MAKING DIPLOMACY: HOW TRADITIONAL KNIFE CRAFTSMANSHIP BECOMES A VEHICLE FOR CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC STATECRAFT

Abstract

Historically, presentation blades—inscribed daggers, kards, jambiyas, and courtly knives—circulated as diplomatic gifts across Islamic, Persianate, and South Asian courts, encoding political narratives in material form. Today, heritage-centered knife-making—exemplified by Uzbek pichoq/pchak traditions in Chust, Shahrixon, and Kokand—operates in an expanded arena of soft power, creative-economy trade, and cultural tourism. Bringing together cultural-diplomacy theory, arms-and-armor scholarship, archaeometallurgy, festival and tourism statistics, and documented practitioner testimony, the article proposes a framework—Object Diplomacy → Market Linkages → Policy Spillovers—to explain how knives function as both symbols and channels of statecraft. Inclusive statistics draw on UNESCO/UNCTAD creative-economy indicators and official data from Uzbekistan’s handicrafts festival and tourism bodies. The conclusion offers policy and practice recommendations and notes how documentary outcomes map to EB-1A evidentiary categories.