Strategic Foreign Policy Development
Strategic Foreign Policy Development Course
Starting 27th January 2025
Brief of the course
This Strategic Foreign Policy Development course is expertly designed and delivered by one of the most accomplished diplomatic educators in the UK, and the former Vice Principal of the UK Diplomatic Academy. This online course is highly interactive given the applied nature of policy development skills, with practical, interactive tasks for participants to complete.
With around 200 countries in the world, with wars, regional crises and global issues such as climate change to deal with, making foreign policy is a hugely challenging task for every government. And no country can operate in a vacuum from what others are states are doing if they want to succeed.
How does a government decide what best to do? This online course aims to train the new generation of young diplomats and also students who aspire to become diplomats, who want to stand out from their peers, with foreign policy ideas that make a real world difference.
Learning outcomes
Understanding the core strategic interests of your country in this issue at hand, together with the interests of your partners and adversaries.
Making sense of the historical context to contemporary foreign policy challenges, to ground future policy development in an understanding of the mistakes and the success of the past.
Ensuring you have clarity about the specific foreign policy objectives you want to achieve.
Thinking forward to map future scenarios, across the full spectrum from the best case to the worst.
Mapping the capabilities at your disposal that will help you achieve your objectives.
Identifying the risks ahead that may constrain your room for manoeuvre and the key stakeholders that will either support or hinder your efforts.
Giving your Ministers confidence that your recommendations are carefully judged, have the right level of ambition and the greatest chance of success.
Measuring the impact of your policy and improving policy over time
Modules Structure
1 – Strategic Interests: why is this important?
2 – Context: why did we end up here and what’s happening now?
3 – Futures: what does the future look like?
4 – Objectives: what do we want to achieve?
5 - Capabilities: what tools can we bring to bear to improve the situation?
6 – Risk: what are the constraints on our action?
7 – Advice: what are the options that Ministers should decide upon?
8 – Review: evaluating success and failure.
Module Leader - Ian Proud
Ian Proud was a member of HM Diplomatic Service from 1999 - 2023. He served in Thailand, Afghanistan and Russia and has had a passion for diplomatic education since 2010. From 2014 - 2019 he was Director of the Diplomatic Academy for Eastern Europe and Central Asia while stationed in Moscow. Upon his return to the UK became the Vice Principal of the Diplomatic Academy, leading a global team of diplomatic learning experts from the USA to Singapore.
He has trained British and foreign diplomatic staff around the world and likes little better than facilitating a learning session. He speaks fluent Thai, C1-level Russian, a smattering of other languages and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (FCIPD).
In addition to his broad and extensive diplomatic learning and development experience, Ian is a leading UK expert on crisis management. During his diplomatic career, Ian was involved in the UK crisis response to the Gujurat Earthquake, 9-11 and the Bali bombing. He was the first British diplomat to deploy to the scene of the Indian Ocean tsunami in Thailand in 2004, where he worked to support the disaster recovery effort for three months. He played an active role in the UK response to the Arab Spring in 2011 and to the Fukushima disaster. While posted to Russia, Ian was Chair of crisis operations at the Embassy, including during the diplomatic fall out to the 2018 Salisbury nerve agent attack and Russia's subsequent hosting of the 2018 Football World Cup. In 2020, he led a range of crisis teams in responding to the global COVID pandemic and the mass repatriation of UK citizens, the largest consular operation in British history. When it comes to crises, there is little Ian hasn't seen or worked on.
Since he retired from HM Diplomatic Service, Ian has provided independent consultancy on diplomatic skills between writing articles and books about foreign policy. His memoir, A Misfit in Moscow: how British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019 was recognised by the Times Literary Supplement as a Book of the Year 2024.
