Review roundtable: naked diplomacy: power and statecraft in the digital age by Tom Fletcher

What is the role of the diplomat in the digital age? In Naked Diplomacy: Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age, Tom Fletcher – former British ambassador to Lebanon and the youngest to be appointed in 200 years – draws upon his own experiences to outline a progressive vision of contemporary diplomacy that challenges top-down or one-way models of communication between diplomats and citizens to instead focus on direct engagement through the use of tools such as social media. In this review roundtable, introduced by LSE’s Nicholas Kitchen, five experts – Alexis Wichowski, Lina Khatib, Iver Neumann, Alaa Murabit and Robert Kelley – respond to Fletcher’s vision of a ‘naked diplomacy’ for the 21st century.