IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/raagxx/v110y2020i5p1369-1385.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Manipulating Diplomatic Atmospheres: The United Nations Security Council and Syria

Author

Listed:
  • Alun Jones

Abstract

This article connects growing interest in affective atmospheres in human geography with critical geographies of diplomacy. Diplomats inhabit, discuss, and operate in and through atmospheres. Specifically, and uniquely, this article explores atmospheric manipulation by them and its connection to geopolitical claim making. In this way, it adds to the work in human geography on atmospheres by revealing its politics; that is, how atmospheres through spatiotemporal and relational processes are manipulated to do the work of geopolitics. Importantly, it also exposes how atmospheres are not incidental, accidental, or unimportant to geographies of diplomacy. Manifestly, atmospheres are political and have consequences. This article is grounded empirically in accounts of atmosphere in the United Nations Security Council by its high-level current diplomatic members. The focus is on the intensity of their “lived” experience and their registering and appraisal of the emerging, transitioning, and transformative atmospheres in the Council. Crucially, their accounts link the complexities of atmospheric perturbations, diplomatic “moments,” and subjectivity with manipulation. Collectively, they expose the cognitively penetrable although differentially affected nature of atmospheric manipulation and how the staging of an atmosphere is taken up and reworked by diplomatic bodies. The specific context for the study of atmospheric manipulation is a Council meeting on the worsening political and humanitarian crisis in Syria and the formulation of a military response by three of its permanent members (the United States, France, and the United Kingdom) in April 2018.

Suggested Citation

  • Alun Jones, 2020. "Manipulating Diplomatic Atmospheres: The United Nations Security Council and Syria," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 110(5), pages 1369-1385, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:110:y:2020:i:5:p:1369-1385
    DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1696665
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2019.1696665
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/24694452.2019.1696665?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:110:y:2020:i:5:p:1369-1385. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/raag .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.