Diplomacy as a subject of scientific research: Epistemological, methodological, and ethical aspect

Abstract

The paper explores diplomacy as a distinctive and complex subject of scientific inquiry within contemporary social sciences. The analysis is grounded in the premise that diplomacy can no longer be adequately conceptualized solely as an instrument of state foreign policy or a set of protocol practices; rather, it constitutes a multidimensional social phenomenon encompassing institutional representation, negotiation processes, symbolic communication, the management of differences, network-based mediation, and digitally mediated forms of interaction. The study seeks to identify and critically examine the dominant epistemological frameworks, methodological orientations, and ethical challenges that characterize contemporary scholarship on diplomacy through a theoretical and empirical investigation of a selected corpus of academic literature. The central hypothesis posits that current research predominantly conceptualizes diplomacy as a communicative and practice-oriented activity increasingly shaped by digital technologies, while conceptual and qualitative approaches continue to dominate methodological design and ethical considerations remain comparatively underdeveloped. The research is based on a secondary quantitative–qualitative analysis of a corpus comprising twenty-two scholarly publications. The analytical framework combines content analysis, comparative analysis, classification procedures, and descriptive statistical techniques. The results demonstrate that 54.5% of the analyzed publications focus on digital and public diplomacy, that 72.7% predominantly employ conceptualtheoretical research designs, and that ethical issues are explicitly addressed in only 22.7% of the corpus, primarily in the context of digital communication practices. The findings suggest that diplomacy possesses a sufficiently coherent subject matter, a progressively refined conceptual apparatus, and an expanding repertoire of methodological approaches to warrant its treatment as a self-reflective and autonomous field of scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, its further disciplinary consolidation requires a more systematic articulation of epistemological foundations, stronger integration of empirical research strategies, and a more comprehensive engagement with questions of research ethics.