom fighters because this will add depth as i always tell my students precise question means depth and depth means insight lesson number two who produces diplomatic knowledge well mostly diplomats for who governs it it's not it's the likes of Blumenthal Blumenthal was a political operator shall we say he's a bit of a dominant Cummings kind of character he was Hillary Clinton's dominant Dominic Cummings during her campaign against Obama uh to run for the presidency and he was so brutal about Obama that when Obama made Clinton secretary of state he explicitly demanded that Blumenthal not be employed in any function whatsoever by the state department um proverbial excrement hits the fan in Libya and who does Clinton turn to Blumenthal in fact Blumenthal is emailing Clinton almost daily telling her what is happening and passing information from his sources and his reading of the situation on to Clinton and his deeply influential the letters you can see Clinton essentially using Blumenthal's language um and another very very important insight for this is that there are more institutions involved than we expect because um other countries know that we're liable to this um there are think tanks there are other diplomats deeply involved in impacting our knowledge production in this case America's knowledge production in fact not all North African countries and six separate North African rebel and insurgent groups have opposites for lobbying purposes in Washington and are registered as official lobbyists the biggest spender in this regard is Morocco that is desperate to prove to American policymakers as a modern country as a democracy and that Western Sahara should be given to to Morocco um another lesson on who does diplomatic knowledge production and unexpected influence on Clinton was Tony Blair do not ever listen to anything Tony Blair has to say ever if Tony Blair tells right to your cable saying you're doing the Lord's work take the opposite position complete opposite position I mean to be perfectly honest I make joke of it but maybe Clinton should by this time have worked out that Tony Blair was not the most insightful advisor to listen to on this issues thirdly this process of knowing who and why we're talking to people is and this is very important Cynthia and Lo tried to make this point and I don't think she had as efficient impact on diplomatic analysis 15 years ago because diplomacy yes is grand and manly and uniform and shall we say you know embassy Ferrero Rocher kind of processes but it's also private it's also personal one of the most important places for policy making around Libya was Clinton's kitchen counter her secretary would leave printouts of the most important bits of information we know what Clinton read because Clinton would be sent say a newspaper article by Blumenthal and Clinton if she liked it would tell her her secretary to print it out and leave it on the kitchen counter and Clinton would spend several hours every early morning reading everything the pile that her secretary had left on the kitchen counter this was basically smartphone diplomacy she would get all of this information and she would forward the bits she liked the most many of them not from the State Department to her secretary as they print them out for me and so we have these informal domestic spaces and people women in this case that are involved much more than we can expect and whose role is not recognized so for instance Boumidi is a very very important young woman that was involved in and shall we say Clinton's policy making overall there are personal relations Cynthia and Lowe wrote really well about the wives of officers of diplomats and so on and so forth that played key roles this is also retrieved in the power of practice paper by Adelaide Nisen and Pauliot where personal relations often go through structures of gender and become elements of diplomacy because diplomacy will deploy everything there is including personal relations and crucially one of the biggest dangers for diplomatic knowledge production it turns out is having very strong and or and or extreme policies what do I mean by this well for instance having a very very radical policy like the war on terror or containment of communism meant a lot of countries were able to say oh I'm also fighting terrorism get me money in fact Gaddafi did that and we rekindled friendship with Gaddafi very much on new helpers fight terrorism and so having big policies such as the unofficial Clinton we will support democracy wherever we see it is itself a problem because one thing to support democracy wherever we see it in this case quite literally ended up meaning we will make it look like democracy so that then we can support it and this is a problem because one thing to see it and seeing it become a constitutive process and this is just not very good for a good diplomacy and good understanding of what is happening on the ground big vague strategies in other words is the fourth lesson don't have big vague strategies global containment of communism global war on terror because it's too vague everyone and their mums can be fighting those and five final lesson and this isn't should be an easy one but it's not is do not allow old persisting problems that are recognized that are known in diplomacy to shape understanding of actors this is very vague but to be more specific I'm talking about race or mentalism agenda let me give you an example in 1947 one of the most successful arguments of French diplomacy persuade America to help France fight the Vietnamese rebels was listen we understand that you're very empathetic to anti-colonial movements so are we we want Vietnam to be free one day they're just not ready yet but you must understand these rebels could never have fought like this establish a massive insurgency and almost defeat the French military on their own they're oriental they've been an inferior race for hundreds of years because the heat has slowed down their brains they are apolitical people that only want to eat rice and live until the next day they would never have done this without a Soviet plot put it this way I'm quoting French Foreign Secretary in 1947 speaking to James Brinn one of the American Deputy Secretary of the State at this point you would not let Negroes inform your policy would you or one of them have the right to become president ironic when I was writing the book of I was president but crucially this work the State Department was like oh yeah of course of course of course of course for instance our Negroes in Alabama would never be able to mount a rebellion on this scale of course this makes sense you must be a Stalinist conspiracy this is not the most aggressive racism but it is a racist assumption that makes these arguments believable in this case a very old story of Orientalism that seems obvious in 1947 Vietnam should not have existed in the Libyan case and yet it did most of the writing on the Libyan case was essentially the same as 1830s discourses about North Africa whenever we speak of chaos women need women that need to be protected as I said earlier whenever we see women in diplomacy gender being treated like this in diplomacy we are really looking at a claim about nature which brings us back to race because the two always go hand in hand ideas of their nature a lot of the French and Obama discourse about North Africa was about North Africa needing to be saved and needing to be helped so that democracy can happen and to be brought into modernity very classic Edward Said you are back you're always behind us in development and modernity joining us means going forward and going better this is not a commentary on the goals of the rebels in the Arab Spring rather a commentary on how we saw it and how our diplomatic establishments made terrible mistakes because of these old and unnecessary ideas about nature gender and crucially old stories of our relationship with these parts of the world now a final comment I want to make is that whenever we hear comments that are gendered or are stereotypized as Nando Bo says they do this they do that we are also looking at an older advice of diplomacy that I'm not sure can be resolved diplomacy in its current form was mostly shaped in the 19th century the 19th century when ideas of ethno-geopolitics were dominant in Europe when Bismarck's royal politic and the cold appreciation that international relations are struggled between races and nations for survival meant that the state is a nation and the nation is essentially behaves like a race I wonder is the permanence of these problems in diplomatic knowledge production perhaps a sign that these ideas are still at the basis of how diplomacy connects to nation and as the state's representative I think there is some of that and it also something that changes periodically as ideas of identity change and nationalism shall we say the balance of nationalism in our political economy moves around but I'm going to stop there and open for questions because I think otherwise I'm in danger of rambling too far great thank you so much Pablo I've got tons of questions I feel like we need a bottle of wine to have a have a good detailed conversation about particularly yeah the legacies and endurance of racial and gendered logics that we think are debunked but continue to resurface and bubble over I mean I'm also reminded of Franz Fanon's a dying colonialism right and how he writes how the West had you know in 1958 imagined Algeria at that time and the gendered and racial dynamics and if you didn't know the year you would think that that is 2021 again how you know these these enduring kind of racial and gendered tropes and how we understand people and other people right you know I'm just so deeply embedded in our institutions so in this is just an example of these ideas having been around forever and therefore they color everything yeah yeah and you know projection of who Gaddafi is but also like you are hinting at a production of who we are right the the civil flight right the saviors and how that you know is implicit in in in in these reproductions as well too I mean I encourage everyone listening to go to Google right now and type on Google image at search so Cozy Cameron and and Gibril who was the leader of the the rebels at the time they've got this heroic you know we're flavorating Libya photo all three of them congratulating themselves in Benghazi is exactly that is this white saviour nightmare and it's in the case of France it was so deeply you know this is our doorstep absolutely I like so is if there's anyone who has questions please either raise your zoom hands or or put it in the chat box and we can have a pick Pablo's brain more further further right and while I guess we're waiting I just wonder I mean you raise attention here between Clinton wanting to control the story right and and then the the the arts of diplomacy is about you know forensically details right getting the knowledge and getting enough detail of knowledge to hopefully inform wise policy that's the intense of it but it seemed in this practice that's not what Clinton wanted and I wonder is this attention that you can overcome right between kind of what policy objectives are of what because I don't think Clinton's an idiot in that regard right but she clearly made a conscious decision here to run with a particular narrative that she felt was important for her right despite what you know the broader intel might have been might have been leading to that seems to be can you can you see that as a is that attention that you know is is this maybe a one-off exception I'd like to probably think it's probably not but how how is that tension resolved for you or do you think it can't be it can't be this is a problem that was highlighted about 40 years ago in one of the seminal texts on white here in the UK diplomatic investigations book between at the moment of the death of the king diplomacy is placed in an impossible position because diplomacy was designed to represent a king or at most a republic run by six men in the case of Machiavelli's diplomacy right that is the basis of modern diplomacy and so when you no longer have a king diplomacy is placed in an awkward situation by democracy in fact diplomacy still works like the diplomacy of the king to still speak of we and a single will that was resolved a lot by nationalism in the 19th century where we meant we Britain have a natural interest realism still owes to that ideal natural interests right that you can see because they're not natural democracy gives us the pipeline that Clinton have the right to make specific choices as to how to see the world and what to do about it because they want an election with a mandate to run foreign policy right so it is important to to allow politics a share in diplomacy because also let's not pretend that diplomacy is unpolitical as I was saying earlier the institutions are driven with 300 years of quite dreadful ideas no 500 years you will not believe how much Christian crap that's left over in diplomacy from the 1600s and and how much Protestant crap you would not believe the kind of things that British diplomats still have to say in some of the more formal moments you know because we we hate Catholicism and we're fighting it over the world still right and so this is a tension that I'm not sure can be resolved for two reasons on the one hand because a democratic mandate does mean that Biden should not have the same foreign policy as that left to him by Trump because it is a mandate for political change that's the whole point on the other I'm not sure the other stress can be resolved which is if you choose to see something and you have been put ahead of these large institutions you can make the institutions show you what you want to see or not show you what you want to see and so I'm not sure this stress can be resolved I have now seen several locations several occasions of major political leaders a very interesting example in the case of Vietnam was British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that when he realized Britain was about to face a massive insurrection in Malaya he said we need the Americans to help the French in Vietnam because even those bullshit and that he actually said this even those rubbish that the Vietnamese are Stalinist stuages this will help set up for America to help us in Malaya even with and so he tells two British diplomats inside gone find me the evidence that the diplomats replied there isn't any British Foreign Secretary writes back to them saying I'm told by the French Foreign Secretary that this committee within the Viet Minh League the Viet Minh was the Vietnamese League for Independence Vietnam is actually a communist Stalinist cell controlling the whole party these guys go and research this group it turns out it's actually a governing group is the Politburo but it's not necessarily Stalinist and they write this and Ernest Bevin writes back saying write it again literally said write it again and they wrote it again saying the French tell us this and then by the time it gets analyzed in London the committee is a Stalinist cell controlling the Vietnamese on behalf of the Soviet Union despite the fact that the entire foreign office disagreed with this and the diplomats kept refusing to write these things because they are your employees Ernest Bevin was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and it was his prerogative to make them see it I don't think it was that clear with Clinton with Clinton it was more of a print me this one don't print me the 30 pages about how the rebels are just a lot nastier than we think it was a case of choosing not to see it and the problem is that this is a natural problem to occur in a context where Clinton could not possibly have read everything couldn't have it's not humanly possible I mean it took me about a month and a half to get through in detail all you know all 5,000 pages of all the emails only the emails related to this so there's not a chance she can have in two weeks looked at everything no she could only direct how it was looked at you have so Inga I would like to ask a question live and then can you see the question yes yes if I just started in the chat okay great so while you're reading Romy's question Inga did you want to ask your question to Pablo live? Hey yes sure I can do that should I go now or just no no please please Inga now so yeah thanks so much for your talk Pablo and so I've been working quite a lot on post 2011 Libya right so this was interesting for me to see and the research angle you took definitely also really enlightening I'm going to put a few points out there that at least arguments I make and then I think my question makes a bit more sense so for my research I would actually question that the or the revolts at least in 2011 were Islamists or Salafi led to be honest like I would say they mobilized much more along regional like regional lines local constituencies even like it was very granular actually and the Islamists actually took quite a bit to catch up on what was developing which of course then plays a role especially when it comes to international support and mobilizing arm support etc. however I would also say that most of the Islamists and Salafis in the country in Libya at the point of 2011 would be what I would call something like reformed Islamists or something like Belhaj, Abdel Wahab guy they've all been through reconsideration programs etc etc and to support my argument after the fall of Gaddafi we also saw Libya at least on a trajectory to a democracy where most of these guys all participated and then the third point Gaddafi and Salafism and Islamism I would actually say he encouraged radical Salafis like the quietest Salafi matralis etc that during the revolution he put out statements with his son supporting these etc so now my question is giving this my points a bit and then giving that you focused on all of the American diplomatic cables etc and we all know how obsessed the US was with the war on terror ever since well yes 2001 couldn't it be that the questions that were asked and the pushback that you see in terms of like are these Islamist or Salafist oh we don't want to hear that actually gets perpetuated by the US's obsession with the question of if these guys are Islamist and Salafist like they wouldn't ask oh tell me more are these Suleiman tribes from the south are actually more tour like rebels or yeah these were faller led Benghazi initiatives or Gaddafi tribes are also involved so that makes sense so it makes a lot of sense so I'll answer your question first and then comment back on Islamism I'm not trying to say that we're all Al Qaeda I'm trying to say that American diplomats knew quite well who we're talking about and they knew quite well also that this was the post Al Qaeda era in Islamism and especially North Africa groups that have now parts of them joined al-Murabi tomb and so on and so forth so it was in in hindsight it was actually pretty good judgment to understand them as problematic not least because the US have been collaborating for years and repressing them with Gaddafi as to terror or not terror this is also a catastrophe of good intentions in the sense of there was a great deal of a good intention of we must stop seeing terrorists everywhere it may well be that this turned around a little bit too far into your ways one because we knew more about these groups than was let on what I meant about the revolt and the representation of the revolt if you look at the representation of the revolt and that they only look at the protesters in cities that's it there was no mention anywhere of any rebels being armed yeah that was entirely abstracted entirely abstracted and in fact it only became very very clear just how armed these groups were in the in subsequent months and then the Benghazi consulate nightmare and so on and so forth I agree that Gaddafi did support some Salafists some that were close to him just like he supports some to our groups and not others and you know supported Polisario for a couple of years and then you know dump them I think I'm not sure that the relationship was that clear as Gaddafi versus Salafists all the other way around it really really wasn't he was engaged one with some and others and that's what I meant earlier about Gaddafi is very very important and pivotal role and perhaps under-appreciated until his death and holding together several different groups he was the accidental male holding together many many strings from falling apart in North Africa and this should have been taken into consideration the problem that we also know in quite a lot of detail and by we I mean the diplomats that have studied knew in quite a lot of detail for instance other dimensions so a key dimension of this revolution was also Arab supremacism against all the nomads and we're not talking not just about the Tuareg many others as well the Barabish and others and a key feature of the revolution post-Gaddafi's death was actually a lot of racism against the nomads and the Salafists would rather use a more ISIS-like argument of they're basically Sufi pagans you know and they need to be reformed and this is a stress that I'm not sure Gaddafi was able to to resolve but he held it at bay because he controlled so many of these groups either as mercenaries as allies or just paid them off to shut up you know the one of the mainly early leaders of the Tuareg rebellion Bahanga was someone that basically Gaddafi had contained Cajold paid off imprisoned trained Gaddafi essentially dealt with these guys however he could I'm not sure it was a very good relationship but it was catastrophic upon the fall of his regime to see many of the rebels turn against these guys and finally going back to the question of seeing what we want to see I think in many ways Clinton made exactly the mistake she was trying to avoid I think there were good intentions in we must not see paranoid terrorism everywhere right but I think the complete opposite wanting to just see freedom fighting you know as if this was the rebellion against the English crown may have been a step too far and that's why my lesson is not that either of them is wrong as much as if there is simplicity in understanding these things and I think that that's what you were trying to tell me by giving me detail of the groups on the ground if it looks simple it's probably not and you know my main critique really is against simplifying the situation all the way to Gaddafi the madman versus freedom fighting unarmed rebels and unarmed matters a lot because unarmed is the language that makes the biggest impact in the Security Council with resolutions that are allowed for this so we have expressing concern and so on and so forth but essentially the only armed characters in the Security Council resolutions which I'm writing a lot of detail are all unarmed and that's just not true that's not to say that they were good or bad but there was an armed rebellion against Gaddafi a pretty big one and essentially that was willingly ignored even though they knew they knew on the ground and that's why Anne-Marie Slaughter is so important Anne-Marie Slaughter tells Clinton literally do not speak of unarmed rebellion these are unarmed protesters fighting for freedom against a tyrant and Clinton goes on to use that language and it makes it all the way into the UNSC resolution so we've got more questions in the chat I should address them now quickly do I see the five lessons played part in the Trump administration I mean to be perfectly honest Trump's administration is was very very incoherent diplomatically because he was treated essentially as a business and whatever can be had in short-term gain is worth whatever short-long-term concession in North Africa this is particularly obvious in the flip-flop in the convention in your comments I think a more obvious example is Trump giving essentially Western Sahara a recognition of their conquest of Western Sahara to Morocco in exchange for Morocco opening a short a small mission not a full embassy in Jerusalem so essentially a very long-term issue was treated for short-term gain that will probably not pay off at all if ever the consequences from North Africa I guess was profit however summarise the five lessons very quickly okay take diplomatic work seriously thousands of pages being written of a lot of good information worth reading two who is doing diplomatic knowledge production and processing it and governing it so for instance the nightmare that insights like Engas did not make it to Clinton's desk that those are a nightmare those insights those nuances they knew they could have ended up on her desk yeah and it's not just her fault is the establishment needs to work this better and use this information better I mean to be perfectly honest most diplomats agree with me that yeah their work should be used better could be used better I've had many diplomats tell me oh my god you take the diplomatic cables more seriously than basically the entire top straighter of the foreign office three this process of knowing who and why we're doing things internationally is much more than diplomatic it's much more than official is personal is private it can also be intimate yeah in some cases it can even be the kitchen table yeah and crucially you must always assume everyone wants in everyone wants to tell you how to see something because that of course shapes how you will deal with it lesson number four big vague strategies are a disaster global fight on communism global fight on terror they are liable to be abused because anyone can make to look like that enemy and finally lesson number five old problems a lot of old problems racism gender but also the very problem of what is the state is the state's nation does the state have natural interests a lot of diplomacy still speaks in the case of that and that was the influence of a generation of rail politic diplomatic leaders the likes of Kissinger and so on that made a very energetic case and it made very energetically the case that there are natural interests for countries determined by nature and so on and so on any more questions I mean I got a question but I think we're running out of time that was more of the you hinted to it in your book chapter but the influence of the private in the security industry and private industry itself and how that impacts how diplomacy and knowledge production is being done too so there is something small worth saying about this and this matters a lot because right now the guy that was responsible for a lot of this private information going into the state departments what is now national security advising Jake Sullivan Jake Sullivan very often would legitimize a lot of the information coming in for more private and informal sources like Blumenthal essentially by getting Blumenthal to buy reporting from think tanks from private security firms and things like that and then including them into the process of diplomatic knowledge production that's what I was saying that we need to grow up in our view of diplomacy this is not Ferreira or Shea and all typewriters it is that but it is also wives gossip you know a cleaner saying hey I've got a tribal contact we must be speak to him suddenly we realize why the Tyreg and Southern Libya so pissed off literally because of a random contact with the cleaner that makes it all the way to the political advisor but no one in Washington cares essentially there is a lot of the personal so I think Clinton for instance was more influenced than we would like to think by a very very simplistic understanding of humanitarianism in this relationship with democracy very very simplistic and it seems to me that a lot of the thinking that went around you know the time the Campbell era of understanding the Bosnian War and so on and Clinton's view of this war I think there's a lot of rethinking as to the long-term effects of this on all politicians politicians carry their stories into their roles and that's inevitable right can I say another important influence was how to say this Clinton's own idea of how to do feminism as Secretary of State is this also mattered this mattered for instance in her relationship with Anne-Marie Schulter and so wanting to see it that way did not necessarily resolve it um interestingly the reason I criticize our feminism is because for Clinton and many of her emails and this is very obvious and these are quite fun to look at I think you just search if you go to the Podesta emails in the weekly database and you go into the plus D version which is the searchable one and then you search her and women essentially just her emails that mention women very often the solution to women in diplomacy is herself I am Secretary of State is all fine now you know if they let me do what I want that is feminism so the two the person becomes the cause but this is a phenomenon that happens in all politics I think Trump is the most obvious the person is the cause of normal but in a lot of politics this has long been true or sometimes the person becomes attached to the cause or to a specific side of the cause which is why I go back to I wonder we can only speculate that's why I study text because I don't like to speculate as to what people think you see Yeah I think Cynthia Enlo also wrote about highlighted you know Clinton more than any other Secretary of State on her international visits would have off the books meetings with women's groups in local context to get more informal discussions we don't know how that fed into her policy or beliefs but yeah it's attention she's bringing women and women issues in you know onto the floor but as you said it's very much conditioned by her own imagining of what feminism is and what possible so I think it's even fair to say that we can see the impact of her generations feminism as opposed to ours right and their methods and approaches one last question from Martin Walker very good question CIA product there was quite a lot of it and it was almost entirely ignored CIA product was essentially what Inga was enlightening us about there are these groups and these many many complex groups and they have these different relationships and many of them are armed to the teeth and these guys have been waiting to kill Gaddafi for 40 years you know we knew quite a lot again ignoring but ignoring the CIA is a political sport in Washington these days I mean Trump did it even more aggressively but if he wasn't the first the CIA's first ever mission ever ever was in late 1946 it's detailed in my book The Road to Vietnam was working out how communists are the Vietnamese rebels are they really Stalinist stuges and they persecuted what the French claimed was a group of Russian advisors traveling through China to Vietnam turns out there were seven Russian tramps that had run away from a gulag they were not Russian advisors going to Vietnam and they found no evidence whatsoever but that too was ignored gosh I mean Pablo you're just an amazing speaker it's lovely to hear you talk and tell the stories that you do analytical sophistication and rigor with entertainment right so you've got brilliant lectureship balance that that we all strive for so I want to thank you so much for being a part of our new voices seminar series and for sharing your research you know and then fingers crossed we'll have you back when your book comes out again to talk more Oh yeah absolutely I would love that Amanda thank you that I have to intervene because that was the compliment I never knew I needed thank you thank you very much thank you everyone for coming it's been great I hope you enjoyed it and email me if you want to see the chapter absolutely and then please also final shout out to Pablo's going to have a blog post in the there's Chatham House series New Voices based upon his talk but also cool it's about where he's going forward so please check that out that will be released in mid-april to watch this space and again thank you audience for coming and asking some pretty cool questions and Pablo thank you so much thank you everyone thank you take care bye bye bye