Giulia Garbagni

Bridging diplomatic history and politics, Giulia’s dissertation is a case-study-led analysis of the role of special envoys in Japanese post-1945 diplomacy incorporating archival research in Japan, the UK, the US and South Korea. It examines how and why, in the early postwar period, Japanese prime ministers often relied on trusted individuals with no diplomatic experience or official affiliation as their personal ‘special envoys’ (technically, ‘executive agents’) – an informal, extra-institutional tool of diplomacy operating outside of established, accountable bureaucratic channels. By exploring the promises and pitfalls of ‘one man diplomacy’, her work grapples with questions that range from the nature of prime ministerial leadership (and its presidentialisation) in Japanese foreign policy making, to the postwar repurposing of imperial-era personal capital and strategic thinking on Japan’s role vis-à-vis Southeast and Northeast Asia. A former AHRC IPS fellow at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), Giulia is a fellow of the Wilson Center's Cold War Archival Research (CWAR) Institute and an incoming Japan Foundation doctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo.