The term “diplomatic cable” is used today to describe an official dispatch or message sent instantaneously via a dedicated computer system between headquarters and its diplomatic missions abroad. As with email, most governments have both classified and unclassified cable systems. Throughout their careers, diplomats–especially reporting officers–must make quick choices about how to provide their government with needed information. This involves the proper and efficient use of language, technology and format to reach the respective target audience. This chapter will try to give you a sense of how to do that, starting with how to convey information to your capital from abroad–in other words, how to report. We will show you how to structure, write, edit and distribute diplomatic cables. There are four general purposes for messages to be sent as diplomatic cables: reporting on events; reporting on meetings or démarches to a foreign government; influencing a decision or policy; and making explicit policy recommendations.

This chapter provides the reader with three reflections about the Policy Priority Inference research programme and its potential to make a difference in the real world. First, we synthesise the results found throughout the book and their implications for sustainable development. Second, we elaborate on systematic guidelines for deriving policies from the various analyses presented throughout the book. Third, we discuss the technical capabilities needed to adopt this toolkit and advocate for the training of computational social scientists.

In this concluding chapter of the book, we summarize what we have found in the previous chapters and discuss the theoretical significance and limitations of our findings. Furthermore, based on these reflections, we provide some recommendations for policy making. In the first section we return to our master hypotheses that we introduced in Chapter 3. Most importantly, we conclude that there is robust evidence that both governmental and territorial power-sharing practices tend, on average, to reduce conflict compared to situations characterized by their absence (see Master Hypotheses 1a and 1b respectively). We summarize the findings pertaining to the other Master Hypotheses as well. The discussion on the limitations of our findings focuses primarily on implications of power sharing on other outcomes than peace and conflict, such as democracy and economic development, but also some of the simplifying assumptions that have supported our analysis, such as the unity of ethnic groups. Finally, the discussion of policy implications reminds the reader that our results are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Still our analysis sheds light on why critics of power sharing may have overstated their case. For instance, failure to consider implementation difficulties could render power sharing ineffective or even counter-productive. In particular, such practices may be particularly effective before the first outbreak of violence, which confirms the importance of conflict reduction through preventive measures, rather than merely through conflict resolution once conflict has already erupted.

This concluding chapter outlines the implications of the shifting scientific landscape in Asia for future generations of Asian scientists. The chapter reviews the theoretical implications of the key findings from the book, and revisits the new concepts and ideas introduced throughout the book, which have relevance for the fields of migration studies, science & technology studies and also gender studies. The chapter highlights what is yet to be studied on this topic, and lays out a future research agenda for scholars from these fields. Finally, the chapter highlights the policy implications of these developments for Asian and non-Asian countries, and ends with a set of policy recommendations for government officials and research leaders in these countries as they seek to make themselves attractive destinations for native (and nonnative) research scientists and raise their relative profile in the global scientific field.