Assembling Micro-Geographies of Interstate Diplomacy

Time: Friday 10 February 10:15-11:30 AM

Venue: U4072, Main Building, University of Helsinki

Interstate diplomacy continues to evolve in an increasingly complex and digital post- pandemic world. No longer confined to closed-door summit halls and gated diplomatic compounds, the diplomatic assemblage has broadened and become more visible across space and scale. However, to date, geographic literature on diplomacy has largely focused on the official sites of state power and reach while neglecting the importance of the seemingly banal sites and practices of everyday diplomatic life. Considering this gap in the literature, I aim to extend the recent interest in critical geographies of diplomacy by studying diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective that connects everyday spaces and affective atmospheres to wider diplomatic processes. I discuss how diplomatic sites and atmospheres in Turkey, China, and beyond are manipulated for geopolitical ends and the kind of disjunctures between idealised designs of diplomatic spaces and the embodied experiences of their end users.

About the speaker

Timo Sysiö is a career diplomat with the Finnish Foreign Service, having served more than a decade in both Europe and Asia. He is currently the Press and Cultural Counsellor at the Embassy of Finland in Beijing, China. Among others, he was previously the Second Secretary at the Finnish embassy in Turkey, in charge of bilateral trade relations and communications.
Sysiö holds an MPhil in political geography from the University of Hong Kong, and is currently defending his PhD in urban spatiality of interstate diplomacy at the National University of Singapore.