International Communication & Conflict, American Political Science Association Pre-conference, August 31, 2005. Presentations will focus on issues relating to media and security, public diplomacy, war, and propaganda. The Pre-conference is co-sponsored by APSA’s Political Communication Division, George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, and Georgetown University’s Graduate Program in Communication, Culture and Technology. Co-chairs are Scott Althaus (UIUC), Steven Livingston (GWU), and Diana Owen (GU). There is no fee, and APSA membership is not required. The program will consist of panels in the morning at Georgetown University and panels in the afternoon at George Washington University. Register online.
Martha Bayles. “Goodwill Hunting,” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2005, pp. 46-56. Boston College writer and teacher Bayles deplores the decline of U.S. cultural diplomacy (identified as “a dimension of public diplomacy”), provides a brief history of cultural diplomacy’s early 20th century philanthropic antecedents and government funded activities from World War I to the Cold War, discusses ambiguities in American pop culture’s impact abroad, and suggests new components for U.S. government sponsored cultural diplomacy focused on engaging Arabs and Muslims. (Courtesy of Mary Ann Gamble)
Samuel R. Berger and Brent Scowcroft. In the Wake of War: Improving U.S. Post-Conflict Capabilities, Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, July 2005. The Council’s study, directed by William Nash, asserts that nation-building is a national security priority equivalent to war fighting. Key recommendations: policy formulation by the National Security Advisor, a new National Security Policy Directive, State Department leadership in all civilian stabilization and reconstruction efforts, USAID leadership in day-to-day execution of programs on the ground, and creation of a standing multilateral reconstruction trust fund managed by the G-8 industrialized nations.
Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser. “Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations,” Washington Post, August 7, 2005. In the first of a three part series, Coll and Glasser examine al Qaeda’s innovative use of the Internet for training, ideological, recruitment, operational, and other purposes.
Craig Whitlock. “Briton Used Internet as His Bully Pulpit,” Washington Post, August 8, 2005. Whitlock reports on how Babar Ahmad, a British citizen and computer savvy mechanical engineer of Pakistani descent now jailed in a British prison, uses his website, to spread ideas and fight extradition to the United States.
Susan B. Glasser and Steve Coll. “The Web as Weapon,” The Washington Post, August 9, 2005. Glasser and Coll conclude the Post’s series with reporting on Abu Musab Zarqawi’s integration of electronic jihad on the Internet with real-time war on the ground in Iraq.
David S. Jackson, Kenneth Tomlinson, Richard Richter, Philomena Jury. “His Master’s Voice,” Foreign Affairs, July/August. Letters from three current U.S. government broadcasting executives and former VOA broadcaster Jury respond to former VOA Director Sanford Ungar’s critique of U.S. broadcasting (“Pitch Imperfect,” Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2005, pp. 7-13). Ungar replies. Full text of letters online.
Stephen Johnson, Helle C. Dale, and Patrick Cronin. Strengthening U.S. Public Diplomacy Requires Organization, Coordination, and Strategy, The Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder No. 1875, August 5, 2005. The authors suggest the U.S. needs more than a new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Recommendations include giving additional resources and authority to the Under Secretary, streamlined management of U.S. international broadcasting, integration and coordination within the National Security Council, an independent foreign polling center, creation of a public diplomacy doctrine and global strategy, and abolishing “domestic access limits” on public diplomacy products.
Joshua Kurlantzick. “Cultural Revolution: How China is Changing Global Diplomacy,” The New Republic, June 27, 2005, pp. 16-21. TNR’s foreign editor looks at China’s projection of soft power in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. As China’s influence has grown, U.S. leverage is handicapped by a reduced diplomatic presence, restrictions on student visas, prisoner abuse scandals at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and perceptions of America’s “obsession” with terrorism. Kurlantzick offers as an example “a small ‘American corner’ where Thais could read English language books about the United States.” What happened to the former American consulate in southern Thailand? It’s now the Chinese consulate.
Robert S. Leiken. “Europe’s Angry Muslims,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005, pp. 120-135. Leiken (Nixon Center and Brookings Institution) profiles growing jihadism among western European nationals, examines implications for liberalism and counter-terrorism, and discusses methods to achieve more vigilant border security without ending the Visa Waiver Program.
Clark A. Murdock and Michele A. Flournoy. Beyond Goldwater-Nichols: U.S. Government and Defense Reform for a New Strategic Era – Phase 2 Report, Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 2005. A CSIS national security study team addresses ways to create a more integrated and effective national security structure. Key recommendations: recast the National Security Council’s role to greater “involvement in ensuring that Presidential intent is realized through USG action,” codify a standard approach to interagency planning, establish a Quadrennial National Security Review analogous to the Quadrennial Defense Review, put operational capabilities in U.S. agencies other than Defense, and modernize professional military education.
Edward R. Murrow Center for the Study and Advancement of Public Diplomacy. The Murrow Center, located at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, has created a website. Established in 1965 and active until the early 1990s, the Center is a memorial to Murrow’s career as a journalist and director of the U.S. Information Agency. The Center houses Murrow’s library and papers and awards Murrow Fellowships to mid-career professionals who engage in research at Fletcher on topics “ranging from the impact of the ‘new world information order’ debate in the international media during the 1970’s and 1980’s to, currently, telecommunications policies and regulation.” (Courtesy of Josh Fouts)
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Online Terrorism, August 2, 2005. Jeffrey Brown discusses the Internet as a tool for terrorists and focus of intelligence agencies with Rebecca Givner-Forbes of the Terrorism Research Center and Michael Vatis former director of the Justice Department’s National Infrastructure Protection Center.
Pew Global Attitudes Project. U.S. Image Up Slightly, But Still Negative American Character Gets Mixed Reviews, June 23, 2005. The Project’s latest findings: “Anti-Americanism in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, which surged as a result of the U.S. war in Iraq, shows modest signs of abating. But the United States remains broadly disliked in most countries surveyed, and the opinion of the American people is not as positive as it once was . . . President George W. Bush’s calls for greater democracy in the Middle East and U.S. aid for tsunami victims in Asia have been well-received in many countries, but only in Indonesia, India and Russia has there been significant improvement in overall opinions of the U.S.”
Janet Steele, Wars Within: The Story of an Independent Magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia, Equinox Publishing, 2005. This book examines the 23-year history of Indonesia’s most important news weekly, Tempo magazine, its influence on Indonesian intellectual and cultural life, and its internal dynamics as a news organization prior to its being banned in 1994. Professor Steel is on the faculty of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, a Fulbright Scholar, and a frequent visitor to Jakarta.
“Indonesian Media and the Freedom of Expression,” Thursday, September 8, 2:00 – 6:30 p.m, a conference hosted at GWU’s Jack Morton Auditorium by the The United States-Indonesia Society in cooperation with the School of Media and Public Affairs and Asia Society Washington Center. Wars Within book launch and reception to follow.
U.S. Institute of Peace, Arab Media: Tools of the Governments; Tools for the People? Virtual Diplomacy Initiative, Released online, August 2005. USIP’s new Virtual Diplomacy publication analyzes the role of Arab media in shaping the information environment that encourages popular hostility toward the West, particularly the United States. The study is based on a six-month workshop series co-chaired by USIP Senior Fellow Mamoun Fandy and Sheryl Brown, Director of the Virtual Diplomacy Initiative. The series examined the primary media sources of information, perceptions, and opinions among Arab populations.
U.S. Institute of Peace, U.S.-Pakistan Engagement: The War on Terrorism and Beyond, Special Report 145, August 2005. This new USIP report, written by Touquir Hussain, looks broadly at the history and current state of U.S.-Pakistan relations in the context of America’s evolving strategic relationship with South Asia, democracy in the Muslim world, and the dual problems of religious extremism and nuclear proliferation. The author is a USIP senior fellow and former Pakistani ambassador to Japan, Spain, and Brazil.
Jonathan Zittrain and John G. Palfrey, Jr. Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study. Investigators sponsored by the OpenNet Initiative conclude “China operates the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world.” The study examines multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages. It is part of a larger collaborative project of the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the University of Cambridge.
Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman. Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School. The authors provide data on the “methods, scope, and depth of selective barriers to Internet access through Chinese networks.” Blocked are a wide range of sites from WashingtonPost.com to George Washington University’s web site to the State Web Site of Mississippi. A number of U.S. government sites are blocked including DefenseLink and Voice of America. The State Department‘s public diplomacy is not listed.
Danielle S. Allen. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, University of Chicago Press, 2004. University of Chicago humanities professor Allen’s examination of Brown and political values is useful to public diplomacy scholars and practitioners for her inquiry into the meaning of trust and distrust, friendship, mutuality, reciprocity, sacrifice, and solidarity. Allen offers a critique of Habermas’ account of deliberative discourse and a strong interpretation of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric in the context of listening, persuasion, and generating trust. (Courtesy of Eric Gregory)
Simon Anholt and Jeremy Hildreth. Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, Cyan Books, 2004. The authors define brand as image, reputation, or “the good name of something that’s on offer to the public.” They trace the concept of America as a brand from colonial times to the present, discuss the impact of today’s anti-Americanism, and offer recommendations (many drawn from recent reports on public diplomacy) for rejuvenating an American “brand in trouble.”
Anne Applebaum. “In Search of Pro Americanism,” Foreign Policy, July/August, 2005, pp. 32-40. Washington Post columnist Applebaum finds “not everyone has chosen to get on the anti-American bandwagon.” She suggests adding new stereotypes — the “Indian stockbroker, the South Korean investment banker, and the Philippine manufacturer” and their equivalents in other countries — to the Arab radical and the French farmer. “They may not be a majority . . . but neither are they insignificant.” Applebaum concludes “their numbers can rise or fall, depending on US policies.” “Their opinions will change according to how often the U.S. Secretary of State visits their cities, and according to how their media report on American affairs.” Includes a sidebar piece by Steven Kull, “It’s Lonely at the Top.”
Check Foreign Policy’s website for future posting.
Ralph Begleiter. “Of Battlegrounds and Blogs: U.S. Media and the World,” The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Winter/Spring, 2005, pp. 213-222. University of Delaware journalist-in-residence and former CNN world affairs correspondent Begleiter responds to questions on global news, his law suit seeking access to images of caskets of U.S. soldiers returned from Iraq, how U.S. media and American soft power influence foreign media and attitudes toward the U.S., and the impact of web-based news.
Craig Charney and Nicole Yakatan. A New Beginning: Strategies for a More Fruitful Dialogue with the Muslim World, Council on Foreign Relations, CSR No. 7, May 2005. Drawing on focus group research in Morocco, Egypt, and Indonesia, Charney and Yakatan conclude that “the right efforts to communicate” can produce significant shifts in negative Muslim attitudes toward America characterized by anger, ambiguity, and ambivalence. The authors urge more listening, “a humbler tone,” emphasis on bilateral aid and partnership, toleration for disagreement on policy issues, and significant resources over time.
Cold War Broadcasting Impact, Report on a conference sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Cold War International History Project, Stanford University, October 13-16, 2004. Includes rapporteur Gregory Mitrovich’s summary of seven panel discussions and a subsequent analysis prepared by A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, “Cold War International Broadcasting: Lessons Learned.” Panelists included experts from Western and former Communist countries. Useful especially for insights drawn from recently available materials from East European, Baltic, and Russian archives and sections on “lessons learned.” (Courtesy of Barry Fulton)
John F. Harris. The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, Random House, 2005. Washington Post reporter John Harris’ account of the Clinton years treads lightly on foreign policy and very lightly on public diplomacy. Media, image, and communication issues are discussed in paragraphs on the exit from Somalia and on Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, terrorism, Iraq, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, White House spokesman Mike McCurry, and the President’s trips to Africa (a full chapter), East Asia, and South Asia.
Christopher Henzel. “The Origins of al Qaeda’s Ideology: Implications for US Strategy,” Parameters, Spring 2005, pp. 69-80. Henzel, a foreign service officer and 2004 National War College graduate, argues the United States, Arab regimes, and traditional Sunni clerics share an interest in avoiding instability and revolution. American strategy should understand and exploit the divide between mainstream Sunnis and revolutionary Salafists.
Lawrence J. Korb and Robert O. Boorstin. Integrated Power: A National Security Strategy for the 21st Century, Center for American Progress, June 2005. Korb, Boorstin and the Center’s national security team call for a strategy that links and goes beyond “hard” and “soft” power concepts, leverages alliances and unifying forces of globalization, integrates public diplomacy into all components of national security, and integrates defense, homeland security, diplomatic, energy, and development assistance policies. The Center’s four public diplomacy recommendations (p. 19) include: support for new schools and textbooks as alternatives to extremist madrassas, a reexamination of US visa policies, increased funding for exchanges with Muslim majority countries, and partnerships with private media to develop programs about American life and culture.