ABSTRACT

This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from transnational networks of diasporas, religious communities, and trade. Flagging this partnership as the key to understanding the changing twenty-first century international order, we follow how informal diplomats provide strongmen much-needed flexibility and openness in their foreign dealings. This agility, we suggest, is afforded by their earned status in the moral economy of ‘network societies’. Held together by interpersonal bonds rather than abstract national belonging, trust rather than law, and patronage rather than taxation, network societies conjure a state-society covenant markedly different from one between a liberal state and its citizen. By shifting the focus from state institutions to the social life of networks, we place the strongman-informal diplomat partnership within longer histories of diasporic networks and imperial brokerage. Combining this long durée approach with a granular reading of everyday politics, we develop an ethnographically and historically informed inquiry into the two ubiquitous figures of twenty-first-century and lay out a programmatic agenda towards an anthropology of international relations.

摘要

本文调查了国内的民粹主义者和国外特立独行的交易者、强人领导人如何通过使用来自海外侨民、宗教社区和贸易的跨国网络的非正式外交官，越来越多地将官方职业外交官置于边缘。将这种伙伴关系标记为理解不断变化的 21 世纪国际秩序的关键，我们关注非正式外交官如何为强人提供其对外交往中急需的灵活性和开放性。我们认为，这种敏捷性是由他们在“网络社会”的道德经济中获得的地位所提供的。通过人际纽带而不是抽象的国家归属感、信任而不是法律、恩惠而不是税收将网络社会联系在一起，从而形成了一种与自由国家与其公民之间的契约明显不同的国家-社会契约。通过将重点从国家机构转移到网络的社会生活，我们将强人与非正式外交官的伙伴关系置于侨民网络和帝国经纪的较长历史中。将这种漫长的研究方法与对日常政治的细粒度阅读相结合，我们对 21 世纪两个无处不在的人物进行了民族志和历史方面的调查，并制定了国际关系人类学的纲领性议程。