by Craig Hayden

I had the privilege of being on a blogger’s roundtable discussion on September 15 with members of the new Harvard Public Diplomacy Collaborative, where they fielded questions from myself, Patricia Sharpe of Whirled View, and Matthew Armstrong from mountainrunner.us. After participating in the discussion and asking a few questions, I believe the new program is an important development in promoting wider recognition of public diplomacy, while offering some positive steps towards real knowledge production that will benefit the practice of public diplomacy.

The Harvard Collaborative is also a good complement to the clearinghouse of information provided by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. While I may be a bit biased (I am a Research Fellow at the USC CPD), I do believe the USC program serves an important role in providing a forum for emerging issues and debates about public diplomacy that encompasses the PD agenda. The Harvard Collaborative, in contrast, seems like a specifically applied intervention that involves two related tasks. The first, identified by Doug Wilson (the Chairman of the Board of Directors), is to draw together a diverse group of opinion-leaders and what we could loosely call “practitioners” to supplement the efforts of others who are doing the PD work overseas, including those from business, labor, finance, “political thought,” diplomacy, national security, think tanks, and other sources. I don’t want to reiterate too much of what they’ve already put on their website. But I do think it’s a bold initiative to consider how the U.S. might leverage it’s considerable networks of influence and opinion-leadership on a global scale – outside traditional conceptions of PD.

But doing this requires some rethinking about what influence means, how it is cultivated and distributed across networks, and how it is transformed by the infrastructures of global communication technologies and their attendant practices. Professor Matthew Baum (the Faculty Chair) and Jed Willard (the Director) provided the details on what their research program will look like. Put simply, to do the ambitious things that the Collaborative wants to accomplish – it requires some serious research into the nuts and bolts of persuasion across (increasingly mediated) networks. It’s not that such work isn’t being done, but focused research questions aren’t being asked to build empirically-based, systematic knowledge about how influence and engagement can work for public diplomacy. As I’ve said before, there’s no theory of public diplomacy – no cohesive body of theoretically derived arguments, let alone tacitly predictive models, that structure our understanding of public diplomacy. We have a wonderful body of anecdotal evidence of diplomatic history. We also have a sweeping catalog of influence, communication effects, and media studies research – but nothing has been corralled to the purpose of public diplomacy in the way envisioned by the Collaborative. Needless to say, I think this is an important development.

Patricia Sharpe asked an incisive question about what the Collaborative means by citizen diplomacy – and how their expansive view of stakeholders squares with how they understand the motivations of citizens as diplomats. I still think there are some questions about how influencers are themselves affected by their status as potential “diplomats.” I asked questions about what kinds of research questions they plan to investigate. Basically, their research will directly address the complex and disconnected dynamics of global influence in ways that are focused on the needs of public diplomacy – and they anticipate working with the wealth of data already gathered around the world to help with this effort.

Perhaps equally significant is their intention to sidestep the often unproductive definitional debates that bog down knowledge production about public diplomacy. They are not drawing boundaries around the concept, or establishing some kind of canon. As they put it: “We’re not studying PD as a field – but providing knowledge from experts that is usable when and where the practitioners are serving.”

This is a refreshing perspective, and I look forward to the insights produced through their program.