Diplomacy seems difficult enough in an era of printed letters and analogue phones. Adding Twitter and other social media sites to the mix, as foreign ministries have recently been doing, leads to a whole new dimension to international relations.
On Saturday, 17 November 2018, our students met with Laurens SOENEN, Digital Communication Officer at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to talk about digital diplomacy. The discussion touched upon a wide range of topics: how do foreign ministries manage their social media outreach? What expectations do other governments and citizens now have in a social media era? And how does physical infrastructure, such as underseas cables, shape our modern digital world?
And we did, of course, end up talking about #Wafflediplomacy as well.