
Strategic Diplomacy:
Rethinking Strategy and Statecraft for the 21st Century of Complexity
Cultivating 'Strategic Diplomacy' in the Indo-Asia-Pacific and Beyond
Strategy is 'the art of creating power'. Statecraft is the skill of governing a sovereign state. We ask: how do international actors mobilize power and exercise statecraft within a world that gives them less control over the outcomes they want to achieve?
The 21st century is the ‘century of complexity’. To be effective, policymakers urgently require knowledge about how to practice diplomacy and statecraft with accentuated strategic rationale.
The ‘Strategic Diplomacy’ project develops an original framework of diagnostic analysis and policy-making for complex systems problems in international relations.
The project team is creating unique cross-regional and thematic research case files of effective concepts and practice; new postgraduate education and executive training; and an extensive engagement program with global end-user communities.
Latest News

Lead Researchers
Professor of International Relations,
Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific,
The Australian National University
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Shedden Professor of
Strategic Policy Studies,
Strategic and Defence Studies Centre,
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific,
The Australian National University
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Navigating a world of revisionist powers.
By Evelyn Goh
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We are living in a world with three leading great powers—all with explicitly revisionist aims when it comes to the international rules-based order. These revisionist powers do not play by agreed rules. The master binary—that there is a status quo international order (upheld by the ‘good guys’) facing off revisionist challengers (the ‘bad guys’) who want to replace it with something else—was a dubious simplification to begin with. It is now patently dead. Please continue reading here.