DiploNews – Issue 340 – 5 February 2018
Upcoming study and training opportunities
Capacity Development – application deadline extended to 5 February
Capacity development has been emerging as a central approach within development for more than two decades. To help development professionals better understand and master this paradigm, this interactive course, offered in cooperation with the Learning Network for Capacity Development (LenCD), introduces the key concepts, principles, and values of capacity development. The main focus is on building practical skills for better design, planning, implementation, and assessment of capacity development initiatives. The course is taught online by Jenny Pearson and Carol Kiangura. The next session starts 19 Feburary 2018 and the application deadline is 15 January 2018. Please visit the course webpage to read more and apply.
February 2018 online diplomacy courses – application deadline extended to 5 February
Start the new year with one of our most popular online courses:
- Diplomatic Theory and Practice
- Public Diplomacy
- Introduction to Internet Governance
Apply by 5 February 2018 for Diplo certificate courses. For further information or to apply, click on the titles of the courses listed, or visit our courses webpage. Register now to reserve your place.
Negotiation Skills
Non-traditional areas of diplomacy (education diplomacy, health diplomacy, Internet governance, humanitarian diplomacy, development diplomacy, and more) require the use of diplomatic skills to build bridges across sectors, diverse actors, and borders. This course on Negotiation Skills, offered by DiploFoundation and the Center for Education Diplomacy, is a practical, interactive course that equips participants with the skills to successfully prepare, undertake, and conclude negotiations in formal and informal settings with government and non-government actors alike. The course introduces the concept and principles of negotiation and reflects on the role of power and empathy in negotiation. It introduces key skills supported by case studies and practical learning activities, including an online simulation exercise. Rather than going into the theoretical considerations of negotiation, such as game theory or group decision-making theory, the course focuses on key skills that are valuable for a variety of negotiations. The course starts on 23 April 2018. Read more on the course webpage and apply by 26 March 2018.
May 2018 online diplomacy courses
Starting on 7 May 2018, we offer courses on diplomacy topics, both classic and contemporary:
Apply by 5 March 2018 for University of Malta accredited courses and by 2 April for Diplo certificate courses. For further information or to apply, click on the titles of the courses listed, or visit our courses webpage. Register now to reserve your place.
Malta scholarships
Thanks to support from the government of Malta, partial scholarships are available for applicants from developing countries to attend upcoming Diplo online courses. These scholarships cover 30–60% of course fees and can be applied to most online courses in 2018. Browse our course catalogue and contact us at admissions@diplomacy.edu for further information. You can also sign up for our courses mailing list to be informed about upcoming courses.
What is the potential of big data for diplomacy? Join us for the launch of the Data Diplomacy report
On 8 February, 10:00-13:00 CET, DiploFoundation will launch the new report Data Diplomacy: Updating Diplomacy to the Big Data Era, commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. The report assesses the potential of big data in different areas of diplomacy, discusses capacity development needs, and highlights some of the key challenges that should be considered when engaging with big data to support the work of diplomats. The event will take place in the WMO Building, 7bis Avenue de la Paix, Geneva. Read more and register. For those not present in Geneva, a soft launch will be organised during the February WebDebate on 6 February at 12:00 UTC.
Launching the Digital Commerce course
On January 29 a new course on Digital Commerce was launched during a face-to-face meeting hosted by the Geneva Internet Platform. Diplo’s Marília Maciel provides an overview of the course, offered by DiploFoundation (Diplo), CUTS International Geneva, the International Trade Centre (ITC), the Geneva Internet Platform (GIP), and delivered with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The course will benefit diplomats who follow digital trade negotiations on multilateral and bilateral levels with the aim of helping participants better navigate and more meaningfully take part in discussions on e-commerce.
Read the latest publications on digital policy
The latest issue of the Geneva Digital Watch newsletter is out! Read about the top digital policy trends in January, including Internet companies’ behaviour under scrutiny, governments exerting more pressure on companies to remove illegal content, new legal measures planned to tackle fake news, and taxation for the Internet companies coming into focus again. Read also about the recently concluded annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), where world leaders reflected, among others, on the need to embrace technological progress in an inclusive and human-centric manner. Download your copy.
For a round-up of the main developments that shaped digital policy in 2017, download our new report: Top digital policy developments in 2017. The report explains why each development was significant.
What’s been happening in Diplo’s blogsphere
Guest blogger Grace Mutung’u looks at parliamentary diplomacy in the context of Internet policy-making. She argues that parliamentarians need to become active to better represent the public interest and to agree on better national policies. Two other blog posts look at the debate around new diplomacies. They argue that the focus on new diplomacies indicated by prefixes or ‘x diplomacies’ miss some important points. Both posts are concerned with finding a definition of diplomacy that goes beyond the activities of government officials and a description of the practice that takes into account other ways of seeing the world. In Enough of ‘new’ diplomacies, guest blogger Philip Conway calls for ‘the reclamation of the diplomatic pluriverse’ by focusing on questions of (historical) marginalisation, existential recognition, and legitimate practices in diplomacy. In New diplomacy: Where do we want to go? Diplo’s Katharina Hone argues that ‘a diplomacy which aims to pay respect to different ways of imagining life needs to hold space for recognising other modes of existence as legitimate.’
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