Sabrina Arias's research reveals that diplomacy by small states shapes international policymaking.
In the corridors of the United Nations, conventional wisdom suggests that power flows from military strength and economic heft. Yet Sabrina Arias has uncovered a different story, one where small countries punch far above their weight and where individual diplomats matter as much as the GDP of the nations they represent.
Arias’ book project, Diplomatic Giants: How Small States and Powerful Ambassadors Shape International Organization Policymaking, challenges fundamental assumptions about how influence operates in international organizations. Through painstaking data collection and interviews with diplomats from more than 50 countries, she demonstrates that small states wield surprising influence in the early stages of policymaking when agendas are set and coalitions are built, cultivating a form of influence Arias calls “diplomatic capital.”.
The research required extraordinary persistence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Arias set out to track every UN ambassador and deputy from 1946 to 2018, ultimately compiling a database of 21,159 entries. Her sources were the UN's "Blue Books," annual directories listing diplomatic staff at each country's New York mission. When archives remained closed, she had volumes delivered through interlibrary loan and manually constructed the dataset, entry by entry.
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences News.
Spotlight Recipient
Sabrina Arias
Assistant Professor