By Philippe Evoy of Université Laval
This essay presented the challenges faced by diplomats in the forced transition to videoconference meetings that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. The difficulty of building trust at a distance, attributable in part to the lack of informal discussions and the human neural architecture, as well as the loss of the ceremonial and formal aspects of diplomatic events, contribute to diplomats’ perception that it is more difficult to conduct their work remotely. This paper “La diplomatie par visioconférence_EN” has recommended to training diplomats to make optimal use of videoconferencing by adapting their non-verbal language and trying to bring some “ceremony” to the interface, and paying more attention to the potential applications of emerging VR technologies.