Years ago, during a meeting, Prof. Fiona McConnell said something almost in passing that stayed with me. She described what I was doing as “diplomacy from the margins”.

Prof. McConnell had already spent years studying communities that practise diplomacy without necessarily being recognised as diplomatic actors. She has since become a close friend and collaborator — and no, not only because that phrase made what I was doing sound much more important than “just my job”.

What mattered was that she put a mirror in front of me.

Until then, I had not really thought about my work in those terms. I was moving between communities, diplomats, UN officials, academics, activists and political leaders; trying to translate one reality into another, open doors, build relationships, and make sure knowledge sitting outside institutions could somehow reach the people inside them.

Once I looked into that mirror, I began to see the dynamics differently.

For a long time, I thought the objective was relatively clear: move from the margins towards the centre. From the margins of diplomacy towards the places where decisions are made. From the margins of a state or political system towards meaningful participation. Towards a centre that listens, recognises agency and allows people some capacity to shape what affects their lives.

After all, nobody really wants to be marginal.

There is something uncomfortable in the word itself. Margins are where people are placed when they are considered less important, less legitimate or less entitled to participate. In diplomacy, being at the margins can mean not having a seat, an embassy, recognised status, accreditation or even the right name on your badge. It can mean needing somebody else to introduce you before you can begin to make your own case.

I have seen the consequences of this very closely.

I have watched representatives spend months securing a meeting that a recognised diplomat might arrange with a phone call. I have seen people travel enormous distances for two minutes of speaking time. I have worked with communities carrying sophisticated political knowledge whose ability to bring that knowledge into an international discussion depended almost entirely on whether somebody inside the system was prepared to listen.

So I would never romanticise the margins. Exclusion has consequences, and exclusion from diplomacy does too.

But Prof. McConnell had seen something else before I had.

Interesting things happen at the margins.

When the usual channels are unavailable, people create others. When there is no embassy, relationships are built differently. When recognition cannot be assumed, legitimacy has to be cultivated through practice.

Networks become essential. So do trust, persistence, creativity and the ability to move between very different political worlds.

You become comfortable with ambiguity because ambiguity is part of the terrain.

And there can be freedom there too.

Actors operating outside conventional diplomatic structures can sometimes experiment in ways that those within them cannot. They move between formal and informal spaces, create unlikely alliances, use culture and public engagement alongside political negotiation, and build relationships that do not fit comfortably into established categories.

This is part of the terrain that Prof. Costas M. Constantinou and Prof. Fiona McConnell explore through the concept of the Right to Diplomacy. Revisiting the older ius legationis, or right of legation, they reopen a question that contemporary diplomacy has largely resolved in favour of sovereign states: who has the capacity to engage diplomatically, and on what terms?

Their Right to Diplomacy is not presented as a simple new legal entitlement. It is a way of thinking about rights of communication, representation, standing and negotiation — and therefore about the inequalities that determine who can represent themselves internationally and who remains dependent on somebody else granting access.

I find the distinction between access and agency particularly important.

Being allowed into a building is not the same as having diplomatic agency. Speaking is not the same as negotiating. Being consulted once the main parameters of a decision have already been established is very different from participating when the problem itself is being defined.

There is still a great deal to explore here.

But recently I have found myself looking at the relationship between margins and centre from another direction.

For years, the underlying question for those operating at the margins has been how to reach the centre.

But what happens when the centre itself becomes uncertain?

In conversations with diplomats today, I increasingly hear a sense that familiar assumptions are being challenged. Not a rejection of diplomacy — quite the opposite — but an awareness that the environment in which post-war multilateral diplomacy developed is changing profoundly.

Geopolitical relationships are hardening. Climate, technology, migration, security, resources and transnational repression cross jurisdictions and institutional boundaries. Political authority is increasingly contested, while many of the challenges governments face require forms of cooperation that are becoming harder to sustain.

Diplomacy itself is having to navigate this uncertainty.

And this makes me wonder whether the relationship between centre and margins should become more reciprocal.

Those operating at the margins have spent years navigating circumstances in which authority is contested, recognition cannot be assumed, formal power is limited and established institutional routes do not always work.They have had to learn how to create influence without status, how to build relationships without formal recognition, and how to maintain channels across profound political disagreement.These have long been everyday questions for unrepresented peoples and other actors outside conventional diplomacy.

But lessons do not travel in only one direction.

There is enormous knowledge at the diplomatic centre too: the craft of negotiation, institutional memory, legal expertise, the ability to maintain channels over decades, and the discipline of continuing to engage with actors whose interests or positions may be profoundly different from one's own.

Perhaps neither space has enough on its own.

What interests me increasingly, then, is not simply how those at the margins can gain access to the centre, but how the two can learn from one another. Actors at the margins often bring experience of working without formal authority, navigating contested legitimacy, building unlikely relationships and finding routes around institutional blockages. Those at the centre bring different strengths: institutional memory, legal knowledge, negotiating experience and access to formal decision-making. Bringing these forms of knowledge into closer conversation could make diplomacy more adaptive to the world it is now facing.

And this brings me back to representation. Because representation is not only about who is present in the room. It is also about whether different forms of knowledge and experience are able to shape how the room understands the problem in the first place.

We often discuss representation as a question of presence: who is in the room?

Presence matters. But so does what happens once you are there. Who listens? Whose knowledge influences the way a situation is understood? Who participates early enough to affect the options being considered?

And perhaps we also need to ask a more difficult question: are the rooms themselves still adequate?

We hear increasingly that multilateral institutions are losing legitimacy. I think we should be careful with that language. Legitimacy is not something an institution simply possesses or loses overnight, nor is it produced solely by formal authority, founding treaties or legal mandates. It is relational.

It is built,and rebuilt, through what institutions do and through the relationships they create with those affected by their decisions. People do not have to agree with every decision for an institution to be legitimate. But they need to recognise that their realities can enter the process, that decisions can be explained and contested, and that institutions remain capable of responding when circumstances change.

This is where participation becomes more than inclusion. It becomes part of institutional capacity.

An institution that cannot hear realities beyond its established categories will eventually struggle to understand the world it is supposed to navigate. Diplomacy has an important role here.

At its best, diplomacy makes political relationships possible without requiring agreement. It creates channels where interests diverge and allows actors to remain in relation even when differences cannot be resolved. That capacity seems particularly valuable now.

But preserving it may require us to think again about some of the spaces in which diplomacy takes place, and about the hierarchies governing who is recognised as entitled to practise it.

This is not an argument for erasing the distinction between states and non-state actors, or for inviting everyone to every negotiation. States have particular responsibilities. Negotiations need to conclude and decisions eventually have to be made.

The question is whether the boundaries we have inherited still correspond sufficiently to the political realities we are trying to navigate. But neither should we assume that all the knowledge needed to navigate the future sits at the centre.

At a moment when diplomacy is being asked to operate in a more fragmented, contested and uncertain world, some of the practices developed away from its traditional centres may have something useful to offer. Perhaps the challenge, then, is not simply to open the doors of existing diplomatic spaces a little wider.It is to create a more porous relationship between different forms of diplomatic knowledge and practice — one in which experience, influence and learning can travel in more than one direction.

After years of trying to move from the margins towards the centre, I find myself increasingly interested in what might happen if the centre moved a little too.

About the Author

Mercè Monje Cano is a practitioner-scholar in international governance, diplomacy and institutional strategy. She previously served as Secretary-General of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), where she worked at the intersection of international diplomacy, representation and institutional change. Her current work bridges practice and research, exploring questions of legitimacy, representation beyond the state, diplomatic agency and how institutions can adapt to increasingly complex and contested political environments. She collaborates with academic and policy partners on research relating to self-determination, diplomacy and governance.