Diplomacy is a game of relationships and, in the same way that Facebook has transformed your non-existent relationship to that guy in your high school science class into a My Little Pony meme transmission vector, technology has transformed the work of statecraft. On the next two editions of Deep Dive, we’ll look at new research on what has changed in 21st century diplomatic practice and the effects those changes have on global politics.

This week, we’ll look at the tool arguably most vital to a profession obsessed with words and process: the word processor. Political scientists Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alena Drieschova have an article in the latest edition of International Studies Quarterly that focuses on how word processors — and particularly the track changes function — have shaped how diplomats do their job today.

During their time observing work in the European Union Council of Ministers, Adler-Nissen and Drieschova noticed that the process of diplomatic work often centered on track changes. It was the tool through which all of the Council’s diplomatic outputs were processed. The tracking system allowed many people to work on a document at once, it allowed everyone to be engaged with the same version of the document at the same time and it allowed for negotiations over wording to happen continuously, whether there were formal talks going on or not.

This may all seem obvious to anyone who has tried to draft a memo with multiple colleagues, but think about the effects of what Adler-Nissen and Drieschova call “track changes diplomacy” from an international politics perspective.

Historically, the question of “who holds the pen?” when crafting treaties or other international agreements has been crucial  — the primary author has huge power over the actual language of the agreement. Under track changes diplomacy, however, everyone has the pen, which is also to say that no one has it. As a result, sometimes agreements have language that no one wanted in the first place. As one member of the EU parliament complained, “so many people are involved, you cannot foresee what the outcome [of the agreement-writing process] is going to be.”

Diplomatic agreements are becoming authorless, yet, they are also written faster than ever before. As more states have joined the EU, the Council of Ministers’ workload has increased dramatically and information technology has played a big role in allowing this to happen. The time pressure, combined with a lack of authorship, can lead to a diffusion of responsibility that leaves everyone wondering how the final text came to be. As an ambassador put it, “I would be curious to know who is ruling this whole thing,” — the European Union.

Patrick Winn discussed the role of Hong Kong’s mafia organizations in violence against protesters in the city. Gang members have attacked protesters and many Hong Kong residents see mafia groups acting as a kind of police auxiliary against the public. Many organized crime syndicates in Hong Kong are closely linked with mainland Chinese government, a link cultivated by the Chinese Communist Party for decades that seems to be paying off in the current crisis.

Jon Letman recounted the history of the Golden Rule, a wooden ship that American Quaker activists intended to sail to the Marshall Islands in the 1950s, when the Marshalls were a frequent test site for American nuclear weapons. The activists hoped to keep the ship in the testing area, forcing the US government to choose between not testing nukes or killing its own citizens. The Quakers were arrested in Hawaii, and never made it to the Marshalls, but today a new group of activists have restored the Golden Rule and are slowly recreating the planned voyage.

Durrie Bouscaren reported on Turkey’s plan to resettle one million Syrian refugees currently living in Turkey in an 18-mile wide band of northern Syria. The resettlement is the Turkish government’s stated purpose for its offensive against Kurdish militias in northern Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hopes to both displace Kurds from the Turkish border and push out Syrian refugees living in Turkey, two key goals for his conservative government.

Harvard computer scientist James Mickens got tenure back in April, but his truly epic tenure announcement only went viral on Twitter last week — maybe a subject for Mickens’ future research on inefficiencies in distributed systems.

Last week in impeachment, as seen from the Beltway.

This pun works on multiple levels, as though the person who made it had just taken a massive bong rip and then exhaled a series of OODA loops.

You may think you’re committed to Halloween and the general spookiness of October, but you’ve got nothing on the state of Louisiana. Louisiana holds elections for parish coroners (perish coroners? perish coroners.) in October, forcing the state’s eeriest retail politics practitioners to go door to door in their coroner costumes all month. Presumably, all their flyers are coffin-shaped and when you meet them at the door they say “trick or vote” before flashing a smile full of unsettlingly sharp teeth. Also the electoral maps are ghoulish.

Every flag made by this ostensible Twitter bot is a joy, but in honor of last week’s National Coming Out Day, a special shoutout to its greatest creation, Bisexual Austria-Hungary.

It’s the most wonderful time of the Introduction to International Relations year.