Welcome to the inaugural issue of Everyday Ambassador!
Thanks for being here at the start.
Lets start with the Who, the Why and the What.
Who?
I'm a law professor, an international lawyer, and an anthropologist.
I have written academic books on the United Nations, on social movements, on central banks and on comparative law and the anthropology of law. I’m a Chevalier (knight) in the Order of Academic Palms of the French Republic, a recipient of the Maier Prize for lifetime achievement from the Humboldt Foundation and a Peace Correspondent for the City of Nagasaki. I’m also a feminist, a mom and a yoga dunce. I was born in Peoria, Illinois, but my work has taken me to places like Suva Fiji, Beijing, China, Cambridge, England, United Nations Headquarters in New York, and Nagasaki, Japan.
I’m fascinated by how the choices we make and the relationships we build at the hyper-local level, where each of us lives every day, shape global affairs and vice versa.
I am lucky to travel a lot for my work—across the US and around the world. I love people-people of all ages, backgrounds, viewpoints and traditions—and I am constantly amazed at the good that people are creating, often without anyone noticing.
It’s a dark time, but I believe in us--I think we can repair this broken world, learn to work across our differences, and create a safer, more just, and more peaceful world. And I definitely think we should have fun while we're at it. I want to learn from you, and share what I know from research and life in global affairs and am learning from the people I meet.
Why?
Because in a divided world, we're all diplomats.
Our world is brimming with challenges—from environmental crises to growing political divides. But it's also bursting with opportunities for change. As the old world order fades away, I believe that the world needs more everyday diplomats: bridge-builders across divides—political, cultural, scientific, and artistic. That would be you and me.
What the world needs now is many more ambassadors—connectors, translators, interpreters, across political and cultural differences, between science and religion, between the arts and the technology world, even between teams within a single company. Whether it's mediating a school board dispute, deescalating an altercation in the grocery check out line, or finding a way to bring nations together to address CO2 reductions, my research has taught me that the challenges and the skills required are not that different.
And we all can use a little support right now…
…some inspiration from the work of others, some tactical advice, and some context to help connect the dots between what we are doing and experiencing day to day and global political, historical and cultural trends.
My goal is to empower you to be the Everyday Ambassador the world needs now, right from where you are.
What?
Starting this week, every Friday, you’ll receive in your inbox the story of one Everyday Ambassador who gives me hope. I bring context to these individual stories, through the lens of my synthesis of decades of legal and anthropological research. I finish by sharing a few tactical takeaways, some moves we can try in our own work as Everyday Ambassadors.
But for this first issue, I thought I should begin by telling you a little more about me:
From Fiji to Beijing
I was a young international lawyer, sent to Suva, Fiji to research how this new member of the family of nations was making use of international law. In my first week, I met with a top government lawyer and diplomat to seek his advice. He was kind, but he shook his head. “You had better come up with another research plan. There isn’t anything going on in international law here.” As I prodded, he insisted: there were no important cases that he knew of, no big diplomatic issues, nothing of significance I could follow.
It was too late. I had already cashed the scholarship check, bought the plane ticket. A week later, I was sitting dejected on the porch of a local coffee shop wondering if I should head back to the university, when a couple of women settled down at the table next to me, huddling in conversation. At some point, one of them looked up, puzzled to see a young foreigner, clearly bewildered and all alone. “Who are you?” she asked, in the direct but somehow generous way that only Fijians can pull off. I stumbled through my tale of woe. This amused the two. “Well, we don’t know anything about international law, diplomacy or global affairs, but since you’re here, do you want to help us out? We’re from the YWCA and we have a newsletter to produce. The lady who did it just quit and we were wondering how we were going to get the next issue out.
You look like you could write a couple of short articles about child nutrition.” I had nothing else to do, so I agreed to help out while I figured out what to do. Little did I know that the YWCA had a storied history of activism around the world, and that in Fiji, it had led transformative programs to empower women and push for democracy from the late colonial era through independence and to the present day.
A day turned into a week, and a month, and soon I was a regular volunteer at a number of women ’s organizations in Suva. As it happened, this was the year of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and Fiji’s government and NGOs were preparing to participate. I attended the Beijing conference as a member of the Fijian NGO delegation and experienced the world of high diplomacy through Fijian eyes. At the Beijing Women's conference and at UN headquarters, I observed how, when given a chance, the activists and newcomer diplomats from Fiji could deftly absorb the lessons and moves of international negotiations and put these into practice in new and impactful ways.
But it took longer than I would care to acknowledge for it to dawn on me that all these newsletters and NGO meetings, all the activities and documents in preparation for and after the UN conference were diplomacy of the most important kind. I couldn’t see it because it was not the stuff of elites and experts. It was not the kind of thing that mattered to the foreign policy establishment I had been trained into. To international lawyers, the UN women’s conference did not count as significant at the time because its final agreement would not be binding on states.
Over time, I came to understand that there was in fact lots of ground-breaking diplomacy going on in Fiji, and in communities like it all over the world. The protagonists just weren’t the government diplomats. They were activists, community members, ordinary people.
This was the start of what became a career rethinking what role ordinary people play in creating a more peaceful, just and sustainable world. I now understand how global leadership happens in schools, in museums, on our campuses, in our religious institutions, in community organizations and corporations, as much as in government offices, in courts and at the headquarters of multilateral institutions. I understand that "diplomacy" is a task, and an obligation, of life at every stage, from students to retirees. We're all needed as Everyday Ambassadors.
Your Turn
-How do you need to show up as a diplomat in your daily life? What divides and differences are you navigating?
-Do you experience this work as an Everyday Ambassador as fun? Challenging? Stressful? Easy? What are some of your success stories and lessons?
-What challenges are you facing or causes are you tackling—at home, at work, in your community? How are these linked to what is happening around the world, to foreign policy, to climate change, to war and peace, to migration?
Thanks for reading!
Let me know what you think, and please share this newsletter widely!
Annelise