- John Duncan is the United Kingdom Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament. He comments regularly via Twitter and on his own blog. The opinions expressed are his own. -

In my FCO blog I recently argued that communication was one of the core tasks of a professional diplomat. With the next major summit of Gov20 taking place in Washington in a few weeks, below are some personal thoughts on how and why diplomacy is responding to the challenge and opportunities of web-based communication.

I came to this as someone who worked on mainframes in the 1970s, whose first PC was a AMSTRAD PCW with 512 KB memory. With that background and living in Switzerland, just down the road from where the world wide web was invented (CERN) it is perhaps not surprising that I view this technology largely as a range of new tools.

It is true that the improvements over the subsequent 30 years are extraordinary. My daughter’s iPod shuffle has more storage capacity than our home PC of only a decade ago. But, having once jammed an IBM mainframe in a perpetual loop, I am also conscious of the “Rubbish in–Rubbish out” principle. The tools are only as good as the use one makes of them.

The speed of communication and the geographical reach is equally extraordinary; developing the reality of an interconnected and interdependent world and new virtual communities. The arrival of these new means of communication is perhaps even more important and encouraging given the parallel development in the more traditional media, particularly television, of news as entertainment.

If net-based communication is changing the way we all access information and opinion, the impact on diplomacy and government affairs may well be equally profound; perhaps most significantly in terms of transparency and democratic accountability.

Both multilateral and bilateral ambassadors spend much of our time communicating the view of governments, both those of our own and those to whom we are accredited. So it can be said that we are often “marketing” ideas — what does the world we want look like and how to get there. It is noticeable that the diplomatic community reacts just as badly to spin as does the general public.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick commented in his address to the International Institute for Strategic Studies last year in Geneva, that: “ The interconnections of globalisation require our generation to recognise anew the nexus among economics, governance, and security”. So the 21st century diplomatic agenda is also a more complex one.

Traditionally diplomatic interlocutors can be divided into decision makers and opinion formers. Governments are not bureaucratic monoliths. Rarely are more than six people key to a decision. Our task as diplomats is to find those key players and convince them.

Opinion formers act as the multipliers. Having a well argued case is seldom enough by itself. Human beings still retain their tribal instincts, in sport as in politics and foreign affairs. We seem hardwired to view things all too often in terms of “us and them”, and diplomacy is no exception. Diplomats need the opinion formers as the people who give the “third-party endorsement” that reinforces our message; a classic marketing technique to respond to a trust deficit.

The internet allows the creation of a new world-wide “us” of shared interests and values. Social media networks and the blogoshpere provide new tools to speak directly to that wider community of actors that Zoellick refers to; going beyond the confines of traditional state-to-state interface, to test and be challenged on our ideas in a dialogue and sometimes in a partnership with civil society.

The figures speak for themselves. At an average international meeting one is talking to between perhaps 27-200 diplomatic colleagues. A post on the perhaps unfortunately named Twitter may get up to 800 or more, with a blog post several thousand.

And the numbers alone are not really the point. The net, Facebook and Twitter have more than their fair share of the minutiae of celebrity lives and get rich quick promoters, but the “political” virtual communities are self selecting and can filter out this background noise.

They comprise a wide range of people from think tanks to journalists, students, to members of the public who care about the issues and are often willing to become involved with other decision makers. They offer direct access to the community that may provide third-party endorsement and at its best the creation of a constituency for change.

There are some who claim that these communities are essentially English speaking, if not Anglo-Saxon. The evidence suggests otherwise. It is clear that a number of those who regularly follow me on Twitter do not have English as a mother tongue. Some of the most successful FCO blogging ambassadors, such as Mark Kent in Vietnam and Alan Charlton in Brazil write in the language of the countries they are accredited to.  The Foreign Office uses close to 40 languages in its net-based communication.

For government officials, engagement with this new virtual community is a challenge. It is unfamiliar and fraught with the risk of making mistakes. But there are also opportunities to multiply the effect of what we are already trying to do.

However one of the important lessons from the last two decades it is that we should be careful to avoid allowing our enthusiasm for new ideas and a new world order to cause us to underestimate the opposition to change.  The international arena has given us some sharp reminders on that score. In the end we still have to persuade the decision makers. The Internet simply offers new and powerful ways to do so. Officials and governments should, and many are, seizing the opportunity.

- John Duncan is the United Kingdom Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament. He comments regularly via Twitter and on his own Blog. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan once remarked that in terms of people killed and injured every day, conventional weapons are the worst weapons of mass destruction in the 21st century.

Monday sees the start of a “Week of Action” to generate support for a new International Arms Trade Treaty, organised by NGO alliance “Control Arms” which brings together Amnesty International, Oxfam and IANSA.

Control Arms have been lobbying for an ATT for the best part of ten years; inauspicious timing perhaps in a decade that is increasingly refereed to as “the Decade of Stalemate” in the field of international multilateral diplomacy.

The low point of international efforts to curb the proliferation of conventional weapons was probably 2006, with the collapse of the United Nations Review Conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons in New York. But it was also the year that a group of seven countries (Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Kenya, Japan, and the UK) launched a process in the United Nations leading to the negotiation of a new legally binding treaty to regulate the international arms trade.

The humanitarian and moral case for regulation is unassailable, with hundreds of civilians being killed every day by weapons that have found their way into the hands of criminals, terrorists, insurgents and more recently pirates.

But economics is an equally important driver in this debate. As the discussion in the UN has moved forward, more and more companies from the arms industry itself have come to support the need for international regulation of what is now a global industry. The patchwork of arms export control agreements that currently exist has frustrated cooperation amongst responsible companies and served as a brake on inward investment. They have had the effect of creating competitors operating on different standards who are pushed towards the areas of the market where there is the highest risk these weapons will be misused or diverted.

As someone whose job bridges both nuclear and conventional weapons proliferation, I am acutely aware that one of the key elements of making progress towards a World Free of Nuclear Weapons is to stop the uncontrolled proliferation of conventional weapons.

Next month, discussions will reconvene at the UN on the future Arms Trade Treaty. My colleague Grace Mutandwa has blogged on FCO site about the impact of the current absence of such regulation in her own country. Other Foreign Office colleagues will provide their own perspectives in the coming days. Readers can also follow the event on Twitter.

- John Duncan is the United Kingdom Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament. He comments regularly via Twitter and on his own Blog. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Nuclear disarmament has been rather knocked out of the foreign affairs headlines over recent weeks by more immediate concerns over potential pandemics, the Indian election and the endgame of the long running conflict in Sri Lanka. But last week while the world’s media were looking elsewhere the international arms control and disarmament community took a remarkable step to break what has been called the “Decade of Deadlock”.

For more than ten years, interminable wrangling over arcane procedural points has prevented agreement over even the agenda for the major Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty which takes place in New York every 5 years. Hardly surprising then that the last Review Conference in 2000 2005 ended in stalemate. Many feared that the next one in 2010 would suffer the same fate.

However diplomats meeting in New York at the preparatory meeting (known as a PrepCom) which concluded on Friday surprised many by rapidly agreeing the agenda and procedural issues for next year’s conference. It seems they had at last heeded the calls for action by senior world leaders, both past (see the numerous op-eds by Messrs Gorbachev, Shultz, Kissinger, Rifkind and others) and present (Presidents Obama, Medvedev, Sarkozy) and Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s call to see the nuclear debate as intrinsically linked to the other momentous challenges we face in today’s world and that these challenges are best addressed together.

In their Arms Trade Treaty initiative, the British have shown that modern grand coalition diplomacy can succeed, working with countries as diverse as Argentina, Kenya and Japan to confront the scourge of conventional weapons proliferation, which so seriously undermines international efforts to promote peace and prosperity in the worlds poorest regions.

The challenge for nuclear proliferation is as just as great where the UK aims to turn common purpose into common action in our shared global society by securing agreement on a comprehensive multilateral strategy to allow nations safe and secure access to civil nuclear power, reduce the risk of proliferation from civil programmes and achieve real progress in multilateral nuclear disarmament.

But is a community who have spent quite so long arguing over technicalities well placed to deliver the sort of political vision in the nuclear field set out in President Obama’s Prague Speech earlier this year? Only time will tell. Emerging blinking into the harsh light of the policy debate last week in New York clearly caught some unawares. Despite coming close to an unprecedented agreement on a series of detailed policy recommendations on the substance of the debate for next years Review Conference, I suspect that we will indeed need the President’s proposed Nuclear Security Summit to inject some more of that vision and energy into a community which “has seen it all before”.

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon was doing his part this week in Geneva flanked by the Algerian and Swiss Foreign Minister’s calling for another part of the multilateral diplomatic architecture, the Conference on Disarmament to get down to work on a new Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty, a basic building block, together with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, that would cap the further development of nuclear weapons and set us on the path towards a world free of nuclear weapons.