How did you come to study women’s organisations of diplomats (WODs)?

I’ve been a career diplomat in the Foreign Service of Brazil for the past 17 years and have become familiar with several of the currently 19 networks of women diplomats around the world. In my interactions with my Brazilian and foreign colleagues, I realised that the activities of these groups went beyond creating support and safe spaces for women diplomats. Through their collective agency, they were (un)intentionally producing sometimes subtle but powerful changes in the way the states are represented and diplomacy is traditionally practiced. I wanted to understand the meaning of these collective actions and their implications for our understanding of diplomacy and change in diplomatic practice.

Can you describe your research questions and your methods?

I aimed to invite the reader to rethink diplomacy differently — not from the centre, but from the margins. My research questions were: What does diplomacy look like from the perspective of those not traditionally expected to enact state sovereignty? Who gets to materialise as legitimate enactors of state sovereignty, and why?

This approach challenges the notion that diplomacy is a coherent entity that seamlessly enters world affairs. Instead, I presented diplomacy as a contested field within the state bureaucracy, where WODs disturb — if not dismantle — diplomacy, reconfiguring what it means and who is allowed to do it.

To conceptualise this approach, I developed the concept of domestic estrangement as a way of understanding how diplomacy is (re)negotiated internally and is never fully coherent. To explore this, I employed a diffractive methodology inspired by Karen Barad, which focuses on how ideas, people, and institutions emerge together and are inseparable. I analysed historical documents, internal communications, and digital platforms, and conducted interviews with WOD members.

What are your major findings?

First, I demonstrate that both WODs and diplomacy are transmaterial phenomena, i.e., they do not exist independently and, instead, co-emerge through embodied, discursive, material, and technoscientific practices. Second, WODs are overlooked as sites of political agency. Operating in highly hierarchical, secretive, and formal settings that have defined modern diplomacy, WODs (re)enact diplomacy in a more decentralised, horizontal, and inclusive manner. Their collective action (re)shapes norms, creates new diplomatic practices, and expands the scope of who is entitled to represent the state.

What could be the social and political implications of these findings?

I hope that my thesis illuminates for a broader audience that WODs’ activities have very concrete implications for how foreign policy is imagined, practiced, and experienced. First, their work enables the reimagination of foreign policy actors beyond the traditionally white, male, Western diplomat. Second, their decentralised and networked organisation transforms diplomatic practice, creating more horizontal and collaborative modes of engagement based on relationship-building and trust rather than on rigid protocol, hierarchy, and secrecy. Third, WODs destabilise Eurocentric hierarchies that have historically shaped global governance, enabling more plural imaginings of international relations. Fourth, their ambiguous dual role as state officials and agents of social transformation reveals narratives about who the state represents and what values it embodies. Fifth, their work produces new ways of knowing, narrating, and enacting diplomacy.

And now, will you continue this research or rather focus on your diplomatic work?

I continue to serve as a diplomat and currently advise the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil on multilateral issues and Middle Eastern affairs. Concurrently, I pursue public academic engagements and plan to adapt my thesis into a book on transmaterial diplomacy, exploring how WODs are reshaping statecraft and foreign policy.

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On 9 May 2025, Amena Martins Yassine defended her PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science, titled “The Rise of Women’s Organizations of Diplomats (WODs) and the Possibilities of New Imaginings for Diplomacy, Statecraft, and Foreign Policy”. Professor Elisabeth Prügl presided over the committee, which included Professor Anna Leander, Thesis Supervisor, and Professor Ann Towns, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Martins Yassine, Amena. “The Rise of Women’s Organizations of Diplomats (WODs) and the Possibilities of New Imaginings for Diplomacy, Statecraft, and Foreign Policy.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2025.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Other interested individuals can contact Dr Martins Yassine for access.

Banner image: Djomas/Shutterstock.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.