My own view is that the process of globalization and interdependence referred to by Craig both undermines the state’s ability to control its own fate and enhances the demands the people place on their state for protection from the downside effects of globalization. This seems particularly true over the past year of global recession. I am inclined to see the state as continuing to be the central foreign policy actor as Bill does but recognize that there are many other actors on the international stage from influential social movements to regional institutions that operate in the international political realm. Bruce is correct, in my view to call attention to the complexity of the world political environment and to point out that diplomacy (or political action abroad) no longer is in the purview of states alone.

Domestically, politics shape the contours of a state’s foreign policy decisions. Internationally, politics shape the landscape on which those foreign policies are implemented. Whether the instrument chosen to advance the foreign policy is diplomacy or military force, the foreign terrain is increasingly political. COIN theory, in particular, recognizes a 80%/20% split between the political and kinetic balance of effort. The shifting balance of power in the international system from West to East, accelerated by the current economic upheaval, also increases world politics as largely western based international norms are contested by rising powers representing distinct political cultures. All of this occurs in a media saturated global public sphere.

It is the confluence the normative and cultural dimensions of international affairs with the political, military and economic dimensions that create the complexities Bruce highlights and makes his question about whether public diplomacy is really still a separate instrument of statecraft valid. Craig is right to remind us of Bull’s insight into international society as the context. If the formation of a global public sphere has advanced to the extent that global politics is mediated much in the same way that domestic politics is, then diplomats must recognize that the public sphere is the policy sphere and be skilled at working citizen perceptions as well as the corridors of power. Secretary Clinton demonstrated that she gets it in her brave and bruising effort to address perceptions and exert influence in Pakistan this week. The hard slogging grassroots work at the nexus of foreign policy, public opinion, and politics abroad is the mission of public diplomacy. Is it separate and apart from the political function of statecraft? Not any longer. Does it matter whether those performing this political function abroad wear combat boots or wingtips? Yes, I think it does because of the projection of values, added costs and potential friction created when the policy intent is political contestation and the actor is military.

For a more academic elaboration of my argument please read my article Statecraft at The Crossroads: A New Diplomacy, Copyright 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press. SAIS Review, Summer-Fall 2009, Volume 29, Number 2. (forthcoming).

The Moon Is In The 7th House

Friday, October 30, 2009

For the real deal, and with real links, please visit her site here.

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.

James Glassman’s post on Foreign Policy.com is thought-provoking and troubling at the same time. “It’s not about us” builds on the thesis of Admiral Mike Mullen’s argument that the U.S. has misplaced it’s faith in communication programs – public diplomacy – to realize foreign policy objectives. Admiral Mullen’s argument picks up a common refrain among critics of public diplomacy – that deeds matter more than words – and that the U.S. should focus on amending its policies to address the contours of opinion in regions vital to nation security. So what’s wrong with that? Well for starters, I think we’re beyond this observation.

For Glassman and to some extent Mullen, the problem is the focus of U.S. Public diplomacy. Their quarrel is with the goal of brand-burnishing, of getting hostile populations to “like us.” I think this is a straw-man argument – but it does suggest a troubling implication. While I’m not convinced that the State Department believes that their primary goal is to get populations to “like the U.S.,” I am concerned that I actually don’t know what the goal is other than bland assertions of “engagement.” Like many, I wonder about the strategic template used to justify and design the initiatives of U.S. public diplomacy. The term “rudderless” comes to mind – a muddle of divergent imperatives (from international broadcasting to exchange programs) – that seem to operate out of inertia and blanketed with some vague language of engagement and dialogue. Am I wrong? I sure hope I am. I should add, I’m not convinced that one strategy can justify all the various forms of public diplomacy at the same time – there’s no magic bullet public diplomacy strategy that kind bind all of what is being done into a nice logic. But I digress.

Glassman takes a shot at the term “bridge-building” – and suggests that while we can’t abandon the important long term programs (like exchanges and cultural diplomacy), we should focus on more immediate strategic communication initiatives. What would these look like? If the goal is not to polish brand U.S.A, then perhaps so-called public diplomacy 2.0 initiatives can be used to empower democratic and civic action, dialogue, etc. within countries like Pakistan to help in-country institutions embolden those stakeholders that wish to minimize the influence of extremists and regain control of their
political destiny.

I wholeheartedly agree with Glassman that a “popularity contest” tactic of press meetings and high profile “to know us to love us” events is not going to serve U.S. foreign policy goals, nor cultivate any real soft power that translates into diplomatic success. Of course I’m also not entirely convinced that the State Department is really focused on this kind of PD, it’s just the stuff that gets headlines. But I do take some issue with the arguments for the proposed new vision for PD.

The notion that the Arab and Muslim world is going through some historical analogue of the religious wars of Europe and transition towards the Age of Enlightenment does two things – first, oddly enough, it literalizes the metaphor of a “debate” in Muslim societies between extremists and modernists and importantly, makes a victory of the extremists a plausible outcome in this societal struggle. To me, this sounds like giving the extremists too much credit and clout. Second, I think this line of reasoning sounds too patronizing at best, and fuels the “American’s are arrogant” when we pronounce with orientalist confidence just how the struggle for Modernity is progressing among the Arab nations. It’s one thing for Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed of Al-Arabiya to say this on Frontline World. I’m not sure if public diplomacy planners should be expressing these sentiments.

Which brings me back to deeds and communication. Glassman is of course right to suggest that the U.S. needs to do something about supporting a political narrative that minimizes and isolates the influence of extremists – in order to start mending the public opinion problems facing the U.S. Implicitly, he suggests that public opinion can be channeled away from a focus on the U.S., to address the fundamentally “endogenous” problems in Arab and Muslim countries facing violent extremist movements. Sounds like a great idea, though I still believe that tinkering with the role the U.S. plays in the broader Arab and Muslim mediasphere is too ambitious to transform by itself (see Entman, 2008). I think that acts of public diplomacy that facilitate civil discourse in the ways that Glassman envisions is a good start – but the motives and expectations need to be clarified at the outset.

Should the U.S. lead this, or should it encourage a cooperative, open-source PD push… a multilateral effort involving nation-states and citizens in a cooperative effort to facilitate (to use the parlance of PD 2.0) communication interventions that empowers social forces opposed to religious or nationalist fundamentalism of any stripe? I think this is the strategic question that remains to be answered. If public diplomacy is to be about facilitation, listening, and dialogue (all touchstones for the supposed way forward in public diplomacy) – then I think a strategy should begin to envision a communication ethic that is inclusive, open, and cooperative in ways that I believe are still radically counter to the way public diplomacy gets rationalized as part of parochial soft power needs.

I have been somewhat sanguine about Matt Armstrong’s position on the Smith-Mundt Act and its domestic dissemination ban on U.S.-produced international broadcasting. While I acknowledge that the Smith-Mundt ban is structurally ineffective in an age when much of U.S. communication material can be accessed by Americans online… I have not heard much about how American access to U.S. programming could improve U.S. public diplomacy efforts (other than perhaps a check on quality).

But Armstrong’s recent article in Foreign Policy, which describes how a Minneapolis radio station wanted to use VOA’s informative programming on Somalia to reach local immigrant audiences and was denied under the provisions of Smith-Mundt, provides a stark reminder of Smith-Mundt’s antiquated relevance. This hindrance becomes more galling when we consider that nothing in the Smith-Mundt legislation prevents terrorist organizations from targeting audiences in the United States, let alone the more high profile international broadcasting of China and Russia. Simply put – the quality programming provided by the VOA might have been a crucial intervention into a local audience that has produced fighters for Al-Qaida in Somalia. VOA provides comparatively accurate and balanced news programming, and allowing such programs to reach critical audiences within the United States costs nothing. To add insult to injury… Kim Andrew Elliott reminds us that U.S. programming is available to domestic broadcasters… you just can’t ask for it directly. Basically – to use the government’s valuable programming, you have to navigate a “don’t ask, don’t tell” farce.

And yet here we are… the U.S. continues to let Smith-Mundt serve as a firewall between U.S. international broadcasting and the domestic population. Why? Perhaps the phantom fears of a looming propaganda state.

As I have said before – we already live in a propaganda state, where mainstream media reporting caters to narrow-cast markets with news and opinions framed to be marketable. So the dangers that Smith-Mundt supposedly protects U.S. citizens from is non-unique. At the same time, the U.S. clings to a phantom hope that its journalistic institutions adhere to a kind of impartial “objectivity” to serve the interests of public debate. Objectivity has been watered down to artificially bisect all issues as politically debatable, with few evaluative standards other than those posed by stakeholders with conveniently contrasting views on the “news.” Put simply – current U.S. media institutions produce propaganda – for better or worse.

So why hasn’t Smith-Mundt been addressed by the legislation, or by executive workarounds? The issue has been ignored because domestic controversies like “healthcare” have an incredible event horizon that occludes all other news. There are few incentives to focus government energy on revising the Smith-Mundt Act, especially at a time of zero-sum politics. As I have said before – it’s not hard to imagine political opponents lining up to oppose any change with charges of “Obama administration wants to legalize domestic propaganda program.” In any age where “death panels” get serious airtime, it’s not surprising that Smith Mundt has been left alone.

So what are the consequences to this ignorance of Smith-Mundt and the domestic dissemination ban? I think Armstrong’s anecdote is a compelling reminder of a larger issue. The U.S. cannot willfully exclude itself from the chaotic global contest of opinion and news framing between international actors. More importantly, the U.S. cannot ignore that globalization involves increasingly porous borders and the flow people. The Minneapolis case highlights the importance of diasporic publics within the United States, and how these media audiences retain connections to their homeland and those parties willing to provide information about their homeland.

The U.S. population is not just a constellation of voting blocks, but a diverse set of communities with interests and relations that overlap and extend beyond the United States. As such, the U.S. is “exposed” to global communicators with an agenda; with pointed framing practices designed to elicit specific opinions and understanding. Here I will say that Norman Pattiz was right in 2002: “There is a media war going on out there.”

The U.S. just isn’t willing to admit that the “war” is being fought within its borders as well as somewhere else. With domestic media institutions having few resources (or incentives) to provide meaningful programming to intervene in pivotal diasporic markets, that leaves the solid reporting of the VOA and other U.S. information programs to fill in the gap. Except, of course, that Smith Mundt protects the U.S. from these government entities. Enough of the ignorance, please!

There is a lot of useful common sense advice in James Glassman’s essay in the Layalina Perspectives publication about President Obama’s Cairo speech. Glassman’s title is thought-provoking, in that he calls for Obama to assert a new narrative that recasts solutions for Arab and Muslim audiences, rather than focus too much on U.S. actions and motivations in the Arab and Muslim world. His advice is intended as a guide for future strategic communication efforts. Glassman agrees with Obama’s call for mutual interest, and somewhat begrudgingly acknowledges the necessity of Obama’s apology for previous U.S. historical transgressions against the Arab and Muslim world. I think Glassman is spot-on to suggest that the U.S. should rightly focus on the principal and enduring sources of negative opinion about the United States. But I also believe the U.S. can’t edit itself out of the narratives that Arab and Muslim audiences find meaningful anytime soon.

Glassman’s proposed solution is to remove the United States from the narratives that continue to frame the U.S. as part of the problems facing both Arabs and the Muslim world. Following this advice, a rhetorical strategy would be to portray the principle anxieties and pressing problems facing these crucial populations in such a way as to minimize the role of the U.S. in the stories that convey understanding about them (such as violent extremism, political corruption, the problem with Iran, democratic reform, and so on). U.S. rhetoric should emphasize how these problems and their solutions are endogenous.

I have a couple thoughts about this recommendation.

First and foremost, I think U.S. strategic communications (from presidential rhetoric all the way down the line to press relations) should think seriously about conflating U.S.-Islamic relations with ethno-political relations. Attempting to recast the narrative of the U.S. and Islam is as daunting as it sounds. And in the process, the U.S. inadvertently draws attention to Islamic relations, when it should more rightly be focusing its strategic relations on specific, regional concerns and grievances. U.S. relations with Arab countries are different that those with Indonesia, yet the U.S. somehow manages to let those concerns become consubstantial. To borrow from Reza Azlan, the U.S. plays into the “cosmic war” narratives when it continues to focus on Islam – when in fact many of the problems that these pivotal audiences are concerned about are political… matters of policy. Glassman rightly suggests that the U.S. try to break the stranglehold on the narrative – that specific grievances facing these audiences are somehow part of a larger U.S. epic struggle against Islam. I would amend the solution to suggest that U.S. rhetoric stop talking about Islam at all. Why fuel the concerns?

Second, a consideration of what narratives do might be in order here. Narratives are often convenient ways to assemble, perceive, and judge events within a scope of history. Narratives frame – in that they allow audiences to process what is happening in a convenient and predictable arc. So, when a bomb goes off in a mosque in Baghdad, propagandists can fashion the U.S. via the narrative template as somehow culpable – in a way that is often maddeningly easy.

While I am a firm believer in the power of rhetoric to transform or challenge the narratives that govern social life – I don’t think that the U.S. can directly the challenge the dominant narrative straight away with a counter-narrative. Sure, a presidential speech can set the terms and tone for subsequent specific policy advocacy… but it should also acknowledge what is reasonable and expected in its audience. If we believe that narratives can be powerful forces – perceptual lenses if you will – then how might one expect a U.S. presidential speech to play in Cairo if it did not acknowledge the accepted doxa of the target audience? To use the terms of rhetorical theorist Walt Fisher, engaging in some mea culpas challenges existing narrative fidelity and probability – if the U.S. is the kind of character that acts like it is portrayed and experienced, then an apology strikes directly at what is expected and understood. Playing against type destabilizes existing narratives, setting the ground for further elaboration and challenges to the received wisdom about the U.S.

To simply write the U.S. out of the script at this stage would be tone-deaf at best to the enduring narratives that govern framing of U.S. actions and intent. While I appreciate Glassman’s suggestions – I view his ideas as narrative objectives, not tactics of rhetorical appeal. The U.S. wants to end up where it is not automatically prefigured as a culpable party to the grievances of Arab and Muslim populations. Getting there, however, means directly challenging the dramatic assertions that hold up the narrative – the actions that demonstrate both intent and responsibility. It means a more vigorous “diplomacy of deeds” (a term borrowed from Karen Hughes), but also a flexible approach to rhetorical appeal that does not reaffirm the monolithic divides that pit the U.S. against a threatened Islamic community. Focusing on that narrative only makes the more substantive policy arguments harder to make persuasive, let alone heard.

Shawn Powers, a fellow Intermap blogger, wrote over at the USC Center on Public diplomacy Blog about about the implications of transparency in journalism for public diplomacy and international broadcasting. In highlighting the shift from objectivity to transparency – he notes that governments should capitalize on how information is legitimated in today’s hyperlinked global media landscape.

The rapid erosion of journalistic credibility evidences a more fundamental challenge to the standards of legitimacy that people use to judge material they consume via media. But what does this mean for public diplomacy and state-based advocacy in general?

It’s one thing to say that governments should embrace the modes of social media. The U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense have multiple initiatives that begin to leverage the benefits of these media. They all recognize the shift in information direction and how information gets processed as credible or relevant. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale justified the use of social media (instead of typical routes through the mainstream media): “This is the way people now get their news, they get their information,” she said. “It’s not as if there’ll be a big black hole. That hole will be filled with other information.”

The basic wisdom here is that governments should attend to the structure of media flows that make up the ecologies of opinion. The two-step flow model of influence may not be irrelevant, but rather refracted in webs of referentiality – how we use and evaluate the multiple streams of info and opinion we get from the internet and beyond.

But does that mean that governments can circumvent the criticism currently leveled at journalism’s brittle objectivity? The implicit solution offered by Powers is that transparency reveals bias, and it demonstrates a willingness to be accountable for the argument moves made to persuade and inform. If embraced as an ethical standard for U.S. PD, it would mean that it is not only in the business of providing truth or factual based information, but that it highlights its information sources, providing open access to the reasoning behind communicative intent.

The problem is, of course, that much of the challenges facing U.S. PD are precisely about intent and bias. Attempts to advocate and persuade, or even demonstrate through exposition (the fact-based journalism of VOA, etc.), are inevitably a presentation of a particular perspective or selection of reality. They are meant to influence – and thus are far from objective in the purest sense. But are they really transparent, and will that matter ultimately in how publics judge information presented to them about the U.S.? If the U.S. puts up a facebook page (like the eJournal USA facebook page managed by the State Deparment) – does that perform the values of transparency that lend credibility to the U.S. perspective?

Or, does it cynically appropriate the social function of social media to insert the agenda and information serving U.S. foreign policy objectives?

In celebrating the value of genuine, individually created content, we create expectations about the value of social media as somehow more authentic. But this authenticity does not necessarily mean communication without intent to persuade or manipulate. I think the conflation of social media with transparency needs to be further explained.

So what happens when social actors (like the United States) perform the acts of social media communication? What becomes the markers of the legitimate and credible when international actors set to influence attempt to muscle in on the terrain of social media? How will we know when we are being manipulated, influenced, or otherwise being “sold” on something? I’m not sure this matters – except for PD planners anticipating how their intended audiences may yet dismiss or disregard attempts by states to leverage social media as part of their PD.

I am asking a lot of questions here to tease out the outlines of why states use social media for PD and whether this constitutes a more ethical or less propagandistic set of activities that might make for a more “effective” PD. I am also concerned that the embrace of social media PD may provide yet more “evidence” for those concerned about being propagandized by states.
To return to the central topic – transparency – can transparency be an effective route to persuasion for nation-states saddled with persistent prejudice about their motives?

Social media may be an answer to develop a sense of community between stakeholders and constituents, but that strategy is not without risks. Regardless, I think that PD commentators and planners need to be honest about the purpose of the activity. As Matt Armstrong stated directly, PD is about influence. To expect political actors (whether they are states or irate Live Journal users bent on agenda-setting) to not attempt to move opinions is to not see why communicative activity is engaged in the first place.

Euphemisms for public diplomacy – engagement, uncertainty reduction, dialogue, information clarification, education, etc. are all secondary routes to the ultimate goal of influence in PD – and thus even the use of social media must be assessed with the kind of influence envisioned. Transparency does not necessarily mean dialogue, respect for other opinions, or some normative template of rational deliberative discourse. It is form of presentation that emphasizes clarity and the maximum disclosure of information and bias. What remains to be seen is whether a public diplomacy that utilizes social media can actively perform and convey the requirements of transparency. In the process we may come to know the purported value of transparency, whether it actually reflects the demands of global media and communication audiences over other communicative values.

Many thanks to James Glassman for his thoughtful response to my comments about his exchange with Marc Lynch over the strategic implications of “PD 2.0.” I’d like to respond and address some of his arguments about the relationship between a “Grand Conversation” and a “War of Ideas.”

On the problems of using facilitative programs to “inject” the U.S. message, Glassman writes:

“Yes, we risk contaminating the conversation so that it won’t be listened to. But I do see the conversation as being a message-bearing methodology. It does not have to bear a message, but it can. Certainly, conversation as valuable for its own sake: when bad arguments are exposed to the light of day, they lose their power.”

Agreed, and I did admit that employing a message-strategy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Surely, leveraging facilitation to insert U.S. messages can be construed as advocacy – and that might rub against the “Open Source” mentality suggested by Ali Fisher. But, the point of facilitation is to recast the credibility of the actor through the communication practice – not necessarily the message. Engaging the audience as something other than a monolithic and inaccessible entity, cynically addressing instrumentally expedient audiences, is the normative principle here. Facilitation allows actors representing the U.S. (FSO’s or whoever) to connect more as peers. Granted, the ethic of this strategy isn’t necessarily new, and much of U.S. PD has historically been about relationship building, listening, and facilitation of some sort. Glassman’s notion amplifies the concept in the domain of information and communication technologies.

But if the experience of the Digital Outreach Team is any guide – the exposure of “bad arguments” is still a relative matter, and I’m not sure if those kinds of encounters are currently more than so much “talking past each other” exercises. Maybe someone can weigh in on this.

Glassman also questions my claim that the “Grand Conversation” is incompatible with the “War of Ideas.” I admit that the U.S. can use both as operational ideas to entail policies, objectives, and the policy scene. Aside from the seeming non-sequitur of winning the “war’ through a ‘conversation’ – I agree there’s nothing essential about the incompatibility. What I was really getting at were two things:

A) Policies tend to follow logics of how they are justified. So, for example, if we have a war on terror, we’re not deploying cops, we’re deploying troops. We’re not out to diminish or dissuade, we’re out to destroy. I’m concerned about the terministic compulsion that comes with conceiving of something as a “war” – especially when a war implies conflict with a legitimate and threatening actor. If the goal is transform the operational environment (the ‘scenic’ objectives of US foreign policy), I think it starts with our terminological strategies of narrating the scene itself.

And some terms ring louder than others. Like War. When the BBG declared that Radio Sawa and the nascent Al-Hurra were going to be perceived as legitimate (and not as propaganda) – Norm Pattiz touted the value of the BBG “firewall” from policy-makers. I think it’s fair to say that kind of nuance never really translated to the audiences as intended. I wonder if the “BBG-as-firewall” argument was even considered as deliberate obfuscation and misdirection.

Which leads to point B…

B) Extremism is real, and so is Islamic terrorism. But the “War of Ideas” infuses the enemy with the kind of dramatic role they dream of fulfilling. The U.S. should not engage in a “cosmic war” at any level, linguistic or otherwise. I don’t mean to dismiss the threat of terrorism – but the real threat is giving reasons to more “moderate” publics to tolerate extremist elements, and persuasive evidence for such movements to feel they can in turn compel publics into tacit acceptance. This is Lynch’s argument in a nutshell. As Jarret Brachman‘s excellent research has suggested – extremist rhetoric is pretty darn crazy. Let’s not add any gloss to their efforts.

The War of Ideas smacks of the binary logics that are grist for the conspiracy theory mill in the Arabic “hidden transcript” – the commonplaces that connect the dots back to an existential campaign against Arabs and by extension, all Muslims. A Grand Conversation, however, doesn’t foreclose opportunities to directly squash terrorist activities. It doesn’t “kill” extremist movements with some kind of argument contest either. Rather, it might succeed by de-legitimation and further isolation of extremist perspectives.

For me, the “War of Ideas” was always about motivating a domestic constituency for public diplomacy. It was not a term suggestive of policies and communication themes. Hence the need for something like “the grand conversation” to provide a helpful description for elaboration. But it’s this disconnect that I think gets U.S. policy planners in trouble, when global audiences have access to our efforts at persuading ourselves on the proper course of action.

As for facilitation – On Youtube, Facebook, Second Life, or whatever… I think the communication methods speak volumes about intention and respect for the “target” audience. Performing (sincerely) the rituals of listening are part of this strategic direction. And the gains should be considered in long-term horizons, much like the relationship-building of exchange diplomacy.

As Robert Entman argued, public diplomacy campaigns of media advocacy at best would result in getting the U.S. perspective in the mix. Facilitation exercises like this are part of that strategy (as is news management), for as Joseph Nye described, a significant challenge is just getting messages through in the wash of readily-tailored information already available to crucial audiences enmeshed in their own social networks. But more importantly, I think facilitation can help to demonstrate the respect that global audiences seek, without sacrificing the beliefs and strengths behind the American position.

Consider the following statement:

…in the newly minted “field” of public diplomacy – a hybrid “discipline” that draws upon the social sciences, journalism, foreign language and cultural expertise. Public diplomacy is foremost a skill, like it or not, that is most effectively learned from practitioners and best acquired on the job.

Public diplomacy in this view is more art than science, which presents problems when the pool of artisan practitioners who might pass on this skill has shrunk. The amount of people working in public diplomacy with actual experience in the job has been reduced considerably since the closure of the USIA. And since the people who actually “do” public diplomacy are the only ones qualified in this view to teach PD –U.S. public diplomacy is in trouble. In any case, Kushlis writes:

To cede public diplomacy training to the theoreticians is not only a disservice to students but a vacuous undertaking that does not serve the country well.

To be fair, I think her argument in her essay is really about the colonization of the PD concept by strategic communication experts and, institutionally, by the Defense Department’s own efforts at “PD.” But I do think it’s necessary to provide some defense of academic contribution (since that’s what I do for a living).

First, I’m not sure what academic “field” Kushlis is referring to, nor do I get a sense of the theory that is so divergent from practice. Diplomacy Studies is a relatively small and isolated segment of International Relations scholarship, and Public Diplomacy but a small piece of that group. Public diplomacy is certainly not a discipline – it is a “field” where scholars from various disciplines conduct inquiry over a common set of questions and problems. There is hardly anything canonical about public diplomacy scholarship. If the 2009 International Studies Association meeting is any indication – there is no consensus on what the term public diplomacy even means. And more to the point – there is no public diplomacy theory.

Yes, that’s right. There is no public diplomacy theory. No rarified, irrelevant, jargon-laden formulation spewed forth from the Ivory tower to distort the views of public diplomacy practitioners and distract them from the real world. There are certainly calls for a theory of public diplomacy – but nothing we could reasonably call a theory. Just read Eytan Gilboa’s plea for more theoretical and rigorous social science on this subject. What academia does have are numerous attempts to categorize public diplomacy policies – the starting point for subsequent investigation. But boxes and categories are not theories. They are descriptions that enable systematic inquiry.

There may be no public diplomacy theory, but there are certainly a good number of books written by practitioners and of course, excellent historians like Nick Cull. If anything, contemporary public diplomacy researchers (like myself) rely heavily on these accounts to formulate new questions and provide means to compare the past with the present. What public diplomacy has become is a fertile ground to consider theoretical dynamics from other avenues of inquiry that might advance what practitioners already know. Plus, public diplomacy is one of those rare subjects where we (academics) can see a number of different academic assumptions colliding – such as the changing role of the nation-state, the role of communication in facilitating new international actors, and the transformational power of media technologies upon traditional concepts of national, identity, and indeed politics itself.

Right now, public diplomacy scholarship is drawing together researchers from communication, political science, international relations, public relations, American studies, and of course history. There are even psychological and educational studies of public diplomacy. The challenge for many of these scholars is to first get past definitional debates about “What is public diplomacy” and second, sort out what ideas and theories might be useful for studying public diplomacy in order to craft useful, theoretically informed observations.

There is necessary kind of eclecticism to this early stage of public diplomacy scholarship – as Bruce Gregory’s thoughtful essay about the origins of this new “discipline” reveals. His essay is illustrative of the various strands of scholarship that are being accessed and woven together to form new ideas about PD.

Consider my own discipline – communication studies. If attendance at communication conference panels about public diplomacy are any indication – there is no danger of communication suddenly churning out theories to further corrupt the practice of public diplomacy. One reason is that communication – arguably the field with the most to say about the practical implications of message strategy, interpersonal dynamics, and the nuts and bolts of persuasion – has a historically ambivalent attitude towards the subject that can be traced back to its abandonment of propaganda studies and a history of what we could euphemistically call “administrative research.” But a new generation of scholars are working to revive interest in PD as a field of interest within the discipline.

Consider, for the sake of argument, some of the contributions that communication scholarship (broadly conceived) can make to the practice of public diplomacy:

1. Understanding how media framing and agenda setting work to constrain attempts at media advocacy, as well as the efficacy of international broadcasting.

2. Crafting better messages through understanding routes to persuasion, as constrained in various contexts, media formats, and technologies – from both a humanistic and social-scientific perspective.

3. Understanding the role of cultural products in carrying messages and indeed, cultivating attitudes, about the United States.

4. Observing the impacts of cultural products and media content that might threaten local cultural sensitivities and harm local communication/cultural industries.

5. Assessing the outcomes of network associations compiled from exchange program participation.

6. Understanding difficulties faced by exchange students in intercultural and cross-cultural encounters that might impact program effectiveness.

7. Considering the social implications of communication technology usage and adaptation on ideas such as identity, nationality, and supra-national social formations like participation in civil society/NGOs as well as extremist groups.

8. Understanding the pervasive power of narratives, tropes, and rhetorical devices in enhancing or constraining communication objectives.

9. Providing a theoretically grounded (both humanistic and social scientific) understanding of how visual argument works to influence, persuade, and otherwise communicate.

10. Consider the role of media representation in the construction of other social forms, cultural practices, and perceptual filters for news about the United States.

11. Using audience analysis to understand how media and communication work to sustain attitudes or create barriers to attitude change.

12. Providing informed communication strategies for dealing with intercultural encounters (such as the PAO interacting with local press).

This list is obviously not exhaustive. But it suggests that academic thinking about public diplomacy has a lot to offer. These are not public diplomacy theories. They are theory-inspired contributions that can be applied to public diplomacy.

The list also offers more than simply sweeping templates for nation-state interest, foreign policy paradigms, or historical trends in how foreign ministries organize. Scholarship can also dig deeper into subjects like soft power. Esteemed political communication scholar Robert Entman has engaged the question of public diplomacy. And drawing insight from the excellent studies put out by Stephen Corman’s Consortium for Strategic Communication at Arizona State is hardly a “vacuous undertaking.”

If there is a danger from theory to public diplomacy – it is the application of bad theory or misrepresentation of theory to the practice of public diplomacy. The “magic bullet” or “hypodermic” messaging model that was evident throughout much PD practice in U.S. history has been discredited in mass communication and political communication scholarship for decades. And now it’s wasted taxpayer money. Who is watching Al-Hurra these days? I would argue it would be hard to find a political communication expert who agrees with that channel on principle.

Engineers take classes from engineering professors. Some salespersons and marketers take business classes from (gasp) professers that may have more experience in academia than in the business world. The same could certainly be said of public relations professionals. So what’s the problem with an academic study of public diplomacy helping out public diplomacy practitioners? Yes – I would agree that public diplomacy can be an applied skill, but that doesn’t preclude the benefits of good scholarship to help with that skill.

The biggest problem I see in the relationship of the academy to public diplomacy is that there simply are not enough rigorous and comprehensive research products to provide insight to practitioners. At least not yet.

Sure there are a lot of white papers and speculative pieces – but this stuff is arguably preliminary. So why not let the academics continue to study public diplomacy – and build a work-able and instructive knowledge base to refine the practice of something I think we all can agree needs more attention and improvement. And I don’t think advocates of public diplomacy need any less people on board who consider themselves stakeholders for the concept. I do think Kushlis is right to be skeptical of definitive scholarly treatments now – there simply isn’t a lot of good scholarship out there at this moment. I also think that practitioner perspectives will continue to be the biggest resource for public diplomacy planners. But let’s not dismiss the PD scholars waiting in the wings – who already have to contend with potential prejudice within their own disciplines.

After a long semester and some writing projects finished, I’ve finally had time to revisit the news on public diplomacy. The recent exchange between James Glassman and Marc Lynch over the purpose of public diplomacy (and PD 2.0) are indicative – at least to me – that much of the discussion over U.S. public diplomacy’s strategic direction hinges on its relationship to broader strategic goals for foreign policy. What remains to be seen are examples of policies that push the implications of what Glassman is arguing for.

Glassman’s recent comments are worth reviewing. Speaking to an audience at last month’s InfoWarCon (amazingly not a science fiction convention), Glassman clarifies the real purpose PD 2.0: it is about de-legitimating Islamic extremist movements. He argued that PD is not about persuading people to like U.S. policies, but about fostering disincentives to see radicalization and violence as a desirable course of action. There are many things that Glassman says that are incisive assessments, recognizing both the complex landscape of media consumption and the pre-existing biases against attempts to persuade. Basically, the U.S. cannot simply explain itself. Attitudes toward media, news, and the U.S. in critical regions preclude straightforward advocacy as a viable PD strategy.

Glassman’s arguments are really about foreign policy operating environments rather than image management (and I’ve blogged about that here before). And yet, I have a nagging sense that his emphasis on facilitation (through social networking technologies and public-private partnerships, etc) really is about new forms of persuasion. And that’s not necessarily bad (a point I’m sure his audience of information operations specialists no doubt would agree with). But there needs to be a practical point where influence happens in all this facilitation. Put another way – the U.S can expect gains from PD 2.0 in two distinct realms: from facilitation (like the democracy video contest or the exchange.gov forum) in the form of modeling or representing U.S. values… or it can leverage these platforms to advocate some form of argument into the flow of messages. Glassman suggests a path to influence here:

Engaging, informing, and influencing using these new techniques, which promote a broad and deep conversation, into which we can inject our own messages and ideals – this is an approach that works. Or let me be more precise: I believe it works.

What Glassman appears to be saying here is that these facilitation efforts (via social networking technologies or otherwise) will be new means to deliver messages. And that seems to cut against what he’s said elsewhere about PD 2.0 – so perhaps I’m mistaken. What I do believe is that the implication of Glassman’s arguments is that older PD forms are not themselves sufficient (regardless of whether or not U.S. policies have contributed to the dismal state of opinion about the U.S.)

To be fair, Glassman has not argued to diminish or get rid of previous successful public diplomacy programs. Yet he has nonetheless received some abrupt criticism. Ambassador William Rugh, a renowned scholar of Arab media, argues that Glassman’s views are “badly flawed.” Rugh argues that the focus of Glassman’s approach to PD is too narrow (discouraging violent extremism). Rugh also suggests that the novel utilization of partner actors (proxies, really) and social networking technologies is not new – and that trained PD officers have been doing some version of this for decades. Importantly, Rugh also states that PD should include explaining the U.S. – by U.S. spokespersons and on the U.S.’s own terms. For Rugh – many people want to hear what the U.S. has to say.

I think Rugh’s points are well-taken – but as diplomacy scholar Jan Melissen has said, we can’t always look to history to solve our problems today in public diplomacy. If our functional, practical knowledge about the domain of public diplomacy is only informed by our case histories and practitioners, I believe this would limit options for thinking of new ways to “do public diplomacy.” And Rugh’s argument that “we’ve always done that” doesn’t solve anything. It highlights the wisdom and insight of previous periods, but doesn’t offer a ready translation into the current context. Again – remember that Glassman isn’t saying to throw out old practices, but increase funding to try new and novel approaches.

I think Marc Lynch’s rejoinder to Glassman offer a much more compelling strategic critique. Lynch argues that focusing on radical extremists grants them too much legitimacy, in an Arab public sphere where such groups are already marginalized. Currently, the debate about the U.S. is about its policies and the Israel/Palestine question, not the U.S. role as a kind of devil-figure in a cosmic war.
Lynch says:

…today’s discourse of resistance is mass-based rather than concentrated in a small radicalized fringe, and is fundamentally political rather than religious. That means a political response, not a response focused on delegitimizing violent extremism, and a public diplomacy oriented towards mass publics rather than strategic communications oriented towards a concentrated, marginal niche

Lynch rightly argues that U.S. PD and the overall obsession of its foreign policy rhetoric with jihadists has done much to amplify this groups importance and fuel rumors that the U.S. is anti-Islamic. He suggests a move to frame U.S. PD as actual engagement – an inclusive process that moves “beyond the counter-productive binary oppositions and threat inflation which have blocked progress for so many years.”

I actually don’t think that Lynch and Glassman have irreconcilable positions. What Lynch questions, I think, is the narrowing of strategic objectives. This kind of message and mission framing is a potentially dangerous reductionism that emboldens actors from al-Qaida to Iran.

So what about framing? When considering the strategic, orientational metaphors that we have for PD, I think we need to get past Glassman’s “War of Ideas.” We need to do this in part because of the very reasons that he identifies. Under his logic, we need to facilitate conversations that can advance causes that align with U.S. interests (such as the ’1 Million Against the FARC’). But does this call for martial metaphors? We are either in a “Grand Conversation” or a “War of Ideas.” I think these two metaphors are ultimately incompatible. Sure, I acknowledge the need for terms that mobilize and justify action on PD. The presence of anti-Americanism and the growth of violent extremism are serious threats that must be dealt with. But a “War of Ideas” implies a great civilizational contest – an existential struggle with the fate of the world in the balance. If we believe Lynch, the increasing marginalization of Al-Qaida-like organizations says otherwise.

This means that U.S. PD must not abandon previous methods that worked (and, incidentally, Glassman never said we should abandon them) but we should remain aware of the contours of political discourse in the populations that we wish to influence. Yet evidently, the debate over PD in the U.S. remains stuck on basic justificatory arguments. That and, of course, the institutional arrangement of responsibility and resources for U.S. PD. But that is a subject for another blog post.

Al-Jazeera is reporting that members of the US military, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, have been “proselytizing” the Christian faith in Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera obtained video from Brian Hughes, a former member of the US military who recorded training sessions at Bagram Air Base during a visit just over a year ago. The footage shows stacks of bibles, translated into Pashto and Dari, evidently ready for distribution by US troops to local Afghanis. Perhaps most controversial is footage in which Hensley while delivering a sermon to a packed evangelical church on the Bagram Air Base, told his audience: “The special forces guys – they hunt men…We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus,” adding, “get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

Promoting any type of religion is against Department of Defense (DOD) regulations, specifically General Order Number 1, which makes it illegal for any US military personnel to “[p]roselytizing any religion, faith, or practice.” Despite this, the report includes footage of Captain Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, explaining to a group of troops that while they aren’t allowed to proselytize, they “can give gifts.” As an example of the fine line between proselytizing and gift giving, Sergeant Jon Watt, a soldier set to become a military chaplain, explained to his fellow US serviceman, “I bought a carpet and then I gave the guy a Bible after I conducted my business.”

Approximately 99 percent of Afghanis are Muslim (mostly Sunni), and “Islam is a central, pervasive influence throughout Afghan society.” The Constitution of Afghanistan mandates the death penalty for apostasy from Islam (via the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence). The last known Afghani Christian convert, Abdul Rahman only escaped the death penalty because the Afghani government, under significant pressure from the US and UK, let him sneak out of the country to seek asylum in Italy. Rahman was first arrested in 2006 for merely possessing a Bible, and after his arrest, he was unable to find a single lawyer in Kabul wiling to defend him. In 2005, a news report about U.S. interrogators desecrating the Quran triggered riots in Afghanistan, leaving several people dead. One can only imagine what would happen if an American soldier was found distributing Bibles throughout Afghanistan.

Over at the Huffington Post, Jeremy Scahill notes how this story will confirm wide-spread perceptions in the region that US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are fighting a “war on Islam,” Indeed, it is precisely this meme that has made US public diplomacy outreach to Muslims since 9/11 so difficult. Couched in a narrative of a “war on Islam,” American military efforts, regardless of their positive contribution to Afghani society, will be seen as hostile to the majority of Afghanis who have very little actual interaction with US soldiers. While U.S. military spokeswoman Major Jennifer Willis has since responded to the report, arguing that the sermons “were taken out of context and chaplains were told to make clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving,” it is difficult to imagine that most Afghanis will find such commentary credible in the face of such compelling and credible video filmed by a former member of the US military.

US troops urged to share faith in Afghanistan