Tag: Diplomacy

A Crucial Time for Diplomacy in Ukraine

Europe, public diplomacyLeave a Comment on A Crucial Time for Diplomacy in Ukraine
Map of Ukraine, with the autonomous area of Crimea in red. On Feb. 28, Russian military occupied the area following the political crisis in Kyiv. Many view the move as an act of war. Credit: Wikipedia Common
Map of Ukraine, with the autonomous area of Crimea in red. On Feb. 28, Russian military occupied the area following the political crisis in Kyiv. Many view the move as an act of war. Credit: Wikipedia Common

Ukraine will need good public diplomacy from the U.S.

Secretary Kerry is wise to be heading to Ukraine on Tuesday for both formal and symbolic diplomacy to signal to the ordinary citizen in Ukraine that the U.S. respects its territorial sovereignty and its human dignity. These are the moments when visits really matter.

With Russian troops on the move in Crimea, ethnic Russians also need to know that their rights will be protected. This conflict cannot afford to spiral out of control. Leaving aside the human toll that conflict could take, and the wider war this episode might evoke, there are public diplomacy and economic reasons for all actors in this drama to want a peaceful ending.

Crimea is a major tourism spot for Ukrainians, Russians and Western visitors. Even National Geographic has written about the seaside beauty, the vineyards and orchards of this Black Sea resort. Russia just emerged from a tourism boom in Sochi. It shouldn’t risk sending a message to the world that tourists should stay away from Russia and the Black Sea resorts of Ukraine. Moreover, economic issues like oil prices — which would spike as a result of any sanctions against Russia — should motivate all sides to calm down.

In 1782, Catherine the Great’s military general, Prince Grigory Potemkin wrote of Crimea saying “Russia needs its paradise.” But today, times have changed. This is 2014. Russia should not risk it all. Let’s hope public diplomacy and diplomatic talks result in a win-win for everyone.

Should We Even Be Studying Public Diplomacy?

Cultural Diplomacy, public diplomacy1 Comment on Should We Even Be Studying Public Diplomacy?

Rodman

by Anna-Lena Tepper

Former NBA player Dennis Rodman’s recent visit to North Korea came to many as a surprise. Along with an entourage of fellow basketball players from the performance group Harlem Globetrotters, Rodman went to visit the most oppressive country in the world, but his intentions weren’t politically motivated. His mission was simply to share the joy of basketball with the North Korean people. In his few days there he did not only initiate several friendly games between American players and North Korean teams, but he also had several friendly encounters with the country’s dictator Kim Jong Un. He left with a great impression of the country and its people and they also seemed to have enjoyed his visit. Upon his return to the States, Rodman’s advice to the President was that he should just call his Communist counterpart to sort things out. This sounds almost too good to be true and very easily done. The question arises, if maybe this approach might yield better results than the ones initiated – or in the case of US-North Korean relationship “non-initiated” – by the international community. After all, Rodman managed to have friendly encounters with one of the US’s biggest enemies.

The field of public or cultural diplomacy has received major academic attention over the last few years. People are not just studying public diplomacy, they also try to analyze, standardize, optimize, generalize, and define it. In an attempt to engage foreign audiences and develop a deeper relationship with them, based on shared interests and common ideas, governments spend millions of dollars each year to implement programs that can facilitate these engagements. However, despite countless highly sophisticated programs – ranging from student and leadership exchanges to a variety of cultural events – that are tailored to different audiences, too often neither scholars, nor policy makers can determine a cause-effect relationship between the programs they implemented and approval rates abroad.

0228-world-orodman_full_600And then there is Dennis Rodman, who travels to North Korea without a plan and manages to leave the country a few days later and everyone, including the country’s communist leader that hasn’t had any friendly encounters with an American in as long as anyone can remember, is all smiley faces. No science behind it, just what seems like intuition, and it worked – apparently. However, some argue that     Rodman’s visit was actually counterproductive, as his approval of Kim Jong Un directly legitimized his questionable leadership.

Still, the question arises if maybe American scholars are sometimes overanalyzing public diplomacy and therefore, often miss their set goals (or can’t detect it). Many argue that Dennis Rodman’s visit was just staged and now that he has gone nothing has changed. Those people have a point. Kim Jong Un has just threatened the United States with a nuclear war again. Politically, Rodman’s visit hasn’t changed anything. However, he still managed to open North Korea to an American visitor for a friendly encounter with the leader for first time in decades, and that is something neither politicians nor scholars have been able to achieve.

Fact is, public diplomacy needs to be very targeted in order to be successful, but at the same time, PD scholars and practitioners should also keep in mind that sometimes intuition is a good indicator of what is a good approach and what is not. Especially in the case of North Korea, maybe a mix of intuitive steps and targeted PD programs is going to lead to a change in the near, or not so near future.

Anna-Lena Tepper is a graduate student at the George Washington University, and is posting as part of Take Five’s ongoing Student Perspective series.

Tweeting in State

Global Communication, public diplomacy, Social Media1 Comment on Tweeting in State
daniel_hertzberg_twitter_use_in_government
Source: danielhertzberg.com

When the recent Diplopundit post and related news items came out about State Department revising its external communication clearance rules, a lot of people reacted with concern that State was either deliberately or merely blind-bureaucratically limiting its ability to communicate by imposing a new delay on digital communication, even on tweets.   Colleagues here at GWU quizzed me with “State Department rules might impose a 48-hour review period on employees tweets.  Because that’s the best way to communicate in the era of instant communication?”

But my experience with the State Department tells me this is not what the new draft clearance rules are about — and here is why:

Right now, if you are an Ambassador or PAO (public affairs officer) overseas you are cleared to tweet or post to social media (as well as talk to local journalists, do interviews with local media, etc.) as you see fit — and it doesn’t look like these new rules would change that.  And if you are in Washington in an office that needs to communicate publicly about something, you can work with the PA staff in your own bureau to get near-instant clearance.

(Plus, employees can always use language that’s already been cleared, e.g. text from previous official speeches and statements — and frankly, a lot of language gets recycled this way because it’s efficient and ensures consistency, which is necessarily valued in this business).

So I don’t see the new rules having any restrictive effect on on-the-job communication via digital media, either overseas or at reasonably senior levels in Washington.

To me (and again, this is just from looking at Diplopundit and the spinoff media articles from it), the new draft rules appear to do two things:

  • Actually shorten the maximum time State PA is allowed to take to clear independent thoughts on foreign affairs which State employees might want to express in a non-official or quasi-official role.  In other words, in situations where the reason people might read your blog article or listen to your speech is that you work for State, but you want to use your own words and speak your own thoughts.  And of course there’s a broad spectrum of such situations, ranging from invitational speaking that all State officers ought to do as part of their work (on one end) to whistle-blowing (at the other); and,
  • Close a loophole that indicated if State PA doesn’t respond to a request for clearance within a certain deadline, one is free to publish.

Up until now, there’s been a blanket maximum time of 30 days for clearance of such quasi-official communication, via any media. But according to the new draft rules, the very small subset of employees’ social media content that might be subject to review through this formal Department process would be guaranteed a much shorter maximum (not target) deadline for clearance.

But it’s good that journalists and the general public are interested in this. (Government always works better when the citizens are paying attention and can give sensible advice if insider-thinking shows signs of going off the rails!)

Expert Views on Public Diplomacy: The Next Four Years

Global Communication, public diplomacy, Social MediaLeave a Comment on Expert Views on Public Diplomacy: The Next Four Years

On November 13,  IPDGC had the privilege of sponsoring Public Diplomacy: the Next Four Years, a terrific “insiders” discussion featuring two former Under Secretaries of State for Public Diplomacy (James Glassman and Judith McHale), a key Senate senior committee staffer (Paul Foldi), and a former State Department Assistant Secretary / spokesperson (Philip “PJ” Crowley).   These are all people who not only have a vision of what America’s public diplomacy can and should do, they also know a lot about what it actually does.

Panel members enthusiastically debated the role and strengths of contemporary U.S. public diplomacy.  One area of complete agreement:  two-way engagement is a big priority over one-way messaging.  Another consensus: information technology is a game-changer in diplomacy and foreign affairs.

Key Takeaway:  Signficant discussion revolved around how diplomacy itself – not just public diplomacy – is changing.   The implication was clear that  diplomacy must change even more in this modern world of globally shared challenges and exponentially more information networks.

Here is one blogger’s observations on key points and highlights from this IPDGC-sponsored panel:

1) Consensus:  Engagement and relationships trump one-way messaging:  

McHale:  The world has changed [and] we will not be able to move our foreign policy goals and objectives forward without having a better relationship, better understanding and engagement with people all over the world.  We simply can’t do it.

Crowley:  [re: tweeting with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez] By doing that, the folks in [the Western Hemisphere Affairs Bureau] will go, why are you doing that? I’d say, it is generating a debate within Venezuela.  And one of my colleagues said, when you wrestle with a pig you get dirty.  I go yes, but this is a debate that we will ultimately win.  [We] have to be willing to let our diplomats engage in this debate and quite honestly that’s a phenomenon that will happen.

Foldi:  Sometimes I think the department falls into this trap of, “well we put all things out on a web and then we let people comment on them.” Well that’s not what they really want, they want to engage in a conversation

Glassman:  You look for those avenues where you can pursue those conversations, where you can build relationships even in very difficult and challenging parts of the world for us.

But at least one voice made the case for “messaging” — when it is done in new, relational contexts:

Glassman: I realized that simply standing up and preaching at people… is not a very effective way to communicate. [Foreign audiences] don’t want to listen to you, to Americans preaching at them. But rather a better way to communicate is to use American authority, such as it is, to convene a large, broad and deep conversation in which American messages are … injected [or] distributed among other messages

So the emphasis is on relationships and engagement.  And whether focused on advancing foreign policy goals or debating policies and ideologies at the head of state level, the panelists are not just talking about public diplomacy, they’re talking about all of diplomacy.

2)  Another area of agreement:  Information technology as a game-changer: 

McHale: The world has changed so dramatically and so fundamentally with … technology and with information and power now being widely dispersed.  We have got to find better ways of influencing foreign populations or we simply can’t go forward.  [For example], right now in this room there is nobody here who can raise their hand and say ‘I can identify who was the leader of the Egyptian revolution.’ Because there wasn’t one; it was coalitions, ever changing coalitions of interests.

Glassman: And second, it’s just amazing, we … have lucked into this world — and we haven’t “lucked” into it, but the tools are there, tools that did not exist ten years ago. The tools for communicating in a public diplomacy 2.0 way.

3)  Defining the core goal of public diplomacy: is it “Benefit of the Doubt?” 

Paul Foldi and PJ Crowley both focus on the perceived gap between words and deeds as a major challenge for public diplomacy.  Foldi describes how a country that builds up its soft power can get over specific policy hurdles:

Foldi:  It can take years to get what I call ‘benefit of the doubt,’ which I believe is the goal of public diplomacy. So that when your country does something or has a policy that seems counterintuitive to the rest of the world, they’ll go “oh, but they are the United States — so maybe they’re doing this [thing we don’t like], but for the most part we agree with them.” And to me … it’s a question of can we get back into the ‘benefit of the doubt’ category for many of these countries?

(Note: Foldi’s view – creating the benefit of the doubt – strikes me as something a lot of public diplomacy practitioners would agree with.   I think many of us would see this is as an achievable goal in many overseas contexts, and we would consider the public diplomacy ‘toolkit’ useful in pursuing this goal.)

By contrast, PJ Crowley focuses not on helping contextualize policies that are unappreciated abroad as being inconsistent with shared values, but rather on trying to eliminate them:

Crowley: Ultimately the best public diplomacy is … policies that reflect your interests and your values and [when] the gap between what we say and what we do is as narrow as it can be. … [One] of the great challenges for public diplomacy is to bridge the gap between words and deeds, to narrow that to the extent possible.  … [Polling trends] should inform what our short term and mid term actions are.

Meanwhile, Glassman and McHale reject a polling-driven “popularity contest” approach, maintaining that targeted PD efforts can and should be used to further specific U.S. foreign policy goals.

Glassman:  I don’t think that favorability ratings in the Pew survey are evidence of whether we are doing something wrong or right.  [I tried] to disabuse people of that notion and rather to focus attention on what public diplomacy can do to achieve specific ends that are part of [our] goals in foreign policy and national security policy; that’s what public diplomacy is supposed to do.

McHale: I’m certainly in agreement with Jim on this issue, it’s not a popularity contest … that is absolutely the wrong focus.

As the panelists fleshed out their ideas, however, I heard each one suggest support for Foldi’s “benefit of the doubt” role for public diplomacy:

Crowley: we will always be challenged …for example Indians have expectations in terms of the US policy towards Pakistan or Pakistan has expectations towards the US policy towards India, and those two… do not easily coexist. And when… you sit in between those two long time antagonists, you are going to end up disappointing both of them to some degree or another.

McHale: There were many areas where … we do find areas of common interest, science, technology, education, all of those areas. … [N]aturally you are going to encounter a lot of resistance and what have you but that’s no reason to give up. And you look for those avenues where you can pursue those conversations, where you can build relationships even in very difficult and challenging parts of the world for us.

Glassman: [A]s Senator Fulbright said, the Fulbright programs teach empathy, standing in somebody else’s shoes. I’m a huge believer in that and I think that is valuable.  (But should two thirds of the money be spent on that?)

Glassman (again): [A]s president Obama said right in the beginning … we need to focus on mutual interest and mutual respect and there are many things that we can get done in that fashion.

All of these comments reflect the idea that some U.S. policies will inevitably be viewed by some other countries as inimical, unfair, and/or a betrayal of U.S. stated values — so concentrating on other interests and values that we do share, as well as working to promote mutual empathy and understanding, is essential.

4) This is really about “all of diplomacy”:

It is worth repeating Judith McHale’s observation about the Egyptian revolution: “right now in this room there is nobody here who can raise their hand and say ‘I can identify who was the leader of the Egyptian revolution.’ Because there wasn’t one, it was coalitions, ever changing collations of interests.”

Pair this with Crowley’s discussion of high-level public communications, for example those tweets with Hugo Chavez.   He makes clear that informal and globally available public communication by heads of state and top diplomats (not to mention powerful business leaders and highly influential NGO advocates) is here to stay.

These panelists emphasized, in other words, that understanding and responding to events such as the Egyptian revolution or debating Hugo Chavez in his domestic political arena is not only the work of public diplomacy, it’s at the center of diplomacy and foreign policy.   And engaging in this public sphere has to be a focus of the whole State Department, not just its public diplomacy bureaus.

Glassman makes the case that, in this new environment, using the tools of public diplomacy is a notably low cost / high impact strategy and should be expanded:  “There are ways to move money within the State Department budget that would make the Department as a whole more effective by putting more emphasis on public diplomacy. … One of the reasons that I strongly believe that we need more public diplomacy … is because at a time of tight budgets, it’s the most cost effective way to achieve those national interest goals that I talked about.”

He takes that idea further to suggest that Embassies themselves may be obsolete.

Glassman: And the other thing that I would just throw out to you is whether in an era of social media and very, very fast communications, whether we should be spending as much money as we are in general at the State Department on things called embassies. Okay it made a lot of sense 100 years ago, but does it make sense today to have this edifice and this very complicated kind of arrangement where people go for a few years and live there, as though they couldn’t possibly influence people in those countries if they didn’t live there?

U.S. Embassy Belgrade

No doubt many would find controversial the idea that one can influence people whom one has never met face to face, much less grown to know better over time.   But on closer examination, is Glassman really saying that diplomats don’t need to go abroad and meet people?  Is it possible to envision an engaged diplomacy involving both face to face and online interactions that does not involve the traditional Embassy model?

I’m not sure.  (What do TakeFive blog readers think?)

Advocates of ‘new approaches to public diplomacy’ often end up by proposing new approaches to diplomacy itself.   As these excerpts from last week’s expert panel discussion show, our panelists at the IPDGC event were no exception.  (And there was much more rich discussion that can be found on the event video or in the transcript.)

Yes, they were unanimous on the importance of existing public diplomacy efforts, and there was little disagreement on the impact of valued public diplomacy tools (exchanges, social media).

At the same time, these experienced public diplomacy experts expressed a range of ideas – some quite provocative – about how approaches rooted in public diplomacy are particularly appropriate for the 21st century challenges of U.S. diplomacy overall.

It will be great for IPDGC and other groups interested in the theory and practice of public diplomacy to get more such debates launched in the wider arena of foreign affairs / diplomacy.  

Social Media, Diplomacy, and the Responsibility to Protect

public diplomacy, Social Media1 Comment on Social Media, Diplomacy, and the Responsibility to Protect

This post also appears on OpenCanada.org as a part of CIC’s ongoing series on Twitter and Diplomacy.

Earlier this week, Jackson Diehl’s column in the Washington Post argued that the Obama Administration’s early diplomatic approach to Syria, coupled with its failure to intervene militarily during the ongoing civil war, represented a “catastrophic mishandling” of the crisis. Diehl, like others who have blamed the Administration for not intervening, lay the blood of the more than 30,000 civilians killed in the conflict on the hands of Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Leaving aside the merits of the arguments for intervention (which, like Diehl’s, seem to take the ahistorical view that the U.S. can simply break up fights like Mike Tyson at a kindergarten recess), they point to the complexities of understanding the intersection of social media, diplomacy, and militarism in an era of Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

Ever since social media became a major part of the story of the Green Movement protests in Iran in 2009, many have argued that new media technologies not only have the power to help bring down dictators, as in Egypt last year, but also to pressure the international community to intervene and stop a regime’s violent oppression of its people. The dissemination of online videos depicting these abuses, spread via Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, are supposed to not only rally citizens in those countries, but make it impossible for major powers in the West, especially, to turn a blind eye to the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians.

As former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said during those 2009 Iranian protests, “You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.”

Brown was widely ridiculed for his hyperbole. The Register’s Chris Williams wrote, “We’d like to see him try Twittering that to people in Sudan, or Northern Sri Lanka, or Somalia.” Today, one could add Bahrain and Syria to the list.

Yet Brown’s Rwanda allusion raises the issue of R2P and its relationship to social media-driven protests. At the 2005 United Nations World Summit, world leaders agreed in principle that the international community needs to be prepared to take military action to prevent a State from committing genocide or other crimes against humanity perpetrated against its people.

The Rwandan genocide weighed heavily on the Summit’s adoption of R2P as a guiding principle of international statecraft. The 1994 bloodletting, as well as the similar dawdling during the Balkan wars of the same decade, were seen as examples of diplomatic and military failures that led to the deaths of more than a million innocent people.

One of the reasons those genocides were allowed to happen, some felt, was because of the difficulty of documenting the atrocities in real time. There were, for example, very few journalists in Rwanda during the massacres, and according to former reporter and current scholar Allan Thompson, only one clandestine video of anyone actually being hacked to death was ever recorded. This is why Rwanda has been called a “Genocide without witnesses.” The assumption since then has been that had people seen the brutality in real time, world leaders in Paris, Washington, and elsewhere would have been pressured to intervene. As PM Brown’s comments 15 years later indicated, social media would provide those witnesses.

If this were true, it would dramatically reshape diplomacy. Some saw evidence of this in Egypt last year, when the Obama Administration initially responded to the protests in Tahrir Square tepidly – some said, too diplomatically – because Mubarak had been such a strong ally of the U.S. over the years. But those diplomatic ties snapped under pressure from Twitter and Facebook, according to this telling of events.

Shortly thereafter, the Administration invoked the spirit of R2P to join an international coalition to prevent Muammar Gaddafi from carrying through with his promise to massacre the residents of Benghazi through the implementation of a no-fly zone and other military actions.

In an era of social media, the story went, we would never again have a genocide without witnesses. Foreign governments in the West and elsewhere would not be able to withstand the public outcry that would come from seeing and reading first hand accounts of regime brutality. Diplomacy would be forever altered.

And yet… not so much.

Widespread documentation of violence has not prompted U.S. intervention in Bahrain or Syria.

Just taking the United States as an example (though we could easily choose others),  well-documented and horrific regime violence has not prompted the Obama Administration to intervene in Bahrain or Syria, to name two examples.

Diehl and others see this as a “catastrophic” failure. Yet the reality is far more complicated, on many levels

Start with the fact that social media’s role in shaping international policy responses to Egypt and Libya are still poorly understood. My colleagues Henry Farrell, Deen Freelon, Marc Lynch and I recently released a report funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace that found social media’s role in the Arab Spring protests of 2011 were probably greatly exaggerated. At least when it came to Twitter and other mechanisms for sharing links to reports of violence and protests, social media didn’t appear to have as much of an impact within those countries or in the region as some expected. They did, however, generate a lot of discussion around the world. Hence, we argued, these social media appeared to behave as less of a rallying cry than a megaphone.

This raises the possibility, however, that all of that retweeting of horrific videos of regime violence could lead to pressure on governments to intervene. Deen, Marc, and I are currently investigating whether that has been the case in Syria. Our interviews with policymakers and others will hopefully shed light on how much impact new media played in shaping diplomatic and military responses to those earlier Arab Spring crises, as well.

But there are reasons to be skeptical that social media can lead governments to intervene when they wouldn’t have in the absence of these technologies. To begin with, there is the simple fact that the U.S. hasn’t intervened in Syria militarily, much to the dismay of Diehl and others. Coupled with its relative silence during the Bahrain protests, this suggests an explanation familiar to international relations scholars and observers: States make foreign policy decisions based on their perceived interests, and these are much less susceptible to public pressure than domestic policy decisions. In the U.S. this is especially the case, in part because Americans don’t know (or care) much about foreign affairs, and press coverage of the topic is correspondingly, and vanishingly, scant, superficial, and episodic. (In general; clearly there are great foreign correspondents doing work that deserves greater exposure than their parent organizations will provide them.)

Ideally, States also make decisions based not on mismatched historical analogies (“Look! Hitler!” or “It’s just like Libya! Intervene!” or “No, wait, it’s just like Iraq! Run for your life!”), but rather based on the specifics of the case at hand. (In fact, however, research shows that policymakers frequently employ convenient historical examples to justify policy decisions they’ve already come to.) One question to ask would be, will intervention actually accomplish the goal at hand? Another might be, at what cost? And a third would be, how do we do know?

So where does that leave us in terms of understanding the intersection of social media, diplomacy, and intervention?

First, social media can create global witnesses to regime violence and genocide. If world leaders are going to take R2P seriously, then this could be an important tool in making that doctrine more than empty words. If nothing else, this witnessing can be crucial to accountability and justice in, say, war crimes trials, but also in not letting leaders off the hook for craven failures to act.

Second, diplomacy and policymaking can be greatly enhanced by social media. For instance, the growing sophistication of crowdsourcing verification of online videos and other means of what Patrick Meier calls “information forensics” can help separate truth from propaganda. It can also be used as a tool for diplomats to pressure regimes, by brandishing documentary evidence of their abuses, or to pressure others in the international community to join coalitions to stop those abuses.

At IPDGC’s “The Last Three Feet,” Rachel Graaf Leslie, recently a Public Affairs Officer in Bahrain, spoke on the U.S. Embassy’s experience interacting with Bahrainis on Facebook. 

Third, social media can aid diplomats in their effort to connect with citizens in other countries. We saw this in the creative and aggressive way that Amb. Robert Ford and the U.S. Embassy staff in Syria used social media to document abuses by the Assad regime before Ford was forced to leave the country. We also saw it in the way that the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain used their Facebook wall to host and engage in spirited conversations with people from different sides of that conflict. This is an important way in which social media are helping to more fully integrate public diplomacy into traditional diplomacy.

Finally, however, we are left with the limits of social media’s impact on diplomacy and policymaking. In the Syrian crisis, for instance, we still have problems with verification and propaganda in the online public sphere. And traditional questions about national interests and, especially, feasibility undercut interventionist sloganeering.

What that means is that social media have probably not fundamentally altered the foreign policy decision making process of world leaders to force intervention, but rather merely contributed to the range of data diplomats have at their disposal. This, however, is not always a bad thing, since intervention is one of those things that’s easier said than done. In fact, it could simply mean that effective diplomacy is all the more important.

New Wine in Old Bottles: Relationships in Public Diplomacy

Cultural Diplomacy, in the field, public diplomacy1 Comment on New Wine in Old Bottles: Relationships in Public Diplomacy
Participants at Ground-breaking Pakistan-India Bloggers’ Conference Hosted by U.S. Consulates in Karachi and Lahore

 

Take Five’s blog post series on Public Diplomacy in the Field — Part Two

Background:  As a State Department Fellow at GWU’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (IPDGC), I’ve observed that a frequently missing piece of the academic puzzle is concrete discussion and analysis of what public diplomats actually do in the field.  And considering that U.S. public diplomacy remains significantly field-driven, this feels like a major gap. 

Thus a blog series is born.

As noted last week, the series showcases current field reporting highlights in U.S. public diplomacy work – through the lens of key PD principles and themes. Today’s theme is Building Relationships.  Last week’s was Opinion Leaders. Future topics will include: Messaging Creatively; Crisis Zones; Arts as Communication; and more. 

As always, readers, I welcome your interest and feedback.

——————–

New Wine in Old Bottles: Relationships in Public Diplomacy

Academic proponents of the “new public diplomacy” emphasize relationship building over the one-way messaging approach perceived to have dominated public diplomacy in the past. “The new public diplomacy moves away from — to put it crudely — peddling information to foreigners and keeping the foreign press at bay, towards engaging with foreign audiences” notes Jan Melissen (p. 13).  RS Zaharna, in “Mapping Out a Spectrum of Public Diplomacy Initiatives” (here, p. xx)  argues that “within [a] relationship framework, education and cultural exchange programs, cultural institutes and cultural relations represent a category of initiatives that use culture as a vehicle for building relationships.”

Meanwhile, Mette Lending (Section I) takes the broad view that “cultural exchange is not only ‘art’ and ‘culture’ but also communicating a country’s thinking, research, journalism and national debate,” and “the traditional areas of cultural exchange become part of a new type of international communication and the growth of ‘public diplomacy’ becomes a reaction to the close connection between cultural, press and information activities, as a result of new social, economic and political realities.”   Finally, from Melissen again (p 22), “…the new emphasis on public diplomacy confirms the fact that the familiar divide between cultural and information activities is being eradicated.”

There is much to consider in the above concepts, and even more so in the detailed elaboration of these  ideas that all three scholars and many others have brought to discussions of the “new” public diplomacy.

One caveat, however, is that these ideas are presented as new prescriptions for action, whereas the U.S. — perhaps unlike most European states — has long intermeshed its international information programs with cultural diplomacy, its messaging efforts with relationship building, and its arts exchanges with an emphasis on civil society development.  Thus, at least to this veteran PD officer, the “new public diplomacy” seems perhaps more like a fully-developed ‘Platonic Ideal’ of what we have long practiced, rather than something qualitatively new.

Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the 21st Century has intensified the importance of bringing a relational, interactive, mutually productive approach to international affairs, and specifically to public diplomacy.  As Joseph Nye explains in his seminal 2004 work Soft Power (p. 4-5), “[On the level of]  transnational issues like terrorism, international crime, climate change, and the spread of infectious diseases, power is widely distributed and chaotically organized among state and nonstate actors. … [This is the set of issues that is now intruding into the world of grand strategy.”  And Brian Hocking (in Melissen 1999, p 31) had previously characterized the “growing symbiosis between state and non-state activities as ‘catalytic diplomacy’ in which political entities act in coalitions rather than relying on their individual resources.” 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also cites such developments, noting that “we are living in what I call the Age of Participation. Economic, political, and technological changes have empowered people everywhere to shape their own destinies in ways previous generations could never have imagined.”  And the State Department’s 21st Century Statecraft plan elaborates, explaining that “the U.S. is responding to shifts in international relations by … complementing traditional foreign policy tools with newly innovated and adapted instruments of statecraft that fully leverage the networks, technologies, and demographics of our interconnected world.”

It is in this context that Take Five continues our series on U.S. public diplomacy in the field, with the following examples from recent months – highlights distributed by the Office of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Tara Sonenshine (noted with *).

They are grouped according to specific concepts drawn from the scholarly works mentioned above, with the goal not only of showing how “new public diplomacy” principles are already being put into practice, but also of generating thinking on how PD could be even better informed by academia’s powerful and  insightful ideas.

In other words, how the “new wine” of relational thinking can fill up the “old bottles” of long-valued program tools to create 21st Century public diplomacy with an exceptional bouquet.

1) “Public diplomacy builds on trust and credibility, and it often works best with a long horizon.  It is, however, realistic to aspire to influencing the milieu factors that constitute the psychological and political environment in which attitudes and policies towards other countries are debated.”  (Melissen 2007, p. 15)

* Ambassador Eisen Marches in Prague Pride Parade and Delivers Remarks:  Ambassador Eisen and a group from the U.S. Embassy marched in the 2nd annual Pride Parade in Prague on August 18, 2012.  Parade participants walked from Wenceslas Square to Střelecký Island accompanied by floats with music and dancers. This event supported Embassy Prague’s goals to promote tolerance and protection of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights.  Ambassador Eisen took the opportunity to emphasize that “one of the many reasons why relations between the Czech Republic and the United States have flourished over the past century is because of our countries’ shared values regarding human rights.”

* Historic Encounter between Indigenous Peoples of the USA and Paraguay:  Public Affairs Section Asuncion hosted a Native American dance group from Arizona, the Yellow Bird Apache Dance Productions.  The group met with Study of the U.S. Institute (SUSI) alumni and their indigenous communities in Paraguay. In partnership with the Ministry of Education’s Indigenous Schools Department, the group traveled across Paraguay to meet, sing and dance with the Enxlet, Nivacle, Western Guarani and Pai-Tavytera communities. They also met with the governors of two provinces who welcomed their presence and encouraged more outreach to their indigenous populations.  The visit provided some moving encounters between the Original Peoples of North and South America that broke down barriers, built bridges and encouraged development initiatives.

 * Art Without Artificial Boundaries: Embassy Celebrates Freedom of Artistic Expression: More than 300 musicians, filmmakers, photographers, artists, designers, actors and other guests gathered at the U.S. Embassy in Minsk on July 11 to celebrate freedom of artistic expression.  This annual Embassy music festival provides talented Belarusian musicians an opportunity to perform despite restrictions imposed due to their political views or social activism.  This year’s event featured, in addition to musical groups of various genres, several artistic exhibitions and showcased a documentary about the challenges that Belarusian musicians and other artistic personalities continue to face.  Such restrictions are “incomprehensible for a country in the center of Europe in the third millennium,” noted Chargé d’Affaires Michael Scanlan.

* Positive Coverage of Cairo ‘Open Mic’ Event:  At least five television stations and newspapers covered an ‘Open Mic’ sexual harassment awareness event at the U.S. Embassy Information Resource Center in Egypt last week.  More than 80 people from different backgrounds and ages discussed harassment on Cairo’s streets and at the work place, as well as solutions.  Both women and men spoke courageously, giving personal context to the growing problem and demonstrating the need for change.  Participants expressed an interest in future cooperation with the embassy on the issue, and the Facebook event page became a discussion board on which the dialogue continued.

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2)  An intermediate-advanced “second tier” approach involves programs that “encompass social groupings such as institutions, communities, or societies. … The benefit of integrating foreign participants at this level is that not only do they take partial ownership of the program, but they can provide valuable cultural knowledge and indigenous connections.” (Zaharna, p. 94)

* Smithsonian Spark!Lab Opens in Ukraine:  On September 5 Ambassador John T. Tefft opened the Smithsonian-Lemelson Center’s Spark!Lab, a month-long exhibit at the Art Arsenal Museum (Mystetskyi Arsenal) in Kyiv supported by a Public Affairs Section grant.  Smithsonian-Lemelson Center Deputy Director Jeff Brody and Ukrainian Ombudsman for Children’s Rights Yuri Pavlenko also participated in the opening.  This is the first international exhibit of Spark!Lab, which encourages kids to conceive, design, build and develop their inventions in an interactive laboratory.  Over 200 educators, students and young volunteers were on hand for the opening, which was covered by major television stations.  Thousands of students are expected to visit the exhibit, which is staffed by volunteers from local universities who are trained by Lemelson Center education specialists. Spark! Lab is the Public Diplomacy contribution to the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership Commission’s Science and Technology Working Group.

* Consulate Istanbul Hosts Iftar for the Neighborhood:  Approximately 500 people joined the U.S. Consul General, the Sarıyer Mayor, several Sarıyer City Council members, neighborhood muftis and imams, and American Consulate families for an Iftar on August 15.  The dinner received praise in local media and by Mission Turkey leadership as one of its best public diplomacy events, demonstrating U.S. respect for Turkish culture and thanks to the Consulate’s neighbors.

* Ambassador and American Rabbi Meet Young Muslims in Cameroon:  Ambassador Jackson addressed members of the Cameroon Muslim Students Union (CAMSU), the most influential Muslim youth organization in the country, at their annual conference in Douala.  … [T]he Embassy has had relations with CAMSU for over a decade and its president is a recent International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) alum.  The Embassy also supported the visit of Rabbi Abraham Ingber, Founding Director of Interfaith Community Engagement at Xavier University in Cincinnati, as a speaker at the conference.  Rabbi Ingber was invited to the conference by CAMSU president Ismail Boyomo, who met Ingber during his participation in the 2012 IVLP program on Religious Tolerance and Interfaith Dialogue.

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3) “[C]ulture does not appear to be the only vehicle nor do cultural programs constitute the most sophisticated relationship-building strategies.”  (Zaharna, p. 86)

* TechWomen Mentorship Program Commences in San Francisco:  From across the Middle East and North Africa, 41 women leaders in technology arrived in California on September 5, to begin a five-week professional mentorship program with their American counterparts.  Professional mentors come from over thirty technology companies in Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco area including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Oracle, which hosted an orientation for the group.

* TechCamp Launches in Senegal:  Embassy Dakar Public Affairs and Economic Sections helped launch the first-ever global TechCamp in Africa.  After an opening reception with remarks by Ambassador Lukens and tech guru Marieme Jamme, TechCamp took off for two packed days of interactive sessions around mobile agriculture, or “mAgriculture.” Participants interacted with 71 different agricultural non-governmental organizations (NGO) and learned from 20 “technologists,” including 10 international trainers. Agriculture is crucial to Senegal’s development.  87% of the population owns a mobile device, while only 20% have direct access to the Internet.  Getting the NGOs to learn about and engage in mAgriculture can propel Senegal’s agricultural development. TechCamp gave the Public Affairs Section the opportunity to engage with new groups of young entrepreneurs and to showcase Senegal as a leading partner with the U.S. in high tech solutions to economic development.

* U.S. Embassy Brings Google Scientists to Brasilia: Proving that science is the international language of cool, young computer scientists from Google pulled in a crowd of 400 students at Brasilia’s Marista High School for an interactive presentation entitled “You Can Do Computer Science!”  U.S. Embassy Brasilia and its IIP-supported Information Resource Center sponsored both programs.  Just a few years out of college themselves, the Google scientists provided students with a great example of opportunities available to youth while demonstrating the role science can play in public diplomacy outreach.  The scientists also spoke at the Brasilia Science Corner, a joint project between U.S. Embassy Brasilia and the Brazilian National Council for Technological and Scientific Development.

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4) Such programs also include “non-political networking schemes” — in which “PD officers in essence become network weavers.   Non-political networking schemes build relationships between like-minded individuals or institutions working on a variety of areas such as science, health, environment, or literacy promotion.”  (Zaharna, p. 95)

* Jerusalem Conference Connects Israeli Musicians with American Experts:  Embassy Tel Aviv connected Israeli musicians to the dynamic U.S. music market by bringing U.S. music industry experts to participate in various panels at the multi-day Jerusalem Music Conference.  Local and foreign professionals and artists enjoyed an interactive panel on the U.S. music industry and trends moderated by Cultural Affairs Officer Michele Dastin-van Rijn.  The conference, modeled on Austin’s SXSW, created a unique platform for networking and collaboration between Jewish and Arab musicians.

* South Asian Alumni Discuss Climate Change:  On August 29, Embassy Islamabad hosted a multi-country digital video conference for alumni of U.S. government exchange programs in order to engage across borders on environmental issues.  Alumni from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal discussed drought, solid waste, and potable drinking water.  There was a consensus that the younger generation should promote regional cooperation on environmental problems, and that alumni should work to raise awareness among youth.  Other suggestions included sharing data and technology, updating regional cooperation documents, increased dialogue among environmental professionals, the mobilization of civil society, promoting policy on climate change, and the participation of Afghanistan as a full member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation rather than in an observer capacity.

* Making a Difference for Women Entrepreneurs:  When IIP recently promoted non-governmental organization Ashoka’s “She Will Innovate” competition, a small business owner in Colombia connected with an Ecuadorian university’s entrepreneur club, which offered its web design and social media expertise for free.  Now the owner will soon have a website, thanks to IIP’s Spanish-language Facebook community for aspiring entrepreneurs, Iniciativa Emprende.

* YAL Alumnus Spreads the Word on Youth Entrepreneurship:  Zimbabwean Young African Leader (YAL) Limbikani Makani, who participated in the recent Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., led a region-wide CO.NX-facilitated discussion on July 18. Makani, Founder and managing editor of TechZim, shared what he learned from his Mentoring Partnership with BlueKai, and urged African youth on-line to become leaders and leverage their innovative skills to boost the region’s economies. More than 240 online viewers from 17 countries tuned in to the live program. Embassies Accra and Zimbabwe and Information Resources Center Abidjan hosted viewing parties.

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5) “[C]ultural relations as a wider concept now also include new priorities, such as the promotion of human rights and the spread of democratic values, notions such as good governance, and the role of the media in civil society.”  (Melissen p. 22)

* Embassy Sana’a brings “In Happy Yemen” Cartoon Series to Thousands of Children:  Embassy Sana’a finalized plans with the Yemeni children’s rights non-governmental organization the Shawthab Foundation for the distribution of 50,000 DVD copies of the cartoon series “In Happy Yemen” to schools and youth groups throughout Yemen, and for broadcast on Yemeni TV.  The series focuses on civic education themes including resolving conflict through peaceful means, with the objective of enabling vulnerable youth in Yemen to make informed, practical, and positive life choices.  Public Affairs Section Sana’a is also working with Shawthab to distribute Embassy-donated backpacks and school supplies to needy children.

* Building a Network of Change-makers in Nepal:  More than 40 young leaders participated in “Generation Change” programs sponsored by the Office of the Special Representative for Muslim Communities in Kathmandu and Nepalgunj (once the hub of the Maoist insurgency).  The program unites a global network of young Muslims working on community-based service projects, building bridges between people of different backgrounds and faiths, and countering extremist narratives.  Pakistani-American trainer Wajahat Ali guided participants in developing leadership, public speaking, goal-setting, and teamwork skills.  Participants developed ideas to combat educational inequity, pollution and climate change, drug abuse, corruption, and unemployment. Selected participants will receive Public Affairs Section grants to make their projects a reality.

* Consulate General Jerusalem’s “Wise Leader Summer Camp” Graduates 24 Youth:  On July 24, Public Affairs Section Jerusalem held a graduation ceremony for 24 participants in “The Wise Leader Summer Camp.”  The camp guided participants through the process of creating a youth government, writing a youth-based constitution, and representing the needs of young people without being directly involved in any party.  The concept of the camp was developed by ACCESS [English language] and Yes [youth exchange] Program alumnus Abdallah Khalifah, who presented his idea at the Alumni Networking and Engagement Seminar in Jericho last April.  The Royal Industrial Trading Company in Hebron hosted the ceremony.

* Caucasus Youth Council Seeks to Influence Policy Debate:  An ECA alumni grant enabled forty Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX) alumni and young leaders from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to gather in Bazaleti, Georgia for a four-day workshop.  The alumni established the Caucasus Youth Council (CYC) to lay the foundation for future cooperation based on the principles of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. The resolutions adopted at the CYC General Assembly will be sent to the South Caucasus governments to be considered when developing policy.

* ECA Arts Envoy Encourages Women’s Empowerment in Nepal:  Arts Envoy and mural artist James Burns of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program visited Kathmandu, from August 5-14, and conducted workshops and lectures on mural-making for over 200 local artists.  Also, 80-plus local residents participated in two days of “open painting” to help complete a public mural connected to Tewa, a philanthropic organization dedicated to empowering young Nepali women.

* ECA’s Institute for Women’s Leadership Broadens Horizons: Nineteen undergraduate women from Egypt, India, Morocco, Pakistan, and Sudan shared their impressions of the United States and the role of women in a democracy with Assistant Secretary Stock on July 27.  The women just concluded five weeks in the U.S as part of a Study in the U.S. Institute on women’s leadership. The students outlined their plans to become leaders in their communities after they return home.

* Study of the U.S. Institutes for Student Leaders Feature New Media in Journalism:  On July 20, Assistant Secretary Ann Stock addressed student leader participants in the Study of the U.S. Institute (SUSI) on New Media in Journalism.  These student leaders came from Bahrain, Iraq, Oman, Palestinian Territories, and Yemen, and participated in a program at Washington State University.  SUSI programs span 5-6 weeks and include academic study, leaderships development, and community engagement.

 

Opinion Leaders: Still the Most Important PD Audience.

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Diplomeet Tweetup co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Morocco and the Social Media Club of Casablanca.

 Note:  First in a new Take Five blog post series 

The Office of U.S. Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Tara Sonenshine began several months ago to distribute summary PD activity highlights to interested members of the U.S. public.  In a series of blog posts starting today, I’d like to showcase some of these highlights, and use them to illustrate key facets of ongoing U.S. public diplomacy work.

Last year, after diving into the world of public diplomacy scholarship as a Fellow at GWU’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (IPDGC), I began to realize that a frequently missing piece of the academic puzzle is concrete discussion and analysis of what public diplomats actually do in the field.  And considering that U.S. public diplomacy remains significantly field-driven, this feels like a major gap. Thus a blog series is born.

Each piece will begin with a few thoughts on what the selected programs and activities have in common, and what is significant about that common theme.   The highlights speak for themselves.

Today’s theme is Opinion Leaders.  Future topics will include: Not Always Setting the Agenda; Messaging Creatively; Arts Programs as Communication; and more. As always, readers, I welcome your interest, your feedback, and your additional thoughts.

Focus:  Opinion Leaders

Over the years, debates have raged within U.S. Public Diplomacy about how much energy and resources to direct towards “opinion leaders” (journalists, professors, artists, political and social movement leaders) and how much towards the broad general public (e.g. via youth outreach.)

Rhetoric in these debates tended to confuse “opinion leaders” and “elites.”  Practically no one objected to the idea of going far beyond elites, but most public diplomacy practitioners recognized that opinion leaders come in all shapes, sizes, ages, classes, genders, and income levels.  Acutely aware that there were only so many PD dollars to go around, they hesitated to abandon working with opinion leaders (sometimes termed audience multipliers) in order to concentrate on engaging ordinary citizens directly.

Fortunately, among the many benefits of digital technology and social media are two that have helped lay to rest the elites vs. opinion leader debate.  First, digital media has expanded the communication power and resources of non-elites to the point where no one any longer can doubt their ability to shape public opinion; and second, digital communication means field diplomats can now reach the general public (in a more interactive and targeted way than broadcasting allows) with much less expenditure of funds and time resources.

The following recent State Department highlights are selected to showcase the variety of ways that U.S. public diplomacy continues to work with opinion leaders — journalists, teachers, professors, NGO leaders, entrepreneurs, and selected youth leaders, and to communicate – through them – with their own respective networks and audiences. (Text from State Department highlights is marked with *)

 Journalists are opinion leaders par excellence.

* VOA Program Connects US and Pakistan:  Viewers in Pakistan can now experience a slice of life in America, with the premiere of a dynamic new VOA program called “Sana, A Pakistani,” that follows show host Sana Mirza — one of Pakistan’s most popular television newscasters — as she gets to know this country.  “I just moved here, so I’m seeing things with fresh eyes,” says Sana. “I want the program to a picture of what life is really like in the United States.” The first program focused on Washington D.C. and included a visit to a mosque, the White House, and an aid organization that provides free meals to the homeless. Sana says she plans to travel around the country so she can show viewers how people really live, including the many Pakistani-Americans that have moved to the United States.

* Alumna’s Recognition Marks Fulbright’s 20th Anniversary in Vietnam:  July’s State Alumni Member of the Month is Do Minh Thuy, a Fulbright Program alumna from Vietnam dedicated to raising the professional and ethical standards of Vietnamese journalism.  The honor coincided with Fulbright’s 20th anniversary in Vietnam.

* Embassy Seoul Hosts Student Journalism Seminar:  In a first-ever collaboration with the Korea
Association of International Educators (KAIE), Embassy Seoul arranged the 2012 Student Journalism Seminar, inviting 34 top student journalists from 17 university newspapers and broadcasting stations across eight cities in Korea.  Under the theme of “Journalism and the Changing Media Environment,” participants enjoyed remarks from U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim, journalism workshops, visits to major media outlets, and meetings with U.S. and Korean journalists.


* Partnering with VOA in South Sudan: Voice of America’s (VOA) South Sudan Project held a reporting training workshop in Juba, South Sudan for 19 journalists, including reporters from VOA’s radio program, South Sudan in Focus, as well as reporters and announcers from the Voice of the People, Radio Miraya, and South Sudan Radio.

* IIP’s eLibraryUSA Wows Influential Ghana TV Station:  The Accra Information Resource Center (IRC) hosted staff from one of Ghana’s most influential TV stations; showing them how to locate documentaries and books, podcasts, videos, articles and reference sources via the collection of 30 commercial databases available to audiences worldwide.  Following the two hour session, TV3’s lead producer said they would extend training invitations to the most prominent people in Ghana’s media landscape.

But media influence is no longer just the domain of journalists.

* Libyan Civil Society Organizations Produce First Public Service Announcements: Four civil society organizations from the cities of Misrata, Tripoli, and Sebha completed technical training in video production and public messaging with a grant from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI).  The organizations produced twelve public service announcements (PSAs) on electoral education, voter participation, rule of law, and mine risk awareness.

People listen to business leaders too (even those not profiled in major newspapers!)

*Russian Business Leader Credits FLEX Year in the United States for Success:  Leading Russian businesswoman Marina Malykhina was featured in a July 27 article in The Moscow Times, where she attributed much of her success to the entrepreneurial values learned as a teenager on ECA’s Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) Program.  Malykhina is the cofounder and CEO of one of Russia’s largest market research firms.

* Fortune Alum Pays it Forward with Mentoring Challenge in Nigeria:  Consulate General Lagos partnered with Idea Builders Initiative, a non-governmental organization run by an alumna of the Fortune/State Department Mentoring program, to conduct a three-day orientation and training program for 35 young women.  These 35 women accepted a “Mentoring Challenge” to reach out to 100 female students in area high schools over the next 12 months.  They learned about public speaking, confidence building, goal setting, conflict resolution, money and time management, career planning, and handling peer pressure.

* Coca-Cola Scholars:  The State Department’s Bureau of Near East / North African Affairs hosted 100 young leaders from the region on July 13 to mark the completion of their month-long entrepreneurship education program sponsored by the State Department and the Coca-Cola Company in partnership with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (IU.)  The young leaders showcased community-based initiative proposals they developed during their program at IU.  Under Secretary Sonenshine and White House Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes addressed the scholars and NEA Spokesperson Aaron Snipe took extensive questions from the group.

All posts aspire to engage future government and political leaders:

* ECA Alumni To Play Key Role in Yemen Transition:  Yemen’s President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi has appointed five ECA alumni (from International Visitor Leadership Program and Fulbright) to serve on the Preparatory Committee for the National Dialogue.  Committee outcomes will set the stage for the anticipated constitution-drafting process.


* First Mongolian Fulbrighter Joins Parliament:  Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, a Fulbright and Eisenhower program alumna and a board member of the Embassy Alumni Association, was recently elected to the Mongolian parliament.  She is the first Fulbright and the third Eisenhower alumna to become a Mongolian parliament member.  She is one of only nine women parliamentarians serving alongside 67 men.

At the local government level, ensuring that at least one or two people know the U.S. can have a big impact:

* International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) Transforms Iraqi Views of Muslim Life in America:  A member of the Anbar (Iraq) Provincial Council shared his views of Muslim life in America, after participating in the “Transparency in Federal, State, and Local Government” IVLP.  He said his colleagues thought it was “impossible to be a Muslim in the United States, since the Americans all hate Muslims and kick them out of the country.”  He said, “I immediately corrected my friends’ misunderstanding and told them about the vibrant community of Muslims that I met in Miami.  I knew what they were saying was wrong, and I couldn’t stay silent.”

Teachers and scholars spread knowledge and shape opinions for a living.

* A Record Number of Fulbrighters Prepare for Departure:  180 new Fulbright Masters and PhD scholars from every province in Pakistan, the largest group of Pakistani Fulbrighters ever, prepared in June / July to head off for universities throughout the United States.

Exchange and public affairs reach current and future influential Americans too:

* ECA Teacher Alumnus Is Connecticut Teacher of the Year:  ECA’s Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA) alumnus David Bosso was honored by President Obama as the 2012 Connecticut State Teacher of the Year for his passion for learning and teaching about the world.  The TEA program provides outstanding secondary school teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), social studies, math and science with unique opportunities to develop expertise in their subject areas. One student wrote: “Mr. Bosso has taken what he has learned from classrooms across the globe and shared his insights with us. When he learns something new, so do we.”

* USUN Panel on Media in a Changing World:  Nearly 100 [U.S.] students interning at news outlets in New York City came to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations (USUN) on July 23 to discuss “Media in a Changing World” with peers and media veterans.  The program began with a panel, moderated by Deputy Spokesperson Kurtis Cooper, featuring Richard Roth of CNN, Marcelle Hopkins of Al-Jazeera, Sylvan Solloway from the New York University Curtis Institute of Journalism, and Koda Mike Wang of the Huffington Post. The convergence of media and tech, social media, changing business models for news outlets, and many other aspects of covering international affairs were part of a lively discussion.

African-Americans in Africa in the 1960’s: an early example of the New Public Diplomacy

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Searching online for details about the life of Dr. Marie Gadsden, a ground-breaking African-American internationalist who was my husband’s dear friend and mentor, we discovered  intriguing threads linking her to a complex and deeply fascinating story:  the story of African-American political and cultural engagement with newly independent Africa in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

It is also a story, I would argue, about two-way, collaborative, non-assymetrical dialogue — with and without government support — of the kind that today is the elusive prescription for successful public diplomacy as described by scholars such as Jan Melisson, Rhonda Zaharna, Kathy Fitzpatrick, and others.  (If you have another view on this, Take Five welcomes your contributions and insights.) 

To return to the story:  Marie Gadsden was one of the first African-Americans awarded a Fulbright fellowship, which in 1953 took her to Oxford University in the UK.  There, chance put her with roommate Sarah Ntiro, a future icon of Ugandan women’s rights, a pairing that added impetus to Marie’s growing interest in strengthening U.S.- African ties.

1959 found Dr. Gadsden teaching English to government cabinet members and to English teachers in newly-independent Guinea, as a response to President Sékou Touré’s first request of the first U.S. Ambassador to that country.  In 1960, Dorothy Height, who was president of the influential National Council of Negro Women and who would go on to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal for her work in the Civil Rights movement, recalled joining in a women’s labor march with Marie Gadsden in the Guinean capital of Conakry.

Dr. Gadsden would likely have known of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s travel to Kenya and the UK, also in 1960.  And a few years later, in 1966, Dr. Gadsden crossed paths with famed American poet Langston Hughes in Nairobi, most likely during his USIA-sponsored trip to Uganda and Ghana.

So what were these and many other African-American icons doing in Africa? The essential answer is that they were sharing ideas, and receiving them.  Sharing expertise, and gaining inspiration.

They were seeking support from Africans for American civil rights – human rights — and working hard to mobilize American support for Africa’s political and economic development.  Traveling for U.S. public diplomacy, and traveling as private citizens, and merging the two as true citizen diplomats.

And also pressing the State Department in Washington to include more African-Americans among the ranks of U.S. diplomats, and to focus more effectively on relations with emerging African nations.

We are by now familiar with the Jazz Ambassadors of that era, a much-lauded Cold War initiative of U.S. public diplomacy that projected American culture and society through jazz greats from Louis Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie,  Duke Ellington, and Dave Brubeck.

But fewer likely focus on the deeply emotional and polarizing backdrop of the early U.S. Civil Rights era, which saw, for example, Louis Armstrong temporarily refusing to tour for the U.S. in protest at President Eisenhower’s early handling of the Little Rock, AK, desegregation crisis.  Such tensions are the focus of historian Penny von Eschen’s absorbing book Satchmo Blows Up the World.

So the heady era when a young America embraced post-WWII globalism (a zeitgeist intensified by visionary and inspiring initiatives of the Kennedy era such as the Peace Corps and rapid expansion of U.S. development assistance), was a stirring but also conflicted period for many African-Americans who saw the African quest for post-colonial independence as a mirror and metaphor for the horrifically daunting struggle for civil rights at home.  In December 1960, Ebony magazine celebrated Africa’s emerging states as both the realization of a dream as well as a somewhat precarious, must-not-fail experiment that demanded the material and spiritual support of African-Americans as well as the official support of the United States.

Dr. Gadsden’s story, like those of many other African-American leaders whose threads were woven into it, brings that era to vivid life.  The all-too-brief details that follow are offered as an introductory sample, a tantalizing glimpse, in the hope that you will follow our own footsteps in discovering the rich history of African-American and African public diplomacy in the early Civil Rights era.

Dorothy Height’s memoir Open Wide the Freedom Gates (2009), and especially her Chapter 14, “Citizen of the World,” highlights the immediate and compelling political relevance of Height’s own international experience and that of other Civil Rights leaders.

In 1960, Height traveled for several months in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea to study the training needs of women’s organizations.  (It was on this trip that she met Marie Gadsden, then with the small and shrinking U.S. Embassy delegation in Conakry.)    Meetings with grassroots women who had never before thought about their problems and goals in gender terms;  being hosted by a new cabinet minister in Accra, and Nigeria’s new chief barrister in Lagos; gaining insights into the debilitating legacy of colonialism — all are vividly described.

On her return, Height helped form a senior policy advocacy group, the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA), together with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, and other top Civil Rights leaders.  A remarkable coalition of African-American religious, civil rights, fraternal, sorority, business, professional, educational, labor and social organizations supported ANLCA, including the American Committee on Africa, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and even organizations whose primary commitment was clearly to grassroots Civil Rights organizing in the U.S. such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

Height recalls that Chief Simeon Olaosebikan Adebo, newly arrived in New York as Nigeria’s ambassador to the UN, invited ANLCA leaders “to discuss how Africans felt about U.S. policy. …He wanted black Americans to think more precisely about how the U.S. was relating [not just to South Africa but] to other parts of the continent too.  He urged us to be aware of policies that affected the utilization of raw materials throughout southern and central Africa…  Above all, he wanted us to know how U.S. policy played into these complicated issues.”

Meanwhile, American poet Langston Hughes had spent much of the 1950’s putting together a highly ambitious anthology of African and diaspora writing,  published in 1960 as An African Treasury.  Daniel Won-gu Kim, in his excellent, insightful piece, We, Too, Rise with You: Recovering Langston Hughes’s African (Re)Turn 1954-1960 in An African Treasury, the Chicago Defender, and Black Orpheus (2007), describes how Hughes began the project in 1954, correponding with hundreds of writers and sifting and weighing thousands of potential contributions, many of them handwritten and “accompanied by letters … expressing their gratitude and admiration of Hughes as an elder black writer. “

Notes Kim, “the friendship and comradeship of this new generation of African writers could not have had a more meaningful influence on [Hughes]. … The anthology served as a kind of crash course, bringing him up to speed in the dizzying but inspiring pace of change in his ancestral homeland, feeding his own drive to rediscover–via African liberation–his role as a cultural fighter for the liberation of his people in the U.S.”

In 1962, on the heels of the anthology’s publication, Hughes made two trips to Africa sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) — his first since he was an impressionable young man working on a tramp steamer in the 1920’s.  In June-July of ’62, Langston Hughes’ itinerary included a major conference of writers at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, and  the dedication of a new United States Information Service (USIS) Center and Library in Ghana.

The “M’bari Writers Conference” opened in Kampala with about 45 writers, editors, scholars and journalists from nine African countries, the U.S., UK, and Caribbean — including rising literary stars such as Chinua Achebe, future Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, and Cyprian Ekwensi.   Langston Hughes already knew and admired many of these writers from his work on the anthology, and had also engaged in correspondence with the brilliant South African writer Bessie Head and others.   His speech at the new USIS library in Ghana clearly drew inspiration from his experience at the Kampala conference:   “[As] America comes to Africa, as through these library shelves, to offer an exchange of knowledge …  [so] Black Africa today is sending rejuvenating currents of liberty over all the earth reaching even as far as Little Rock, Birmingham and Jackson, Mississippi.”

A modern awareness of this interweaving of literature, politics, culture, nationalism, and human rights echoes through “Langston Hughes in Paradise,” Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein’s beautiful and inspirational 2011 essay in Contrary.  Lichtenstein, while teaching Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” (with its famous line “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”) to students from the State University of Zanzibar, perceives this poem’s message of nationalism through the response it generates in her students.

Finally, there is the fascinating 1960 episode in which then-NAACP lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall served as an advisor to Kenyan nationalists during negotiations on a new constitution for Kenya, at the time a British colony. The story, outlined in Mary Dudziak’s Working toward Democracy: Thurgood Marshall and the Constitution of Kenya, describes an invitation to Marshall from Tom Mboya, a young nationalist leader from Kenya (who was assassinated a few years later, in 1967.)  Marshall traveled first to Kenya, and then to London, while his offers of assistance were debated by both Kenyans and British.  Interestingly, Marshall’s most substantial contribution to the Kenyan constitution was to strengthen protection for property rights, de facto those of land-owning white Kenyans.   Dudziak’s insights into the nuances and apparent contradictions of Thurgood Marshall’s work on, and later views on, the Kenyan constitution are well worth a read.

In February 1960, Marshall quickly wrapped up his involvement and returned to the U.S. earlier than anticipated “after four African-American freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College held a sit-in at the segregated lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. The simple protest soon expanded into a widespread sit-in movement,” and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund set out to defend the students immediately.  “The sit-ins posed a set of legal and practical dilemmas for civil rights lawyers,” among them the problem — felt strongly by Marshall in particular, echoing his property-rights concerns about the Kenyan constitution — that the students had violated “facially valid trespass laws, not facially vulnerable segregation laws.”

Meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall maintained ties with his Kenya colleagues, and his work on the draft Kenyan Bill of Rights continued to be influential. Marshall developed a deep affection for Jomo Kenyatta after his release in 1961. He traveled to Kenya on a U.S. State Department sponsored trip in July 1963, and was an honored guest of Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta at Kenya’s independence ceremonies in December 1963.

Marie Gadsden herself, after more than a decade with the Peace Corps, went on to become a pioneer in connecting America’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU’s) with international development training and exchange programs funded by USAID, USIA, and the State Department.  Her work on this effort through the Phelps-Stokes Fund and later through NAFEO brought her a level of respect in Washington that led to her being named the first African-American board chair of Oxfam-America, among many other recognitions.

Throughout her life, she maintained a deep commitment to developing America and developing Africa, to engaging young Americans and young Africans in service, both at home and abroad. She seamlessly worked for the U.S. Government, for private organizations, and to advance her own deeply held personal vision.

Hers was a life of public diplomacy.

China, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Arab world, and the Vatican: New Books on Public Diplomacy Span the Globe.

Global Communication, Middle East, public diplomacyLeave a Comment on China, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Arab world, and the Vatican: New Books on Public Diplomacy Span the Globe.

New books on Public Diplomacy, December 2011 through April 2012

Take Five readers:  Let us know if you like this resource, and we’ll make it a quarterly feature.

1) At the 2012 London Book Fair. Professor Zhao Qizheng is launching his two new books in English. They are Cross-Border Dialogue: the Wisdom of Public Diplomacy, published by the New World Press, and How China Communicates: Public Diplomacy in a Global Age, published by the Foreign Language Press (together constituting an English version of his Chinese book entitled Public Diplomacy and Cross-Cultural Communication, published by Remin University Press, 2011).  Zhao says, “I’m trying to present a picture of the real situation in China, to reduce misunderstanding and eliminate the foreign reader’s sense of unfamiliarity with the country.”

2)  The People’s Peace Process in Northern Ireland,  by Colin Irwin (April 2, 2012) — From the book jacket:  ‘I recommend this book to all those involved with peace making and peace building, political negotiations and public opinion polls, as well as those with a particular interest in Northern Ireland. … I am persuaded that the unique approach [Irwin] developed of running public opinion polls in co-operation with party negotiators contributed significantly to the successful outcome of our efforts. – Senator George J. Mitchell.

3) Cyberspaces and Global Affairs by Sean S. Costigan and Jake Perry (Jan 1, 2012). Note Part II: Web 2.0 and public diplomacy includes the following articles:  – Call for power? Mobile phones as facilitators of political activism;  – ICT infrastructure in two Asian giants: a comparative analysis of China and India;  – Information (without) revolution? Ethnography and the study of new media-enabled change in the Middle East;  – The political history of the internet: a theoretical approach to the implications for US power;  – US identity, security, and governance of the internet;  – Information and communications technologies and power;  – Social media and Iran’s post-election crisis;  – Viewpoint: combating censorship should be a foreign policy goal;  – Viewpoint: an alternative prospect on cyber anarchy for policy-makers.  About the editors: Sean S. Costigan directs MIT CogNet and teaches information technology at The New School, and Jake Perry is an independent scholar.

3) National Relations: Public Diplomacy, National Identity and the Swedish Institute 1945-1970 by Nikolas Glover (Jan 1, 2012).    Says the author:  “My study focuses on the Swedish Institute for Cultural Exchange with Foreign Countries, 1945–1970. … It postulates that identifying with and promoting a particular national identity in the post-war world has been a question of relating the nation to others …  The concept of national relations leads me to engage with historical research on public diplomacy, the history of communication and the history of nationalism.”

4) Diaspora Diplomacy: Philippine Migration and its Soft Power Influences by Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III (Dec 27, 2011).   The author talks about “the remarkable and untapped soft power that international migrants possess and how various actors—from governments, NGOs, business, the church, and international organizations—could tap this valuable resource to enhance global cooperation, development, and understanding. With detailed and intimate illustrations from the experiences of the Philippine diaspora in San Francisco, London, Dubai, Dhaka, and Singapore…”

New paperback editions:

5) The New Arab Media: Technology, Image and Perception by Mahjoob Zweiri and Emma C. Murphy (Mar 29, 2012; hardcover published January 2011).   ISBS says “topics examined include: the impact of Al-Jazeera * implementation of the internet in the region * the use of the media for diplomacy and propaganda * image culture * the use of the internet by religious diasporas * information and communication technologies and the Arab Public Sphere * the influence of satellite television on Arab public opinion * the explosion of local radio stations in Jordan.” .

6) Kosovo’s Diplomacy: How can Public Diplomacy have an impact on Kosovo’s political and diplomatic position? by Alban Dermaku (Jan 23, 2012; hardcover published January 2011.)  Book flap text:  “The declaration of independence marked a new era for Kosovo and its relations with the countries that have recognized its independence. Since then Kosovo is striving in its diplomatic efforts to achieve broader international recognition and become a member of the United Nations. … In modern times, public diplomacy is receiving broad recognition as a crucial element for understanding and influencing foreign publics.”

Postgraduate Theses from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, new on Kindle eBook: 

7) Prioritizing Efforts to Improve Foreign Public Opinion of America: Applying a Business Model to Discover and Create Customer Value by Anthony J. Sampson – Kindle eBook (published Apr 12, 2012; thesis written in 2007 for the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA).  Author’s note: “Given the reality of fiscal and resource constraints, America could not possibly address all of the concerns of the foreign public; rather, America must focus its efforts on the factors that are likely to make the greatest impact. This study identifies negative factors that interfere with favorable foreign pubic opinion and suggests an analytic framework for prioritizing those factors.

8) The Holy See and the Middle East: The Public Diplomacy of Pope John Paul II by Ronald Patrick Stake – Kindle eBook (published March 31,2012; thesis written in 2006 for the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA).  Author’s note:  “This thesis considers changes in the diplomacy of the Holy See with respect to the Middle East … between 1990 and 2003. Policies … involved (1) establishing full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel; (2) convening the Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Lebanon, ending in the papal visit to Lebanon in May 1997; and (3) opposing the 1991 and 2003 U.S. led wars against Iraq. …{T}he thesis argues that new circumstances occasioned a rethinking of the Holy See’s interests in light of the development of modern Catholic social teaching.”

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