The Academy of Diplomacy and International Governance and the Institute for Sport Business, in collaboration with the Institute for Media and Creative Industries, the Institute for Design Innovation, Institute for Digital Technologies, and the Glendonbrook Institute for Enterprise Development, Loughborough University London, will be organising the 20th International Symposium in the Series of Diplomacy in the 21st Century.

The aim of the 20^th International symposium is to parse and interrogate four apparently distinct fields of practice – diplomacy, sport, politics and the media. At first glance, this might seem a rather daunting, if not ungainly enterprise. Upon closer inspection, however, the organisers will make the case that there exist not only significant parallels, but also intriguing paradoxes and potentially consequential pitfalls.

In an increasingly globalizing and heteropolar world imperilled by a new threat set of wicked, S&T-driven issues for which there are no military solutions, diplomacy has never mattered more. Using the tools of dialogue, negotiation, compromise and knowledge-based, technologically-enabled problem-solving, soft power – diplomacy has a comparative advantage over the international policy alternatives. Diplomacy alone is capable of resolving differences and securing win-win outcomes through complex balancing and by affecting behavior on all sides of the exchange. That is not the case for hard power, which relies on the use or threat of armed force to compel or coerce adversaries to submit. The non-violent exercise of persuasion and influence, which is to say winning others over to your cause through the power of attraction, is, or should be, diplomacy’s hidden advantage.

The symposium is a call to break the habit of scrutinising diplomacy, sport, politics and the media as distinct fields of practice, and instead to find ways to rearticulate their synergy and to search for new ways forward.