Assembling aeromobilities of diplomacy: A case study of the Finnish Foreign Service

This paper highlights the need to expand research on air transport regulation from the institutional to the everyday scale of analysis. Employing the Finnish Foreign Service as an example, it demonstrates how an assemblage approach to diplomatic aeromobility, as a fact of diplomatic working life and an item in geopolitical representations, can open up new angles on and directions for air transport and diplomacy research. Without trying to authoritatively delimit the concept, the article examines how the aeromobilities of diplomacy form overlapping, emerging, and mutually constituting networks at multiple scales, from the micro geographies of the airplane cabin and the geographies of the neoliberal state to the macro geographies of international air transport networks. It demonstrates how diplomats as both co-producers and end users of international air transport networks fill the space onboard a network carrier with a unique mobile working culture, co-produce mutually reinforcing representations with the flag carrier, and bring credibility to air service agreement negotiations. The paper suggests that further research on other geopolitical contexts and components of diplomatic aeromobility is needed.