Special edition: join a diplomacy think tank
Many doors into diplomacy for mid-career professionals
Thank you for subscribing to Ambassador at Large, practical diplomacy for international professionals from a four-time British ambassador. You make this work possible for me.
This is an educational resource. Here’s a template to get it expensed.
£100 per year, less than £2 per week for high level insights, guides and inside information drawn from 30 years of diplomatic service.
Think-tanks, research organisations, academic bodies and policy councils can be a viable, stimulating and meaningful route into diplomacy, mid-career.
This is the 6th in a series on pathways, to take you where you want to go despite the job cuts and competition.
Previously, now available in our archive:
The main mid-career pathways into diplomacy
Get into the national diplomatic service
How to become an Ambassador
Routes to multilateral diplomacy
Consultancies and short-term contracts
Today: think tanks, fellowships and academia.
A think tank or a university won’t typically make you a state diplomat. There’s no conveyor belt from research to an embassy. What they can offer is a diplomacy-adjacent environment, meaningful engagement on issues that matter, and a platform that strengthens your credibility and extends your network.
That can open doors for you into track-two diplomacy, government advisory work, posts in international organisations and more opportunity.
This is all in the context of a tough environment characterised by government cuts, redundancies and competition. As geopolitical tensions rise, the need for expertise and skills is also rising.
And as you read this, the door to think tanks and diplomacy research is ajar. Below, I include links to 25 current vacancies, including all the examples I highlight in the following article.
What may surprise you
A think tank is an employer on several tracks.
Research, communications, events, partnerships, business development, operations and fundraising. They offer valuable opportunities to work in diplomacy-related research, and most of their jobs are in other functions outside research itself.
Short-term funding and the need for fundraising
Posts are usually funded by specific grants. They’re frequently one to three-year terms. One careers guide advises that junior researchers “typically leave their think tank job after 2-3 years”.
Senior figures typically bring in the money that pays them. For example, a “Development Research Manager” role at the Brookings Institution, reporting to the Director of Development Research, sounds like a policy post. In fact it’s more about fundraising, conducting philanthropic “prospect research”, profiling donors’ wealth and giving capacity to build Brookings’s “giving pipeline”.
Demand for fundraising expertise, coupled with diplomacy networks and skills, is higher than ever.
The US ecosystem is much more porous to government than the UK’s
The think tank scene is vibrant both in the US (over 2,000) and the UK (around 500). US institutes tend to serve as governments-in-waiting for the party out of power, providing positions for former officials who hope to be back in office.
The UK also has a revolving door but is more parochial and small-scale, and turns largely one way, from think tanks to politics. The sector is more university-anchored and Whitehall-adjacent than interchangeable with the civil service.
There are several categories of opportunities in both systems, at junior, mid-career and senior level, and beyond the US and UK.
Image: a moment to reflect, inside the UK Foreign Office