Intercultural Communication and Identity Management in International Diplomacy

It is impossible to define diplomacy without doing so in terms of communication, for the latter is a necessary requirement for the performance of the same. Diplomats represent an entire nation and its people, and hence try to minimize misunderstandings by carefully regulating their language, actions, self-presentation and identity management so that harmony can be maintained in the intercultural communication between the involved negotiators. In this paper, I have attempted to derive connections between various concepts of human communication and their importance in the diplomatic arena, so as to view how interconnected and dependent all these concepts are. Multiple examples have also been presented in order to elucidate the concepts explored. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the performance of diplomacy is centred around communication between agents from various cultures, and how this intercultural communication influences the formation of perceptions, relations and reputations of the nations involved. It also looks at how diplomats perform self-presentation and identity management in order to control others’ perception of them and build better relations between nations.