“Diplomacy is Human Systems”
- Fernando Garibay
- Dec 31, 2025
- 1 min read
Updated: Jan 6
As I close 2025, I am grateful for a year of sustained dialogue across classrooms, convenings, and public forums with diplomats, academics, creatives, technologists, and civic leaders. What stayed with me most was not any single venue, but the cumulative pattern that emerged when many thoughtful people engage the same questions from different vantage points.
This lecture tour clarified a central conviction: "Diplomacy is human systems. It is industry and algorithm agnostic, yet not confined to treaties, speeches, or state-to-state signaling. It is the careful management of interconnected relationships that operate as a system, shaped by feedback loops, incentives, norms, emotions, and credibility. In these settings, trust functions as infrastructure. When trust rises, coordination becomes more feasible and less costly. When trust erodes, everything becomes harder, slower, and more fragile.”
I leave the year with a simple synthesis: diplomacy is the governance of human networks, and our most durable progress comes from building trust across complexity with consistency, humility, and care.
-Prof. Fernando Garibay
