The practice of diplomacy has changed dramatically in recent decades as a result of technological advancements and shifting geopolitical concerns. No longer confined to the cloaked and closed-door practices of elite state institutions, the diplomatic landscape has broadened, and been made visible, across space and scale. Amidst this rapidly changing environment, it is imperative to understand how states are adjusting their material diplomatic infrastructure and what that means for everyday diplomatic practices. While many countries have adjusted to twenty-first century diplomatic realities by adapting to a more mobile, maneuverable diplomatic corps and fewer facilities, the United States remains committed to a widespread diplomatic network, the largest in the world. This diplomatic footprint is the hallmark of universality, a sustained effort over time to acquire near total diplomatic coverage by dotting the world with embassies and consulates designed to look, work, and behave in a similar, if not, ageographic, manner. Attending to this understudied phenomenon means studying the historical and geographic conditions out of which this relatively even and uniform diplomatic apparatus materialized. It further means analyzing the contemporary pattern of U.S. diplomatic infrastructure against the shifting terrain of diplomatic norms and space. Drawing empirically on interviews with elite diplomatic practitioners, substantial archival material, and the researcher’s own experience working within the U.S. diplomatic assemblage, this study has sought to examine why the United States remains committed to universality and what embassies and consulates actually do to secure U.S. foreign policy goals. Specifically, the study—presented in this dissertation as three discrete original research articles—is framed by the following research questions: (1) What ideas and policies shaped the geographical footprint of U.S. diplomatic infrastructure over the course of the twentieth century? (2) How does the globe-girdling U.S. diplomatic assemblage reflect and influence geopolitical ideas and practices? (3) How does the grouping of diplomatic missions along regional lines reflect and influence U.S. foreign policy?

This thesis involves parsing document-based reports from the United States Human Rights Reports and rating the human practices for various countries based on the CIRI (Cingranelli-Richards) Human Rights Data Project dataset. The United States Human Rights Reports are annual reports that cover internationally recognized human rights practices regarding individual, civil, political, and worker rights. Students, scholars, policymakers, and analysts used the CIRI data for practical and research purposes. CIRI analyzed the annual reports from 1981 to 2011 and then stopped releasing the dataset for any further years, but a possible reason is due to the manual process of scouring the Human Rights Reports and then rating each human rights practice for each country. This manual process provides a solid foundation for creating a new automated process. The automated process uses the rating values provided by CIRI in the 1981-2011 dataset as expected values to evaluate the accuracy of the rating process. To transition to an automated process, the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) application is used. GATE is an open source project used for developing solutions for text processing. GATE is used in conjunction with the coding schemes provided within the CIRI Coding Manual to create an automated ratings process. The CIRI Coding Manual uses qualitative and quantitative criteria. The original and automated ratings are evaluated using GATE’s Annotation Diff Tool to get the F-measure for every country in the dataset. The evaluation cases range between 1999 and 2011 because those are the only years included in both the CIRI dataset and the Human Rights Reports. The F-measure results are more accurate when quantitative criteria is used to rate human rights practices. The primary contribution of this thesis is a method for automating each country’s human practice ratings so that the purpose of the CIRI project can be continued.