Throughout my career, from Jamaica to Nigeria, Pakistan to Switzerland, I've learned that effective diplomacy means more than shaking hands and staging photo ops. It means developing real, robust relationships. It means finding common ground and managing points of differentiation. It means doing genuine, old-fashioned, people-to-people diplomacy.
Interpretation
Effective diplomacy involves building genuine relationships rather than superficial interactions.
In this quote, Linda Thomas-Greenfield emphasizes that successful diplomacy transcends the mere act of meeting and greeting; it requires cultivating authentic connections between people. By focusing on finding common ground and navigating differences, effective diplomacy fosters deeper, more meaningful interactions that can lead to constructive outcomes.
In practice
In a speech about international relations, one might quote this to underline the importance of building connections.
The fact that I made it to where I made it, when I look at where I came, I think is a message to the world and it's also a message to other young people who come from diverse and underprivileged backgrounds, that where they come from does not necessarily have to define where they are going.
Those of us who experience racism cannot, and should not, internalize it, despite the impact that it can have on our everyday lives. We must face it down, every time, no matter whom it's directed towards.
I think countries are now, leaders are now more conscious of the importance of having women engage in their country's development plan. Because again, and I say this over and over and over again, when we invest in women they invest back in their families, they invest in their communities, and they invest in their countries.
The more we elevate people's lives - the more we treat people with dignity and respect and honor their rights and freedoms - the more we discourageand even preventterrorism.
It is unconscionable for Russia to force Ukrainian citizens into Russia, and put them in what will basically be concentration and prisoner camps.
In so many of our communities and countries, racism is endemic. It's built in, like a rot in a frame.
And one thing that I always believed and that I knew for certain was that I could never have sustained a personal relationship while I worked this hard, or while I was that driven this intensely by the story.
I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.
I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap.
It doesn't matter what the other is being, doing, having, saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn't matter what the other is thinking, expecting, planning. It only matters what you are being in relationship to that.
Although goal setting can clearly be overdone, only a few people are overly involved with goals and goal setting; most people do far too little goal setting, including the reflecting that precedes the setting of such goals. Too many marriages have financial goals but not other explicit goals. Yet the gospel is certainly goal-oriented.
We women know how to take care of everybody so well. But the one person we have written out of the equation is us.
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