But Matt’s point does suggest one (of many) wedge issues between the study and practice of public diplomacy. Scholars of PD have long argued about definitions and terms, in order to be better analysts. How can we do studies if we don’t know exactly what we are comparing or describing in an otherwise coherent, systematic way? Eytan Gilboa argued at ISA that interdisciplinary PD studies is fractured along disciplinary lines – we “see” what makes sense to use as scholars of diplomacy, international relations, communication, public relations, etc. Gilboa’s call for an “instrumentalist” approach is an appeal to terministic parsimony. We should agree on terms before we start studying, and, we should use the terms that practitioners use. If I’m going to develop some “Theory of Cultural Exchange,” my idea of cultural exchange should match what a practitioner would think that term means. Ask some international broadcasters if they think what they do is “public diplomacy.”

While I agree that sharing some terms is important for making what academics do available and useful for practitioners/policy-makers, the burden isn’t entirely on scholars to make this happen. Just like their over-worked cousins in government, academics labor to produce products that are of value to those that will judge them: other academics. And this requires attention to the genre constraints of that job. While I’m not a fan of esotericism for its own sake, I think practitioners could help themselves by being better consumers of academic argument. Academics may not always produce “shovel ready” ideas for immediate use, but their benefit (one could say, their vocational mandate) is their position to observe and reflect on what practitioners do in ways that are not always available to those they study, but may nevertheless provide insight.

For example, Robin Brown’s proposal for four “ideal types” of public diplomacy and strategic communication does not provide a readily applicable vocabulary that seamlessly corresponds to what public diplomacy practitioners do around the world. Ideal types do not necessary reflect “reality” – they are analytically convenient constructions, derived from observation and research, to make better scholarly arguments. As Brown notes, his four ideal types: Expanded Diplomacy, National Projection, Cultural Relations, and Political Warfare, are drawn from his extensive research, to help categorize, compare, and understand. They are not divorced from reality – they help us order and make sense of it.

Which brings me back to the power of words and language. I agree that we academics need more coherent and systematic ways to make arguments. That’s part of our job. But I would also argue that the politics of definition are just as interesting when talking about public diplomacy and strategic communication. Yes, it’s important to establish terms in order to better study the effectiveness of a particular program or to construct a focused case comparison. But it’s also important to look at the unstable nature of terms to constrain policy action and to shape understanding of the world. When US State Department technology advisor Alec Ross pointedly distinguishes “public diplomacy” from his own policies and programs, this signals a host of assumptions about the significance of US public diplomacy. The US has launched numerous online diplomacy initiatives, predicated on communication with publics, but yet it’s not “public diplomacy.” What does this mean for bigger questions about public diplomacy’s role in the relation between global politics and global communication?

As I contend, the rhetoric of policy itself is a crucial part of understanding the limits and possibilities of public diplomacy. What states do is just as important as how they explain, defend, and justify what they do. This attention to the language of PD is admittedly one small slice of the many questions that drive research in this field, but I think it alerts us to the contentious nature of definition that inevitably haunts the practice of public diplomacy and its integration into the larger, evolving institution of diplomacy.

There’s much more than I can put forth in one blog post. But a brief summary of some key insights:

I) Critical Inquiry. The political economy of information technology is increasingly relevant to public diplomacy-related concerns. Put simply, we need to be aware of the critical implications of foreign policies that seek to deal with the global infrastructure of communication. I do not mean simply governance – but how policies (like the US “Internet Freedom” agenda) work to forward broader soft and hard power objectives. Jillian York‘s presentation to the New Media working group, in particular, highlighted the issues at stake when the US spends money on technologies to allow foreign publics to circumvent network authoritarian control, while at the same time allowing US companies to export the technologies that enable censorship abroad.

II) What are publics? A number of paper’s grappled with the issue of audience analysis. Steven Corman‘s paper on audience segmentation leaps to mind. There was an evident concern with how we understand publics as politically effective, as necessary for foreign policy objectives, and as audiences to be reached through particular communication tactics.

III) Theory. Eytan Gilboa‘s paper called for a language for PD theory that can be shared by practitioners and scholars. Not sure I necessarily agree with this, but it does point to the need for more coherent terms and categories, something that Robin Brown argued for in his paper. Caitlin Byrne‘s paper on the utility of constructivist IR theory in PD research was a refreshing stance, and illustrated how constructivist research could provide some theoretical coherence to PD studies, while PD could offer constructivism a vehicle for analysis. Indeed, the charge of PD to shape an iterative process of mutual understanding between states, let alone publics, seems to point to PD as a kind of “applied constructivism.” Yiwei Wang‘s linkage of soft power to national identity was also important call to contextualize some of the key theoretical warrants for why states engage in soft power. His assertion that the US position on soft power comes from a position of unquestioned legitimacy (read: the US is always “right”), was a helpful reminder to broaden our understanding of how states interpret soft power and public diplomacy. Gary Rawnsley‘s study of Taiwanese soft power programs also illustrated the problems with the “architecture” of public diplomacy programs, which reflect how states fail to adapt to the requirements of wielding soft power effectively. Rawnsley’s analysis shows a consequence of a problematic architecture: Taiwan is trying to promote the wrong thing in order to cultivate soft power. Instead of amplifying the message that Taiwan was a steward of Chinese culture, it should highlight its unique status as a Chinese democracy.

IV) Method. Many of the papers, including ones previously mentioned, argued for more comparative work. Public diplomacy and strategic communication are too often understood from the US experience. It was again important to see that scholars have taken up the charge to internationalize PD studies. I was also struck by some smaller scale studies, that opened up new lines of systematic inquiry. Emily Metzgar’s research on Japan’s JET program was a straightforward and illuminating study of public diplomacy program effects, that also helped to provide a route towards measurement strategies that are seemingly lacking amongst PD practitioners. Frank Smith‘s work on science diplomacy, through a study of a US Navy program in Indonesia, was a very insightful study, illustrating the tensions between the politics and the science at stake in understanding how science diplomacy actually works in context.

Bigger questions seemed to animate a lot of the panels across the conference. Questions that dealt with how academics understood the way technology transformed contentious politics, democratic action, and the practice of statecraft. It was clear that this scholarly community is attempting to understand how the context of network-enabling information technologies are transforming the traditional institutions of international politics – from conceptions of action and identity to governance and diplomacy. There was a clear sense that while maybe some theories relevant to international studies may yet hold, our sense of the practice of things like public diplomacy needs to catch up with reality. It was also clear that insights from outside the traditional sphere of international relations/political science might yet shed some light on communication and media effects, the cultural foundations of new media ecologies, and the constitutive effects of communication on international institutions.

There were many more papers and authors I would have liked to mention here. Suffice to say it was a stimulating, at times frustrating, and inspiring conference. I’ll dig deeper into some of the issues raised at ISA in future posts.

It’s not that there can’t be theories of public diplomacy. However, as I understand it, some practitioners fail to see the need for an explanatory theory for something that is so contextualized and often hard to “teach” in a comprehensive way. Public diplomacy is statecraft, public relations, inter-personal communication, cross-cultural communication, persuasion, networking, media and technological competence, and of course, about good writing. I actually would tend to agree with the practitioner bias, in that we don’t really need a grand theory of public diplomacy. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we don’t really have many universalizing theories for diplomacy either.

Public diplomacy is really a term of convenience, a cover word for a range of practices: cultural diplomacy, exchange diplomacy, information programs, public affairs, advocacy, and yes, even international broadcasting. The point here is not to propose a definition. Rather, it is to offer that we don’t have a vocabulary to make the kinds of claims that lend themselves to explanatory theories that apply across the range of what PD can be. While scholars such as Eytan Gilboa admirably seek new vistas for public diplomacy theorizing, general or even “middle range” theories may have limited utility for public diplomacy. Which is one reason why I don’t really care to participate in the construction or defense of totalizing theories.

To understand public diplomacy at the level of theory is get past simple definitions, by decomposing the practices of public diplomacy into its component parts or activities. In so doing, we open up those vistas that people like Gilboa and Entman seek in their lament over a lack of theory. What do I mean by this?

I mean quite simply to focus on what we actually want to know. If the point is to articulate how particular messages influence attitude or behavior, we have a ready stockpile of mass and strategic communication research techniques available to test messaging. Practitioners (cough, the State Department, cough), in particular, don’t need to reinvent the wheel of “measurement and evaluation.” Rather, they need to be better consumers of what academics do when they study similar things.

However, there is much to be said about how institutional analysis and social theory can inform our understanding of why public diplomacy exists as a part of a strategic culture, a set of norms, a component of a larger foreign policy apparatus. Such “constitutive” or “materialist” theories certainly didn’t originate in public diplomacy studies – but they can help the academic community understand public diplomacy as a set of social practices, value commitments, and historical, path-dependent institutions. We can leave public diplomacy in order to find theoretical frameworks that help us understand public diplomacy in relation to broader contexts that invetiably shape its practice. This point is elegantly argued in Iver Nuemann’s critique of the English School scholars tradition of studying diplomacy.

“Leaving Public Diplomacy” in order to study it is a point I will return to in future posts – about how to see cognate fields as relevant to the study of public diplomacy.

So what does the communal pool of knowledge and expertise on public diplomacy actually have in lieu of such theories? We have types and categories. In particular, I am thinking of the work of RS Zaharna and Robin Brown’s thinking on this subject. Typology creation can be very valuable, especially since public diplomacy studies is fraught with (friendly) definitional debate. More on this in a future post. Probably after ISA 2012.

So why did Intermap go radio silent? I was busy trying to get “The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts” finished and published.

That said, I’m eagerly pursuing new projects – many of which will be talked about here. And I know that Intermap is joining a much more vibrant blogosphere on issues pertaining to international communication. Mountainrunner is blogging again. RS Zaharna’s blog project is exciting. Robin Brown’s blog is always stimulating and provocative. Steven Corman his research colleagues at ASU have continue to provide great insight on their COMOPS Journal blog. And of course, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy and GW’s “Take Five” blog are but a few examples of a steadily growing, diverse field of online discussion. And that’s not even mentioning the active twitter feeds the fuel the media ecology on public diplomacy and international communication studies. So let’s get started.

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.”

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.

The latter clarification is largely academic – but important to make. Masters programs in public diplomacy

Will there by a theory of public diplomacy? Right now, we have a variety of theories and related perspectives that are appropriate and applicable to public diplomacy scholarship. From micro-level theories of communication, such as agenda setting, priming, framing, and a slew of persuasion theories…. to critical perspectives from social theory that force us to consider how public diplomacy practices reinforce or convey ideological messags

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.

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.

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.