Case Studies | How case studies can improve diplomatic training
A Council on Foreign Relations report highlights the importance of learning from diplomatic case studies
Jonas Heering and Alistair Somerville
The slate of national security and foreign policy appointments by the incoming Biden administration demonstrates a clear shift away from the “America First” turn of the Trump years. A slew of reports with recommendations for how to rebuild the State Department has accompanied this return to a diplomacy-first approach.
Among their recommendations across a range of foreign policy issues, these reports and task forces invariably call for better training of current and future diplomats at the State Department and across national security agencies, to equip officials to tackle the challenges of today, and of tomorrow.
In their report for the Council on Foreign Relations, “Revitalizing the State Department and American Diplomacy,” ISD board member Uzra Zeya (who serves on the Biden transition’s State Department Agency Review Team) and incoming Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer highlight the need to “return to the essentials of diplomatic tradecraft.” In particular, they argue for the use of case studies as part of professional education at the State Department for both Civil and Foreign Service Officers.
Case studies are just as valuable in diplomatic training as they are in undergraduate and graduate-level academic courses, because they require students to engage deeply with the decision points and choices that policymakers face. Indeed, Zeya and Finer provide a concrete recommendation on how to integrate case studies into an overall more comprehensive training program at the State Department:
“Increasing staffing pipelines and funding to create a training float that will deepen officers’ command of the fundamentals of diplomatic tradecraft, including policy development and doctrine, case studies, negotiation, crisis management, program management, and specialized knowledge throughout their career path.”
Want to learn more about how U.S. diplomacy could change with the new administration? Check out our Transition Notes series with foreign policy recommendations for President-elect Biden.
Two case studies from ISD’s library highlight international responses to one of the most pertinent global challenges of the 21st century that the CFR report highlights: pandemic disease.
In “Morality, Public Health, and the National Interest: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR),” readers explore the George W. Bush administration’s decision to commit $15 billion over five years to address the international HIV/AIDS epidemic. Zeya and Finer describe PEPFAR as “one of the most successful government programs in American history,” which “achieved such strong bipartisan funding that it brought antiretroviral treatment to nearly fifteen million people worldwide.” But as our case study highlights, the program raised ethical questions about funding programs in the developing world and the political leverage these programs give to rich countries. The case study also considers how fighting the AIDS pandemic fit with U.S. national interests and allows diplomats-in-training to debate, for example, whether to use bilateral or multilateral programs to fight pandemics.
The 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia served as a stark reminder that infectious diseases do not recognize international borders. In contrast to the U.S. government’s response to Covid-19, the State Department’s leadership and coordination of an international public health response to the Ebola outbreak was key to limiting the pandemic’s death toll to just over 11,000, compared to initial projections of over a million deaths, write Zeya and Finer.
ISD’s case study, “The 2014–2015 West Africa Ebola Outbreak: The Diplomacy of Response and Recovery in Guinea,” examines the political and diplomatic efforts behind the international response to Ebola, as well as the transition from urgent response to longer-term capacity building and development needs in the context of pandemics.
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage communities across the globe, and governments struggle to implement an efficient rollout of vaccinations, revitalizing global health diplomacy is more important than ever. Vaccine nationalism is bound to fail, not just in response to Covid-19 but future pandemics too.
Current and future diplomats will need a better understanding of the functioning of global health institutions and international responses to pandemic diseases. Case studies that highlight how these challenges have been met in the past (as well as past failures) provide an excellent tool to better prepare Foreign Service Officers for the next pandemic, and much more.
Jonas Heering is a research assistant at ISD. He is also the Bunker graduate fellow in diplomacy, and a master’s student in the School of Foreign Service.
Alistair Somerville is the publications editor at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and editor of The Diplomatic Pouch. Follow him on Twitter @apsomerville
Check out ISD’s case studies library:
Read the full CFR report:
