Grassroots Student Diplomacy: The Junior Diplomat Initiative (JDI) in Prague, Geneva, Paris and Tbilisi

What is it about?

The democratisation of diplomacy in recent years opened new opportunities for non-state actors' engagement and activities in diplomacy. A wide variety of practices emerged regarding how the non-state actors are involved in national and international policymaking. The scholarly literature has broadly reflected this phenomenon. Attention has also been paid to the intersection of diplomacy with youth, educational institutions, and educational exchanges. Nevertheless, due to the complexity of these issues, their dynamics, and rapid innovations, many blind spots remain. The engagement of future practitioners, students in diplomacy-related undergraduate and graduate university programmes, in people-to-people diplomatic communication is neglected. The activities of the Junior Diplomacy Initiative – JDI – in Prague, Geneva, Paris and Tbilisi show that even a small student organisation committed to students' training for future diplomatic service can, with a little assistance of official diplomacy agents, exceed these learning objectives. It also creates a viable model of people-to-people grassroots diplomacy for other countries. The innovative elements are not only embedded in the model itself. They also lie in the creativity of young people and their readiness to absorb new trends. There is, thus, a great scope that should be more intensively exploited by diplomatic practice and more deeply addressed by diplomacy research.

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