Francisco Antonio-Alfonso is a young practitioner and scholar of diplomacy. He earned his PhD in International Relations from St Andrews University and joined Mexico’s Foreign Service in 2016. His areas of interest include sinology, cultural encounters, alterity construction and global IR theory. With Karin Fierke (2018), he recently published Language, Entanglement and the New Silk Roads, in Asian Journal of Comparative Politics. His diplomatic post is currently in China.