In Diplomatic Material Jason Dittmer offers a counterintuitive reading of foreign policy by tracing the ways that complex interactions between people and things shape the decisions and actions of diplomats and policymakers. Bringing new materialism to bear on international relations, Dittmer focuses not on what the state does in the world but on how the world operates within the state through the circulation of humans and nonhuman objects. From examining how paper storage needs impacted the design of the British Foreign Office Building to discussing the 1953 NATO decision to adopt the .30 caliber bullet as the standard rifle ammunition, Dittmer highlights the contingency of human agency within international relations. In Dittmer's model, which eschews stasis, structural forces, and historical trends in favor of dynamism and becoming, the international community is less a coming-together of states than it is a convergence of media, things, people, and practices. In this way, Dittmer locates power in the unfolding of processes on the micro level, thereby reconceptualizing our understandings of diplomacy and international relations. "A valuable contribution to the field of political geography.... Dittmer... provides a refreshing take on foreign policy by tracing the material circulations that continually influence how political elites understand the international community."― Ed Bryan , Geopolitics “The world is a much more complicated place than simple assumptions of international relations between autonomous territorial states often suggest; our task as scholars is to explicate the complexities, and Jason Dittmer has done us all a favour here by offering an exemplary text that shows us both how to do it and why it matters.”― Simon Dalby , Social & Cultural Geography "Dittmer’s achievement in the book (and perhaps that for which he should be most lauded) is that of dragging insights from the deepest, darkest depths of theoryland into the light of the everyday."― Stephen Legg , Antipode " Diplomatic Material is an innovative study that substantially broadens how we think about the makings of foreign policy."― John A. Gentry , Perspectives on Politics "Jason Dittmer innovatively combines multiple literatures and empirical cases to render familiar issues in novel ways. His engaging writing makes the work accessible to undergraduates. Diplomatic Material will be of interest to those working in diplomacy, assemblage theory, and more-than-human approaches in political geography and international relations." -- Merje Kuus, author of ― Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy Jason Dittmer is Professor of Political Geography at University College London and the author of Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics and coeditor of Diplomatic Cultures and International Politics: Translations, Spaces, and Alternatives . Diplomatic Material Affect, Assemblage, and Foreign Policy By Jason Dittmer Duke University Press Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6911-0 Contents Abbreviations, Acknowledgments, Introduction: Geopolitical Assemblages and Everyday Diplomacy, 1 Materializing Diplomacy in the Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office, 2 UKUSA Signals Intelligence Cooperation, 3 Interoperability and Standardization in NATO, 4 Assembling a Common Foreign and Security Policy, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 Materializing Diplomacy in the Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office Much attention has been paid to how foreign policy matters, but significantly less has been paid to the matter of foreign policy. That is, foreign ministries, embassies, and various sites of diplomacy have been extensively considered via the symbolic dimension of architecture or location, but rarely in terms of their engineering or materiality (the exception being the literature on embassy security). The logic of rational-choice theory and its variants within international relations generally discounts the bureaucratic-material context in which foreign policy is made, leaving no room for the bodies of ministers, diplomats, clerks, or others involved in the production of foreign policy, let alone the buildings they inhabit. In contrast, I foreground the foreign ministry itself as an assemblage of materials, bodies, and objects, subject to a range of processes unfolding at different temporalities. Understanding the foreign ministry in this way does not explain why specific foreign policies emerge from that assemblage, but it does help explain the force relations to which the foreign ministry — as an apparatus within the state assemblage and always also in assemblage with other foreign ministries — has been subject for the last two hundred years. The British Foreign Office (known as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office since 1968) has long been a leader in the evolution of t