Embassies in Crisis

In moments of crisis Embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. It is this aspect of Embassy experience that this collection of essays explores.

Embassies are integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But Embassies are also discreet political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory 'immune' from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis Embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. It is this aspect of Embassy experience that this collection of essays explores and Embassies in Crisis revisits flashpoints in the recent lives of Embassies overseas at times of acute political crisis.

Ranging across multiple British and other embassy crises, unusually, this book offers equal insights to international historians and members of the diplomatic community.

Autorentext

Rogelia Pastor-Castro is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests focus on Franco-British relations, and European security and integration. She has published on post-war European defence, and British and French diplomacy, and has co-edited The Paris Embassy: British Ambassadors and Anglo-French Relations, 1944-1979 (2013) with John W. Young. Currently, she is working on a three-year AHRC funded project on The Weight of the Past in Franco-British Relations.

Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter. A specialist in the politics of contested decolonization, his most recent publications are Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 (2012), Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire (2014), and, with co-author Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France (2017).

Inhalt

Introduction: Embassies in Crisis: Diplomacy, Communities, and Conflicts; 1. The British Embassy in Paris and the Fall of France; 2. 'Ambassador Brawls with Minister': Emotions and Internal and External Crisis at the French Embassy to the Holy See; 3. Keeping the Flag Flying: John Reeves and the British Consulate in Macao, 1941-45; 4. Austrian Diplomatic Missions in Crisis: From 1938 to the Cold War; 5. The Mindszenty Affair and the United States Embassy in Budapest; 6. British High Commissioners in India and Pakistan and the Kashmir Conflict, 1947-49; 7. Crisis at the Creation: the Establishment of the First US Embassy in Israel, 1947-1949; 8. The U.S. Embassy in Saigon and the Dien Bien Phu Crisis, 1954; 9. Hook, Line and Sinker: The British Embassy in Cairo and Egypt's "Expulsion of Soviet Advisers," 1972; 10. Eyes Off the Prize? The British Embassy in Tehran, 1976-79; 11. Crisis response in a 21st century British Embassy: Ukraine 2013/14; 12. Embassies Responding to Crisis: A Practitioner's Perspective