Embassies in Crisis

British Academy, 9 June 2016

Call for Papers

This one-day conference will combine academic papers with a seminar session at which serving and former Embassy staff will be invited to present their testimonies and perspectives. The intention is to present a summary of the conference findings to the FCO to help inform future thinking in this area. The event will be held at the British Academy, 9 June 2016.

Embassies have long been integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But Embassies are also discrete political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory ‘immune’ from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis Embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. Embassies in Crisis will revisit flashpoints in the lives of Embassies overseas. Approaching Embassies as distinct communities with their own micro-histories, this conference seeks to explore each of these aspects in the lives of Embassies and the people who run them. Papers are welcomed that discuss instances of international confrontation or mass demonstration, past and present, that placed particular Embassies in the global spotlight.

The conference is a collaboration between Strathclyde historian Dr Rogelia Pastor Castro and Professors Martin Thomas and Richard Toye of the University of Exeter. The event is organised in conjunction with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historians and the British International History Group.

Those interested in contributing a paper are asked to provide a title and 200 word abstract to:

Dr Rogelia Pastor-Castro Rogelia.pastor-castro@strath.ac.uk

Deadline: 15 April, 2016

Rogelia Pastor-Castro is Lecturer in International History at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests focus on European security and integration. Her publications include, co-edited with John W Young, The Paris Embassy: British Ambassadors and Anglo-French Relations, 1944-1979 (2013). She has published on post-war European defence and British and French diplomacy. She is currently writing a book on Britain and France: Contending visions of Europe. She is Treasurer of the British International History Group.

Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for War, State, and Society at the University of Exeter. Currently a research fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation, he has written extensively on the French empire and contested decolonization. His most recent books are Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers, and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-40 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Fight or Flight: France, Britain and their Roads from Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. He has published widely in the fields of modern British, imperial and global history, and is best known for his three books on Winston Churchill. He is co-author, with Professor Martin Thomas, of Arguing About Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France 1882-1956, which is to be published by Oxford University Press.