On Tuesday, February 1, 2011 I had the privilege of speaking to Dawn McCall, the Director for the Bureau of International Information Programs (or IIP) at the US Department of State. IIP along with Education and Cultural Affairs (or ECA) comprise the direct reports to Judith McHale, the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. For good discussion of how IIP fits into the rest of the State Department, see Matthew Armstrong’s recap of his discussion with McCall the previous week.

Director McCall answered questions about recent changes to IIP announced on January 28, 2011, which comes after a thorough “three month business review review that examined every aspect of IIP’s operations, programs, and products. The review included focus groups, site visits to American embassies and consulates abroad, and working groups within IIP.” IIP is primarily responsible for printed material, web and video content, and speaker programs that promote subject matter experts giving talks around the world. IIP also manages America.gov.

The changes we talked about are interesting, in that they reflect a reorientation away from directing content production from Washington. McCall announces in the press release: “In today’s crowded communications environment, we cannot expect audiences to come to us… Instead, we must go to where they prefer to be, and think of new ways to engage with them.” Sound advice, given the plurality of media options that comprise how audiences seek and rely on particular outlets to frame their view of the world and sustain their communities. The US can’t just put up a website and expect public diplomacy impacts, let alone even decent traffic. It needs to be present (in a legitimate way) within particular media ecologies.

The central theme of our conversation was that IIP would endeavor to understand, work with, and respond to the needs of the various posts around the world. This starts by moving beyond America.gov, to tailoring content to particular online and media-based communities “where audiences actually spend their time.” McCall indicated that America.gov was “too passive.” If there are “conversations going on in different places,” then IIP needs to recognize how to deliver its content to these places.

I think it’s important here that she wasn’t stressing a particular unified “message,” but rather a more contemporary term: content. Content, in this usage, connotes a more flexible approach to the message itself, and emphasizes the significance of the act of communication over its particular encoded information. It’s not the job of IIP to craft a monolithic message – but rather, following her explanation, to “listen to the posts.” According to McCall, IIP spent a lot of time creating content, but very little time actually engaging with the local officials who would be more aware of communication requirements and informational needs for their particular audiences (or audiences that reflect communities of interests around a policy issue, etc.). Thus IIP must provide “deeper” content that is on the “wavelength” of the needs of the post. This also means providing more content offerings – linking different forms of media and content production.

IIP is therefore not simply a mouthpiece in this vision, but an internal service provider to the rest of the State Department. McCall indicated that the Bureau’s new orientation would focus on audience analysis and on working with other partners in the USFG to develop content, understand communication requirements (like language competencies), and work to develop a talent pool both within and outside of government for content production.

Audience analysis, I think, is also key to some of the measurement and evaluation problems that plague public diplomacy more generally. McCall emphasized the need to adapt and listen – and to provide a breadth of content that was relevant to the particular missions abroad and the local knowledge of the post. This didn’t sound like a platitude, but a serious attempt to reconfigure an approach to content generation that both recognized the complexity of the communication environment and the requirements – more in-depth content (higher quality speakers, information, media products) that could be matched on demand to issues and contexts.

It sounds expensive – but apparently this shift is going to be executed by more efficiently organizing (and recognizing) resources available. For example, McCall talked about the formation of “content development groups” that linked different producers – horizontally and vertically, across media-based and content-based expertise.

As public diplomacy – as a concept – begins to define the larger strategic vision of traditional diplomacy, I think it’s logical that the “traditional” public diplomacy departments re-orient to serve the growing public diplomacy dimensions and practices of other parts of the State Department. If other parts of State are effectively “doing” public diplomacy – than integrating IIP as a partner could potentially go far to keeping the strategic communication concerns of public diplomacy in the mix of diplomatic practice and indeed, foreign policy making.

It’s key for other functions of the State Department to recognize the tools and expertise that an in-house public diplomacy unit can provide to their existing (and increasingly public) responsibilities. IIP’s announcement is not merely a signal that IIP is keeping up with contemporary communication environments – but that it can be integrated into the larger communicative action obligations of the State Department more readily. Case in point: Egypt. I asked her about how IIP could help the US handle its public diplomacy tasks in Egypt during this time of political crisis. She said that IIP has the technological capability to manage remotely content operations for key US online presence (like the Egyptian embassy). When the Internet went down in Egypt, the US Embassy website was then managed directly by IIP, keeping a portal to the US perspective on events open. Regardless of whether that perspective was appropriate or timely, IIP demonstrated the technological capacity to react and adapt quickly. And that’s an important start.

More generally, the changes signal something that was probably a long time coming. IIP is becoming a communication enterprise attuned to the requirements of contemporary public diplomacy: by linking specific audiences to perspectives that the USFG wants to promote in some fashion, through engagement in conversations, providing clarification, and otherwise providing focused content that is not out of touch with the local needs of the audience and the post. In theory, IIP won’t be a provider of arbitrary content and views out of Washington, but rather be an attentive contributor. And by being “attentive” – IIP might contribute to the larger symbolic project of demonstrating the US capacity to “listen.”

I just read Robin Brown’s thoughtful commentary on the UT-Austin PD-MAP assessment report and tool. In my previous take, I was focused primarily on the utility of the instrument: the methodological implications for how it can be used by policy-makers and as a roadmap to knowledge building about effectiveness.

But I think Brown’s blog reflects what I think is really interesting about the PD-MAP exercise and what animates my own academic project – how actors conceptualize, argue for, and implement strategies of influence that are indelibly marked by their own political, social, and cultural context. When people write about measures of effectiveness – what are they saying about the mechanics of persuasion, the ideal relationship between the subject (the audience) and the state, and the normative implications of intervening in other people’s world-views? As Janice Bially-Mattern has argued, we need to think carefully about how we so casually talk about tweaking people’s “ontological security” when we use “representational force.”

And that’s what make’s Brown’s comments important. He highlight’s the most obvious and persistant critical aspect of public diplomacy – the observeration that U.S. public diplomacy is itself a product of ideological positions that sustain particular material advantages and asymmetries. He says this is a “realist” response to the classically liberal attitudes towards international communication that justify public diplomacy, but I think it’s more of a critical stance. The purported goals of compliance, couched in terms of harmony of interests and understanding, mask objectives that sustain the status quo to the benefit of the communicator.

Edward Comor reminded a gathering of public diplomacy scholars earlier this year at the ISA convention in New Orleans that despite how exciting and innovative public diplomacy research may be – we cannot forget the critical side of scholarship. For all the new work that’s being done on how communication modalities are being used in public diplomacy campaigns, or how communication ecologies like networks reflect new dynamics of persuasion – we must also be reflexive about the “why” of public diplomacy. Granted, this critical kind of scholarship isn’t for everyone.

But as Brown implies, a critical sensitivity to public diplomacy may actually help practitioners. Not necessarily by provoking reflexive stances towards their role as agents of the state. But, by providing a perspective that is outside their comfort-zone as policy-planners, immersed in organizational and political cultures that make the practice and content of public diplomacy seem self-evidently rational and ethical. A critical stance towards the messages and practices of public diplomacy should ideally reveal the ways in which it may be perceived by other “audiences,” especially when the norms of communication, the commonplaces of public discourse, and the rituals of communication (to borrow a phrase from James Carey) are quite different.

The path to a more effective public diplomacy obviously requires some form of systematic inquiry, data-collection, and assessment. But it can also benefit from a clear-eyed view of its situated-ness in the ideological assumptions that justify such practices in international relations.

At their September 28 meeting, the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy announced a report they had commissioned from a research team at UT Austin. Its subject of evaluation and measurement for public diplomacy is undoubtedly important and a significant priority for governments engaged in public diplomacy around the world. This report owes its existence to the efforts of the Advisory Commission’s former Executive Director, David Firestein – an intelligent and articulate advocate for public diplomacy concerns. Frankly it’s surprising that it took this long for the Commission to get to this subject, but it’s a significant step in the right direction. The report itself, however, is not perfect.

Matthew Armstrong wasted no time in offering a thorough and at times stinging assessment of the report. Having read both the report and Armstrong’s commentary, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

1. The report is a commendable and surprisingly systematic attempt to devise a flexible evaluation tool.

2. It’s not ground-breaking in its recommendations – but then again I don’t think it was intended to be. It’s designed to provide a tool for policy evaluators to consider programs based on previous experiences.

3. I think Armstrong’s negative comments about the project’s formative research expressed a frustration many public diplomacy watchers share about previous evaluation work.

4. I also think Armstrong’s critique: that the report offers nothing new in terms of criticism of US PD is fine, but that wasn’t the point of the report.

5. The report authors were not able to interview and survey enough people to do a thorough analysis of US strategic thinking and culture about public diplomacy. Then again, I’m not sure they needed to. See above.

6. The PD-MAP is a neat tool. But it’s strangely idiosyncratic and at times arbitrary in its recommendations for how to measure outcomes. It’s not well cited – which is important when you consider all the different dynamics they are trying to measure.

7. I’m starting to appreciate John Brown’s position more on public diplomacy research (!). See below.

I won’t repeat the summary work done by Armstrong in his lengthy treatment of the report. I admit I was very skeptical of the report before reading it. There has been a lot of studies of US public diplomacy, commissioned by the GAO and others, that measure what the government is doing and not the result. Effectiveness is often inferred from what the report authors call “outputs.” The report, however, is very much interested in “outcomes.” Connecting outputs to outcomes is not an easy task – it requires diligent research, analysis, and indeed access to data that studies can use to make claims about outcomes. And here’s the kicker – it also requires theories to guide analysis, because we’ve developed pretty good ideas for how and why things happen that can be explained from data analysis.

For example, if you’re going to investigate persuasion effects of, say, selected exposure to a particular message, visual, or experience – then you don’t need a theory of public diplomacy. You need to employ established and reliable measures of effect developed in relevant fields like social psychology, communication studies, and public relations/strategic communication. Too bad the real world of public diplomacy doesn’t allow much for field work, quasi-experimental, or controlled experiments on persuasion effects. But I digress. We get it. Measuring public diplomacy is hard.

There’s a reason why the academic study of international relations and foreign policy in general has very few durable theories and hypotheses that have held up across contexts. A predictive, elegant model that is useful for international affairs is a rare thing to come by. The most sophisticated quantitative analyses very often deal with very specific parameters, situations, and data. The messy particulars of different embassies, cultures, operational contexts, policy programs, policy objectives, and research subjects makes a comprehensive model for PD seem almost fantastically absurd in prospect. So what do we get with the UT Austin report?

The report did not set out to develop a predictive model, let alone a theory, of public diplomacy, though it does claim to measure effectiveness against expectations established systematically from flexible factors and priorities. In my opinion this is a good thing. Rather, it’s pretty clear the group devised a way to catalog, organize, and code program information in such a way as to allow policy programmers to get a real picture of how effective their programs have been from a strategic perspective.
The three main strategic goals of PD the authors derived from their research and used for evaluation are:

Increased Understanding of the US
Increasing Favorability toward the US
Increasing US Influence of the US.

So, the first part of the report deals with how the authors settled on these three primary strategic objectives for PD. The second part builds on the objectives, to illustrate how you might code and standardize data in such a way as to model effectiveness against these objectives. Their derived tool, the “PD-MAP” model, is a flexible system to accomplish analysis of effectiveness (linking outcomes to outputs) that is apparently based upon a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Model. Admittedly, I don’t know much about this concept, nor the theories and studies that have been used to develop the concept. But the benefit, the authors argue, is that you can tweak the model in any way you like to account for the relative importance of the objective, the risks involved, the expectations, etc. Through data standardization, the model combines results of different effectiveness measures into a relatively straightforward depiction.

I’ll cut right to the chase. The proposed PD-MAP evaluation tool is a great way to organize and compile evidence of effectiveness in such a way as to measure outcomes by standardizing results from a wide-ranging series of pre and post hoc measurement data. Yet the overall system relies upon a set of assumptions that makes me pause, because the real heavy-lifting of data collection and analysis aren’t that specified. What we have instead is a policy and strategy management tool.

Remember the saying about “when you assume…?”
The ways in which the authors describe sweeping subjects like influence and understanding are arbitrary. Yes, they do offer descriptions, but little justification by previous thinking on what those concepts signify as sets of processes. They just offer a definition and go from there, with effectively no citation or reference to why they made those decisions, nor why the definitions they choose are pertinent to public diplomacy. For example, there is a subsection on “favorability dimensions” – where did they get this stuff? I get it that we need relatively stable operational assumptions for these concepts to start measuring them – but I still find the conceptualization rather thin – especially when you consider the different sites of inquiry they identify (elites, governments, everyone else, etc.). They get around this problem by ultimately leaving much of the definitional work up to the person on the ground doing the analysis (assigning weights, objectives, etc.) who might better understand the particular situation. But this flexibility, in my mind at least, starts to erode the utility of the tool – especially if the significance of the variables (can we call them that?) are so subjective to the person who would use the model.

But yet another problem with these concepts is that they may be difficult to separate analytically when considering causation. The authors do admit to this problem in various sections of the paper, but it’s still present. Put simply, “increasing understanding of the US” could very well lead to “increasing favorability” in ways that are not obvious from the suggested measures they provide. Disentangling these concepts looks great on a policy checklist, but much murkier when making knowledge claims. Which leads me to my next quibble, the measurement methods discussed within PD-MAP.

The authors offer a wide array of suggested measures via example, supposedly to be conducted by practitioners or independent contractors, to facilitate data collection in order to measure outcomes that will feed into PD-MAP. The report provides a really impressive range of suggestions- linking strategic objectives to data – that ultimately reads like a set of obvious tasks finally compiled into one instructive document. By this point in the report, the PD-MAP comes across as an all-inclusive manual for how to conduct comprehensive PD evaluation; it’s an engineering solution to the big-tent of public diplomacy initiatives. This isn’t exactly a problem – but I’m not exactly sure how it helps other than putting it all in one place.

The report notes a number of possible measurements of effectiveness that can be researched after a particular intervention (like, say, a journalist training program) has occurred. It strikes me that what the authors suggest is probably already on the radar of those policy planners who do such programs, and who must justify their continued work. Put another way – shouldn’t practitioners engaged in particular interventions anticipate what would count as success? Or be in the best position to know? The authors rightly note the most logical signs of effectiveness – but how is this helpful other than telling program planners something they already probably know.

I don’t mean to be unfair to the report authors. I’m sure that many of the suggestions are helpful and perhaps, may not even have occurred to some practitioners. My guess is that the primary obstacles for practitioners in the field are twofold:

A) the ability to measure in ways that offer reliable (and unbiased) evidence.
B) the resources and time to do this kind of work along with all the other responsibilities placed upon people working in the field or in Washington.

And to be fair, the report authors also pretty much acknowledge this set of constraints. But the measurement suggestions, while often quite reasonable, are also at times arbitrary. And they rely on arguably shaky causation models. If, for example, we are concerned about US security and are interested in the effect of US PD efforts to minimize broadcasted statements encouraging violence against the US in a region that has been targeted by a PD intervention – how do we ultimately know that the PD campaign was the necessary, crucial, or sufficient cause. Simply put – we don’t. At least not based on this model.

The Value of PD-MAP
To be honest, I actually think this report is a comprehensive, systematic, if a bit idiosyncratic attempt to standardize performance metrics. In some sense, it reads like a catch-all field manual to direct attention to what “counts” as evidence – offering often reasonable, sometimes truly inspired, and yes, some logically dubious reductive attempts to demonstrate linkages between outputs and outcomes. It’s the Scout Handbook for Public Diplomacy evaluation.

So does improving US PD mean assigning values that can be standardized in order to compare across functional categories and to demonstrate particular objectives? My first read tells me that the value to PD-MAP is its deep tool-kit of data-collection ideas – not its elegance as model for analytical evaluation. Perhaps I’m reading it too harshly.

What I’m getting at here is that its most significant value isn’t knowledge creation, per se, but knowledge organization. The report touts the flexibility of the model, and the ability to handle various kinds of data, priorities, and risk factors that are very much context driven. When I first read this report, the first thought that came to mind was: hey, this is a great place to dump a bunch of data that I can play with and tweak as I see fit later. Sort of like a citation management software with lots of tag controls, or perhaps more accurately, a structured, relational database with some fun weighting functions built in that could allow me to code data effectively – like many of the computer assisted content analysis suites out there.

And then the obvious hit me. This is fine for a particular audience of policy planners whose job it is to provide reports about activity. It’s a project management tool. It’s for planners that need to look at the big(ger) picture. But the devils are in the details (and weights, for that matter).

My John Brown Moment
My day job as an academic puts me in a frame of mind to quibble with the method and methodological assumptions about insights derived from the data to be gathered in this model. I won’t bore you with specifics. My epistemological complaints aren’t that important at this stage when public diplomacy planners need a flexible, reliable methodology that would justify a set of methods workable for different applications. Evaluation divisions need marching orders to start the process of measurement. The PD-MAP starts to accomplish this, but leaves me with another thought. We need more disaggregated, separate investigations. I know this flies in the face of a lot of PD commentary on the need for real systematic data analysis.

John Brown provides the inspiration for this thought. Brown is a renown public diplomacy practitioner and commentator, whose incisive comments are a necessary ingredient in the discussion of US public diplomacy. Yet I’ve certainly disagreed with some of his arguments about the problems and futility of public diplomacy research. Brown seems to think that public diplomacy, like art, is a humanistic set of practices that transcends rigid disciplinary thinking and thus is diminished (perhaps dangerously so) by attempts to theorize about it. It’s politics, not political science. It’s a vocation, not a canonical academic discipline. That’s fine, but it doesn’t help those charged with coming up with something approaching at least nominally rigorous knowledge claims in policy-making contexts.

What I take from Brown’s position is not that we should discourage PD research. It’s that we should encourage interdisciplinary contribution to how we understand the very different processes that take place under the auspices of the term, public diplomacy. Brown is right to note that public diplomacy theorists (whoever they are) don’t have the “answers.” But scholarly methods more broadly considered can and do have a lot to contribute – especially when public diplomacy is really a combination of various different disciplinary forms of knowledge. What does this mean for PD-MAP?

Evaluation of US public diplomacy does not begin with PD-MAP. It may, however, end with PD-MAP – and that’s probably just fine. I think that those charged with PD evaluation and intelligence need to match the various situations, interventions (i.e. pd programs) and strategic objectives of public diplomacy with respective, established evaluative practices, theories, and experts. That probably means contracting work. But the DoD has done a good job of cultivating institutional knowledge centers in house… perhaps the time has come for State.

Public diplomacy is a big tent concept. In the United States, the term is an artifact of bureaucratic and legislative authority over the budget. As such, rather than reconcile different aspects under one evaluative umbrella, let’s treat them separately. If you’re going to measure media effects, commission media effects research. Don’t shoe-horn it into an a-theoretical database and call it a day. (To be fair, PD-MAP can be theoretically driven, assuming you tell it to act that way).

If the concern is, for example, influence outcomes – then cobble together experts and established measures of influence in order to flesh out a rigorously determined and tested framework. If something can be applicable across contexts or communication modalities, then ideally such frameworks can be used again. It’s not terrible if it can’t. It’s just inconvenient for policy planners who must point to particular precedence in order to justify future programs.

If the concern is understanding outcomes – then lets bring together the different kinds of expertise and ideas that reflect this concept outside of public diplomacy, that are already well-investigated in other disciplinary perspectives and professional contexts.

At a more micro level, if you want to know about the effectiveness of a particular media or information campaign – the PD-MAP is not the place to start. It may be the place to put your data once you’ve tweaked the model appropriately. But how, for example, do you infer outcome solutions when there may be complex analytical methods (like social network analysis) which provides certain kinds of evidence that you then must place in the context of other methods (like media framing or agenda setting analysis), in order to draw out implications for your strategic objectives? The imperatives of public diplomacy necessitate a mixed laboratory, so to speak, in order to really provide measurement and evaluation. It just seems like the PD-Map steps out ahead of the knowledge we need.

And I don’t mean to say that public diplomacy is so complex that we can’t ever really know if something is “working.” Nor am I saying that ideas and methods (or theories and methodologies) are not up to the task. I’m just saying that right now, the kind of knowledge required by measurement and evaluation units who must report to superiors is difficult to generate without a load of caveats. Which means the questions we ask of evaluation units may need to be less tightly bound to strategic imperatives, and more focused on very specific outcomes.

It may very well be that a truly deductive and predictive model for public diplomacy interventions is impossible given the range of circumstances, contexts, and priorities at stake. In this scenario, the most social-scientific approach probably will amount to a sophisticated structured case-comparison method, where multi-method cases of PD interventions are assembled and tagged in a useful way for policy-planners. Such an archive can allow policy-planners to reference a database of programs that yield useful clinical knowledge, matched to appropriate circumstances.

But the ambition of PD-MAP also suggests that particular, targeted quantitative analysis of specific public diplomacy interventions are not only possible but should be encouraged in order to amass comparative data. I agree. I just think we need to be more attuned to theory and already-established knowledge about persuasion, cross-cultural communication, media effects, and yes, sociological variables of collective action before we start inferring. I seriously commend the PD-MAP team for the ambition of linking outputs to outcomes. It is truly the holy grail of public diplomacy. We’ve got a rudimentary architecture, now lets fill in the house.

I am curious to hear the following statement, made by one of America’s preeminent critics of public diplomacy thinking, clarified a bit more:

All too many academic theories about PD are incomprehensible, pompously-expressed “concepts” from persons — among them rightfully esteemed tenured professors whose intelligence is all too often joined with a tactless inability to handle the last three feet of person-to-person contact — who have never actually worked as diplomats in the field of “public diplomacy,” which they pontificate about, often too assuredly, from their ivory towers on comfortable campuses so distant from what some call the “real world.”

The quote appeared in a recent article on the Huffington Post. Truth be told, I am admittedly a fan of John Brown and his frequent skewerings of pretension (unless, of course, such barbs are leveled at my alma mater, then I’m shamelessly hypocritical). But it made me pause. Perhaps Dr. Brown was being polite, but I think we need to put some sort of name to the real troublemakers that Brown is alluding to.

Put another way – what is the real problem that bothers Dr. Brown? What sort of creeping threat is posed by public diplomacy theorists? Is it a particular theory and or scholar that threatens the bedrock of practical pedagogy in public diplomacy? Is it the pervasive valorization of technological approaches to public diplomacy, which might focus state sponsors to direct scarce resources away from proven public diplomacy practice and training?

I think there is more to this sweeping indictment of the academic study of public diplomacy than meets the eye. At first glance, it makes me feel a bit defensive (since I happen to be one of those academics who has never been in the foreign service). It’s practically discouraging – and seems to perpetuate the persistent scholar-practitioner divide that looms between teachers of international relations and diplomats. And to be fair – both sides contribute to this divide. So really I ask – what’s the big deal? Should scholars interested in public diplomacy pack up their bags and join the foreign service? Barring that, is the Huffington Post essay really a reminder to keep scholars in their place?

The critique of academics is also oddly out of place, since Brown’s essay is ostensibly a reaction to the recent NYT Times article about practitioners of social media-based engagement and “21st Century Statecraft” at the State Department.

I say let’s keep the diplomacy between the camps going. I will start this process with an olive branch in the form of a question to skeptical policy veterans: “What would the practitioners of public diplomacy have the scholars of public diplomacy study, research, and teach?”

p.s. – I actually think Brown’s objections about “abstraction” reflect a long-standing debate amongst academics on the philosophy of social science inquiry. Do we scholars pursue deductive-nomethetic prescriptions, covering laws about the workings of social world, or, should the purpose of social science (and scholarly investigation more generally) be geared towards more middle-range theories applicable to the complex and messy realities of foreign policy. As I have stated before, I really doubt there is such theorizing about public diplomacy at the level Brown is concerned about – though I agree with his skepticism in a purely academic sense. And for the record, I’m fine with people making claims about theory and the standards of inquiry outside of the academy. Insert winking emoticon here.

Quick take on the July 29 New York Times article about the twitterific musings of the State Department’s senior technology advisors, Alec Ross and Jared Cohen.

The article “Twitter Musings in Syria Elicit Groans in Washington” addresses the discomfort caused by Ross and Cohen’s candid musings about their experience while traveling Syria for the State Department. The two were “riffing about how visitors can buy an American-style blended iced coffee at a university near Damascus and how one of them had challenged a Syrian communications minister to a cake-eating contest.”

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable use of Twitter to me. Yet apparently the two were gently chided by the State Department. Supposedly, the State Department does actually support the embrace of such technology as part of 21st century diplomacy. As the NYT’s piece suggests: “Yet despite the youthful indiscretion, their broader goal of using technology to further diplomacy enjoys enthusiastic support from the highest levels of the department, notably Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

So why is this a “youthful indiscretion?” This sounds profoundly out of sync with what I understand to be the real implication of social media for diplomacy. Social media like Twitter and facebook are not just other vehicles to address target audiences; touchpoints in a slick marketing campaign. They are means by which the State Department can be rendered something other than a monolithic voice of the US government. They reveal the human faces of the US government, and not just another sloganeering or exposition platform. It is through these media that credibility can be cultivated, by providing ways to identify with communities of social media users, to show that government social media users listen and participate in such communities.

Perhaps this is not such a big deal. Perhaps the report is as much a reflection of the framing of the news story as it is actual conflict within State. There are some very intelligent people at State who “get” the social implications of social media. I just found this article to strike against the spirit of engagement present in social media.

So I was at the Confucius Institute at the University of Maryland this week doing some research for my book on comparative public diplomacy. I had a great discussion with the directors of the program. They offered a number of insights and were very welcoming. I’d like to share something that came out of the meeting that adds some perspective to recent US attempts to rehabilitate US public diplomacy strategy. The individuals I spoke with seemed pretty sure what they did was not public diplomacy – and were somewhat ambivalent about the term cultural diplomacy. For the Confucius Institute – their “mission” was primarily defined as education and educational partnership.

Their work is justified around the promotion and exchange of culture and values through education – and the word “diplomacy” seemed oddly out of place. More to the point, I think there was an aversion to thinking about culture and values from an instrumental perspective (read: for the promotion of Chinese foreign policy objectives). I realize there are good reasons to avoid casting your job as a kind of public/cultural diplomacy – but it remains an intriguing question. For public diplomacy to work – does it need to disavow the label? The Confucius Institute arguably does great work, and offers an important conceptual distinction akin to outfits like the British Council: where a cultural diplomacy center sustains its credibility by its independence from government policy-making.

This kind of self-identification sustains the historical difficulty in linking public and cultural diplomacy. This historical trend, however, may be at odds with the nascent “fusionist” perspective elsewhere, where organizations like the US Dept of State increasingly employ the implicit language and strategies of public diplomacy in their redefinition of traditional diplomatic institutions. I’m not sure how these two trends would be easily resolved conceptually or institutionally.

I had the good fortune to attend a discussion last week between Alec Ross, the Senior Advisor for Innovation in the office of Secretary of State Clinton and Marc Lynch, professor of political science at George Washington University and a featured blogger on Foreign Policy.com. The focus of the discussion was primarily about the use of media technology for outreach and public diplomacy in the Arab world. Each gave a short presentation that talked about the need for embracing technology, and for sustaining realistic attitudes towards what communication technology can accomplish for the US State Department. For this blog post, I’ll summarize a few of the interesting points they raised:

Alec Ross:

- The US needs to focus on technologies of empowerment. Online content in particular is important to youthful audiences in the Middle East. Online content has a distinct kind of authority (compared to other media outlets) in this population.
- “Connection Technologies” are being used by many actors, including US antagonists.
- Such technologies have evolved to provide info, build community, and more importantly, to provide resources. E.g. – the web is a transactional medium.

For Ross, there are 2 positive and negative trends that go along with the increasingly ubiquitous information and communication technology in the region:

Negative Trends
1. Censorship and government infiltration of connection media is up (and not just in Iran and China).
2. Such media technologies are increasingly used for radicalization (Not just blogs and discussion forums, but video games as well).

Positive Trends
1. Increasing connectedness among the Middle East populace (reduction of the digital divide; dramatic increase in mobile handsets).
2. Reassertion of science and technology as an area of social and political emphasis in conservative and M.E. countries.

Marc Lynch

Lynch offered that we can’t just focus on particular technologies as politically transformative in the Middle East. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Paltalk, etc. are all trends. In his view, information seeks outlets, and we need to focus on the broader communication environment.

He suggested that we pay attention to how successful opinion leaders adopt new media platforms. And he discouraged paying attention to any specific media or message. What he calls “the forces of the status quo” (Arab governments, etc.) have caught up with new media technology, and thus radical groups usage of such technologies have been “defanged.”

What Lynch was driving at, in my estimation, is that we need a better understanding of how information flows and likewise, how people may be able to act on information (for as we know, some in the Middle East have access and blog, tweet, etc but can’t have a real political effect on their situation). Rather, we need to comprehend how such media transparency can lead to real accountability.

On the subject of social networking technologies, Lynch wonders how we can know at this stage what kind of relationships established through these platforms are significant enough (say, for public diplomacy) – and whether they are real or spurious.

Alec Ross then jumped in on the social media discussion, noting there is a significant difference between using such platforms for a US presidential campaign and using them for public diplomacy. The transaction is more obvious.

Ross noted that the “Cold War frame” for PD was “institutional.” People don’t want to get connected to institutions. (As an aside, I wonder what it means when we “Friend” the US on facebook? Does that mean Uncle Sam gets to see my crazy college photos? Does this count as engagement?)

But I digress. Ross goes on to say that we need a rich understanding of the local context for social networking to use it more effectively. On a related note, he suggested the State Department may need to rethink its strategy of “branding the Secretary” – and look to those individuals that represent the US on the ground in a local way. Public diplomacy may, in this view, emulate the practices of successful personalities (popular, influential, etc.) that have built up networks and institutions around them. At a practical level this might start with the US ambassador – to personalize the practice of US PD. We don’t relate to institutions in the same way we do to personalities. This may be a fundamental aspect of credibility in a highly media-saturated environment.

When pressed on what “success” might look like in public diplomacy, Ross pointed to the recently released Opinion Space project, a collaboration between the State Department and the Digital Media Lab at UC Berkeley, as an example of a new way to engage – a discussion forum organized as a visual representation of topics and opinions. It provides a potentially instructive form of mapping the contours of global public opinion around issues related to US foreign policy. Yet Ross acknowledged that it is still an open question whether the US can successfully implement an online community that is operated by a government. Also, the government should not embark on kinds of ventures that are “counter-veiling to the market.” I understand this as the government trying to use social media tools in ways for which they are not designed for, or, to try and impose strategic imperatives on tools for which they are ill-suited. (Lugar’s argument that we can “win the war of ideas through twitter” comes to my mind).

Lynch also sounded a word of caution on the need to “fill every space” with a government media presence. Similarly, given the volume of access that US presence in such networks affords – how can the US effectively respond to millions of tweets, emails, and facebook posts? And importantly, who should do the responding?

The talk was a stimulating look at how the US government is grappling with the social and political ramfications of a changing communication infrastructure in the Middle East. I disagree with some of what was said – in particular Lynch’s sort of neutral conception of the value of information in a sociological/cultural sense. But I think Lynch is right to note that public diplomacy (or whatever’s its going to be called in the future) needs to reflect a localized understanding of how technology shapes the routes to influence – both those social relations and bonds that rely on communication networks, as well as how the technological medium changes the nature of what counts as credible, persuasive messaging itself.

When the US State Department makes statements about how it needs to “shape the narrative” – it should start by noting how such narratives both reflect and constitute the social bonds, networks, and cultural structures that are the real terrain of public diplomacy. By embracing the notion that we can “shape” such things, we transgress potentially sensitive symbolic resources – so we should be careful to assert such goals without a rich social understanding. I am tentatively encouraged by both Ross and Lynch, and look forward to more thinking on this subject. The State Department’s “R” division is working out its game plan. Yet the frontlines of public diplomacy – the regional bureaus and the embassies – need this kind of thinking sooner rather than later.

So I’ve had some time to digest the conversation on McHale’s proposed new framework for US public diplomacy strategy. Upon reflection, as Rhonda Zaharna describes in her insightful and clarifying new book, Battles to Bridges: US Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy after 9/11, the framework is yet another example of how “grand strategy,” “strategy,” and “tactics” get muddled in the conceptualization of public diplomacy objectives and the world-view that it is based upon.

The sticking points in public reactions to this framework take on two distinct dimensions: conceptual and structural.

The first, epitomized by Phil Seib’s excoriation, is that the proposal offers nothing fundamentally new. Seib has a particular vision of what it should have focused on:

Nothing in the new plan addresses the need for public diplomacy to worry less about branding and more about service; to step away from Cold War-style monologue and embrace a comprehensive plan for interactive communication; to shift from a Middle East-centric public diplomacy to a more balanced global outlook; to realistically employ public diplomacy as an antiterrorism tool; and to reach out to diasporic populations and virtual states.

Seib’s critique is conceptual and strategic. There are elements, however, of what he is asking for already in the framework. It’s just that they are emphasized as crucial, or, they are mentioned alongside some of the more antiquated conceptions that continue to define US public diplomacy thinking.

Others have noted that the framework doesn’t really read like strategy at all, but more like a laundry list of things to do, or to express that the US do more.

Matt Armstrong has also noted in various venues that the framework continues to foreground the conceptual distinction between foreign and domestic, when, as Seib also notes – the notion of the foreign is complicated by the fact that states are increasingly virtual. Nation-states are interpenetrated by diasporic populations, both mobile and connected via technology, that complicate the notion of “target audience,” if not the impossibility of a stable notion of audience.

The final conceptual critique seems to center on the notion of “listening.” Essentially – the framework does not emphasize the actions and responsiveness that would reflect a strategic posture of listening. For many in the critical community of PD watchers, the notion of listening is the final frontier of real transformation. It also happens to be the concept that would most tightly bind the functions of PD with the overarching foreign policy apparatus.

The other strand of critique is structural. Bill Kiehl, commenting on MountainRunner, notes that the proposal to add new regional DAS’s to help coordinate the bureau’s with McHale’s office has already been tried. Kiehl writes:

This is not exactly the change that public diplomacy needs. Fussing around the edges instead of a major structural change will not make enough of a difference. The public diplomacy DAS in the six regional bureaus idea was tried before and it proved to be ineffective in either bridging the gap to policy or in bringing some unity of command to public diplomacy abroad. Putting a DAS for international public affairs in perhaps the most dysfunctional bureau in the State Department (PA) will not cure the dysfunction or dramatically improve the “message” to overseas audiences. There is really nothing here that inspires confidence that America’s public diplomacy will improve.

What’s interesting, at least from my perspective, is that the structure appears to be as much an internal appeal to revitalizing the “R” division of public diplomacy among the functions of the State Department as much as it is a necessary structure for an effective PD. I say this because of the continued presence of figures like Alec Ross, who operate clearly in the conceptual domain of PD, yet are not in fact under the authority of McHale. The Undersecretary’s new framework, as an organization template, is an assertion of organizational relevance as much as a strategic argument.

Of course the framework is not without its defenders. Or rather, the critics are not immune to criticism. In the comments section of another Phil Seib post on the framework, James Glassman, President George W Bush’s last Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs takes Seib to task for being too general and sweeping in his criticism.

But I think that what Seib may be getting at, something I’ve heard echoed elsewhere, is that the framework is not really reflective of what has been said repeatedly for years by academics and policy commentators regarding public diplomacy. I’m sure that individuals like Seib can acknowledge the positive steps taken by leaders like Glassman to revitalize US public diplomacy, but I don’t think Seib’s critique rests entirely the structural, procedural, and resourcing of PD. Seib, like myself, is concerned with conceptual reform – perhaps a reform so radical as to be difficult to embrace easily. I’ve been writing about an evolution of public diplomacy that would invert the functions of public diplomacy and traditional diplomacy; an effacement of conceptual boundaries that will likely be driven by foreign policy objectives more than top-down institutional redesign.

This kind of conceptual identity change requires input and reflexivity from the State Department. A willingness to accept outsider perspectives and wisdom. It strikes me that Seib’s points on the framework reveal a more insular strategy formation process than he or others are comfortable with.

I finally got around to reading the new strategic template for US public diplomacy as put together by the State Department – ostensibly the agency tasked with managing and directing US public diplomacy. The strategy is in a handy powerpoint presented by US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Judith McHale. She spoke of it again on March 10, 2010 before the Senate Foreign Relations committee. A few things from the document and the speech stand out in my mind.

I admit I came to the document a bit skeptical. Supposedly, it took many months to prepare – and feedback was kept to a minimum (bloggers were invited to talk about the plan AFTER it was released). And indeed my initial reading was somewhat disappointing. It read like McHale’s crack team of strategic planners had planned to step out of the TARDIS time machine in 2001 rather than, say, 2010. Simply put, the document reads too much as a dated conception of message management designed to counter or compete with the actions of other actors like China, Russia, and extremists groups (nevermind that their respective programs are for decidedly different objectives and have questionable effectiveness – they are doing stuff, so should we!). Aren’t US public diplomacy planners done with the “there’s a media war going on” kind of talk?

Yet interestingly, the document provides a compelling picture of the “complex global challenges” facing the US, including human rights, women’s rights, climate change, food security, etc. These are not just contexts for public diplomacy. They imply warrants for an aggressive public diplomacy that’s crucial for US diplomacy in a broader sense:

Making progress on these issues requires complex, multi-dimensional public engagement strategies to forge partnerships, mobilize broad coalitions, and galvanize public opinion across all sectors of society: activists and academics, business and civil society leaders, faith communities and NGOs

Put another way – the challenges of US foreign policy necessitates a kind of diplomacy does not make clear distinctions between diplomacy and public diplomacy. That said, the strategic implications of this move are not fully elaborated in admittedly limited venue of the slides.

So here are a few of my quick takes on statements made in support of the strategic imperatives. Language from the McHale document will be bolded. The statements are for the most part fine – but not exactly representative of a “change” in the Obama-inspired sense of the term. There is much here that is a continuation of previous conventional wisdom. I’m going to leave out comments about what I liked, and focus on what I find questionable.

1. Shape the narrative (develop proactive outreach strategies to inform, inspire, and persuade);” Develop and implement country/region-specific targeted media engagement plans to strengthen U.S. ability to shape the narrative and proactively present U.S. views

Sure, though clearly we need to consider the limits of the global communication infrastructure and indeed US ability to control any narrative and expect predicted outcomes. It’s not the US shouldn’t try to advocate a particular form of framing – that is, promote the kinds of evaluative stories that circulate about the US and its policies. But the US needs to understand the limitations of marketing-based analysis. And more importantly, the US needs to understand how such frames (or narratives) are created, acquire credibility, and in turn lock out alternative representations of the US. I’m pretty sure that “shaping the narrative” is a not straightforward task for public diplomacy.

Increase operating freedom for frontline staff at post through more flexible and nimble engagement with media and build capacity for aggressive, timely response

This is fine to say, but how do we reconcile this kind of flexibility with the institutional culture that may not incentivize a kind of “open source” approach to engagement? Off the cuff candor and The State Department don’t always appear in the same sentence in my head.

Recruit a leader for International Information Programs (IIP) with a deep understanding of behaviors, attitudes and preferences in international markets; strengthen capacity to analyze target audiences, leverage new technologies, and manage strategic outreach campaigns

When I first read this I thought – “We need someone who actually knows what they are doing.” But seriously folks, it seems to me like a lot of responsibility is being ladled onto IIP. In particular, balancing the goals of “shaping global dialogue” (does that mean CONTROLLING?), “communicating US perspectives,” and “countering misinformation” seems like a sweeping mandate. What it really sounds like is a serious intervention into both the content and structure of how information circulates about the US. As Robert Entman concisely pointed out in 2008 – this is not an easy task, and may very well be impossible. So perhaps the US should re-articulate its strategic imperatives towards something that is more realistic and less resonant with the information warfare vocabulary it inherited from the Cold War Bush administration.

2. “Expand and strengthen people-to-people relationships (build mutual trust and respect through expanded Public Diplomacy programs and platforms);”

Use social networking and connective technologies more effectively. Leverage new tools to communicate U.S. perspectives where appropriate. Participate in informal dialogues in new conversation spaces. Empower individuals to use these tools to play constructive roles within their own communities.

While I know that State Department people like Alec Ross and Jared Cohen are quick to temper the expectations of new technological tools for US diplomacy – I’m not sure if this kind of attitude has really filtered into the discussion of social networking technology for US PD. What do we expect these technologies to do? The empowerment angle is a good start, but I think there’s some more room here to articulate a coherent social media strategy. Empowerment does not begin with “Friending the US.” That said – I still think it’s an open question as to whether the US provision of social networking services (e.g. in Mexico, Pakistan) can translate into tangible “PD” gains – as if we had a metric to assess that anyway.

Deepen our connections with alumni of USG programs through better long-term outreach programs. Greatly expand alumni coordination, tracking, and outreach to turn these potential resources into credible advocates and community organizers

The fact that this is still an imperative is problematic. This really is a no-brainer.

3. “Combat violent extremism (counter violent extremist voices, discredit and delegitimize al Qaeda, and empower credible local voices);”

Honestly, I don’t think this is a job for US PD. Making this a key pillar of the US strategy elevates the extremist community too greatly. Public diplomacy should address the threat of extremism (whether Islamic or otherwise) through indirect means, by shaping the broader contours of global civil society and empowering others to diminish the space where extremists can flourish. Combating extremisms is a job for covert and overt psychological operations and a specific definition of strategic communication. However,

Provide tools and platforms for independent voices to expand their reach. Facilitate linkages between post contacts to create stronger civil society networks to advocate more effectively; provide access and training in social media to create broader platforms for local voices; equip post contacts with useful information and resources to deepen their impact

… this may very well be a good idea and continues to elaborate the role that PD could play as demonstrating a kind of value and credibility, rather than simply searching for new magic bullets to extol US virtues.

Yes, there needs to be ways to disrupt the kind of networks that sustain particular narratives to recruit and cultivate extremists. I’m not convinced this should be the central imperative for public diplomacy. This is one of those cases where the DoD can, and does, play a significant tactical and strategic role. And where we might find some disagreement over the definition of public diplomacy.

4. “Better inform policy-making (ensure foreign policy is informed upfront by an understanding of attitudes and opinions of foreign publics);”

This is the final frontier of PD recommendations – the avoidance of Murrow’s famous “crash landings.” I also think this kind of recommendation is nice to say, but it would require a considerable effort to combat the inertia the currently drives US foreign policy and diplomatic practice. Which is why the following statements are problematic:

Bolster capabilities to conduct and disseminate market and consumer research that tracks and analyzes important trends in global behavior and opinion

Leverage research and analysis to inform foreign policy formulation and tailor outreach to resonate with target audiences

Ensure that Public Diplomacy’s expertise and understanding of societal trends informs foreign policy formulation and implementation

First, the GAO has been repeatedly adamant about measurement and evaluation for US PD and strategic communication. But we need to make sure that there is use for the data. Put another way, what use is there for sophisticated measurements if there is no clear end for its use? In McHale’s strategic document there are a lot of different justifications and objectives for PD, which in turn would require a diversity of measures.

Simply deferring to the marketing state of the art is not a panacea. AC Nielson rating and certain kinds of polling may be of limited use when the goals of US PD transcend the management of customer relations or brand recognition. Rather, there may need to be some creative, innovative analysis that directly captures the implications of relationships and reveals routes to influence. For example, quantitative social network analysis and in-depth media ethnographies of diasporic populations might be used in conjunction with more traditional marketing-derived analysis to meet the needs of US strategic planning and assessment. Clearly, the US cannot simply import a plug-in-play evaluative framework derived from best practices in the commercial sector. The analysis solution will likely involve such practices, but also the creative input of PD professionals and cultural experts with years in the field.

Second, the contribution of PD to the formulation of foreign policy sounds so incredibly optimistic I am tempted to call in disingenuous. Rather, what I anticipate happening is not that PD will revolutionize diplomacy or US foreign policy, but that diplomatic practice will come to recognize the conceptual apparatus of public diplomacy as necessarily part of its own practices. PD won’t transform US foreign policy. PD – as both a concept and a set of practices – will be appropriated by those institutional actors empowered to actually do it. We can already see this with the DoD. At State, people like Alec Ross and indeed the implications of Secretary Clinton’s “architecture of cooperation” signal this kind of slow transformation in the identity of US statecraft.

5. “Deploy resources in line with current priorities (strengthen structures and processes to ensure coordinated and effective Public Diplomacy).”

This is the big whopper. It speaks directly to the question of leadership. Who is in charge of US PD? Who can effectively authorize and direct what is necessary for PD? Who can have the kind of resources and indeed, strategic agility, to actively craft a necessary and proactive US public diplomacy? While many want State to be in charge (and indeed defer to the direction of State), we then get statements like this from McHale:

The Global Strategic Engagement Center (GSEC), which is part of my office, is specifically chartered to support the NSC’s Global Engagement Directorate. We are expanding and upgrading GSEC to strengthen its ability to contribute across a broad range of U.S. government strategic communications and global engagement activities. To head the new GSEC, I have recruited Ambassador Richard LeBaron, formerly our Ambassador to Kuwait and one of our senior-most Foreign Service officers. He will arrive on the job this summer.

Ok, so we know that her office participates in meetings with both the NSC and DoD. But more importantly, where does the buck stop? It’s nice to know that the State Department’s “R” is a team player, but what now? I’m not suggesting that there needs to be central message control. I am suggesting the distributed responsibility that currently defines US public diplomacy leadership is a major reason that us PD critics are still having our critical discussion. This quote from McHale implies, at least in my mind, that maybe NSC could be directing global advocacy programs (which, btw, are only a part of what it means to do PD). Or more likely, that there’s enough implicit direction from the NSC so as to defray any substantive criticism about US public diplomacy’s strategic failures from the State Department. It’s not R’s failures. It’s the structure.

That said, I think this is ultimately a political issue that need to resolved by those with the authority and will to do so. As some have suggested, this issue of responsibility and resources may have to be worked out by Congress. Which isn’t a very comforting thought at this point. But I have some hope that leadership is out there.

More on McHale’s public diplomacy strategy presentation and the controversy surrounding it a forthcoming post.

I just posted a somewhat lengthy blog essay over at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy blog. It promotes Robin Brown‘s argument for a social network approach to the practice and study of public diplomacy.

As academics from various disciplines begin to look more aggressively at theoretical frameworks for public diplomacy scholarship, I think that social network analysis will be prominent. This insight isn’t exactly new -see the interesting work of Ali Fisher and Steven Corman – but I think it bears repeating. More importantly, I think that a social network approach isn’t just a programmatic way to study public diplomacy. It’s a valuable tool for evaluation and measurement that can directly impact how PD is both assessed and formulated.

There’s of course “room” for other theoretical perspectives and contributions (especially in normative, media, and critical theory), but social networks will increasingly offer compelling empirical measures that can speak to immediate concerns over the structures of influence – the terrain that PD and diplomacy must navigate in an informed way.