JS-13.2
Unfolding Inequalities of High-Risks Unevenness Across Some Foreign Service Organization: Comparing Contrasting Conception Couples of Diplomat's Body and Health

Tuesday, July 15, 2014: 8:45 AM
Room: 311+312
Oral Presentation
Jelica STEFANOVIC-STAMBUK , International Studies, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
Diplomacies embody risk-taking. Since time immemorial at home and abroad dangers, abrasive conduct, threats, and violent deaths of practitioners, named and ranked differently at different culture sites, have been around. Therefore safety metaphors for diplomatic agency, that of sublime being or of public minister, inviolable in body and protected in person if acting with host prudently and respectfully, and later supplanted by fictions of transmutation or an enminded body were employed to enclose devoted lives of diplomacies' professionals with privileges and immunities. Conceptions of diplomat's body and diplomatic body, ennobled, properly signaled, adorned, scripted and constituted, were immersed in habituated privileges and immunities as trust enhancers. If not eradicating, they are circumscribing the risks of harming and abusing serving diplomats of unequally resourceful, inclined and powerful sovereigns. During recent decades widening Inequality in governance of stability and change globally and locally, deepening proclivities for exclusionary management of intermestic affairs and rising dissatisfaction, sometimes humiliation of contestational affiliations thereof, slowly eroded risk reducing effects of privileges and immunities at certain sites. Particularly exposed to heightened risk are diplomats of several countries, more in some regions less in others. Out of such concerns, the US Foreign Service, most affected by high-risk unevenness, has venture into reconceptualizing diplomat's body and health. Coupled conceptions of diplomat representational body fortressed in posts, armored and motorcade and transformational body at difficult career wise outposts, with hardship bonus pay, got an addition. Foreign Service, prompted by violence, terrorism, hosts inability or unwillingness to provide security and the missions' physical security platform beyond the State's established standards conceptualized the high risk and the high threat resilient diplomat body. Conceptualizations are legally enacted with relative budget appropriation for the fiscal year 2014.