Geographies of diplomatic labor: Institutional culture, state work, and Canada's foreign service

Abstract

The common perception of a foreign service career emphasizes the role of high-ranking diplomats traveling the world to engage in the high politics of statecraft and negotiation. Critical geographic scholarship, however, has recently turned to examine the more mundane, quotidian, and regularized work of foreign policy professionals in consulates, embassies, and foreign ministries. This paper builds a historical and institutional understanding of the work of Canada's foreign service officers, examining how ideals, practices, and structures related to professionalism, elite status, expertise, and collective bargaining matter for articulating diplomats' self-identity, and how this shapes and is shaped by institutional change in the Canadian state. We look first at the changing “institutional culture” within the foreign service, especially how FSOs understand their work and its relationship to the foreign ministry as a workplace, and how this workplace has changed through institutional shifts in the departmental configuration housing the diplomatic corps. We then examine the role of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO), which represents and bargains on behalf of foreign service officers in Canada, in shaping Canadian foreign service officers' sense of themselves, their work, and their place in the Canadian state.