Embassies in Crisis: Studies of Diplomatic Missions in Testing Situations

Embassies are integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But Embassies are also discreet political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory ‘immune’ from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis Embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. It is this aspect of Embassy experience that this collection of essays explores and Embassies in Crisis revisits flashpoints in the recent lives of Embassies overseas at times of acute political crisis.

Ranging across multiple British and other embassy crises, unusually, this book offers equal insights to international historians and members of the diplomatic community.

Rogelia Pastor-Castro is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests focus on Franco-British relations, and European security and integration. She has published on post-war European defence, and British and French diplomacy, and has co-edited The Paris Embassy: British Ambassadors and Anglo-French Relations, 1944-1979 (2013) with John W. Young. Currently, she is working on a three-year AHRC funded project on The Weight of the Past in Franco-British Relations.

Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter. A specialist in the politics of contested decolonization, his most recent publications are Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 (2012), Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire (2014), and, with co-author Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France (2017).