Jozef Batora. “Public Diplomacy Between Home and Abroad: Norway and Canada,” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, I (2006), pp. 53-80. Batora’s excellent article in the Journal’s first issue makes three central points: (1) successful public diplomacy presupposes an ability to engage multiple stakeholders in domestic constituencies as well as foreign publics; (2) public diplomacy of small and medium-sized states differs from large states in “core mission, volume and breadth of messages and images, and outset legitimacy;” and (3) public diplomacy is more effective when “embedded within both locally and globally attractive values.” Useful for its imaginative approach to public diplomacy concepts as well as its Norway and Canada case studies. Dr. Batora is a research scholar at the Institute for European Integration Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Habib Battah. “SMS: The Next TV Revolution,” Transnational Broadcasting Studies, June-December, 2006. The managing editor of The Journal of Middle East Broadcasters looks at the potential of interactive television and SMS (Short Message Service) technology fueled by rapid growth in the mobile industry (more rapid than in Internet infrastructure), the popularity of SMS text messaging with the region’s youth, and economic benefits for entrepreneurs in the region’s liberalizing telecommunications sector. Battah discusses the influence of Star Academy, Superstar, and other reality TV shows on interactive messaging; the role of text messaging in anti-government protests in Egypt, Kuwait, and Lebanon; and interactive television’s potential for challenging authority as revenues for regional broadcasters expand.
Clifford Bob. The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Duquesne University political science professor Bob explores reasons some causes succeed and many others do not in competition for NGO support in the “global morality market.” Much depends on media and marketing strategies, relative power dynamics between insurgent groups and transnational NGOs, organizational imperatives and strategic expectations of NGOs, and the vagaries of uncertainty and chance. Bob’s study challenges much conventional wisdom in thinking about the roles of nonstate actors in global civil society. (Courtesy of Donna Oglesby)
Hosam El Sukkary and Lawrence Pintak. “Interview with Hosam El Sukkary, Head of the BBC Arabic Service,” Transnational Broadcasting Studies, June-December, 2006. Sukkary responds to questions about the BBC’s plans to resume television broadcasting in Arabic in 2007 as part of an integrated multimedia platform to include radio, TV, and Internet operations with interactive content. How will it compete? How will its content differ? Why should the British public fund it? Will it be public diplomacy? Will it have a political message? Will it be Britain’s Alhurra?
Sonya Fatah. “FM Mullahs: In Pakistan’s Tribal Frontier, ‘Talk Radio’ Fuels Sectarian Killings,“ Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 2006, 16-17. South Asian based journalist Fatah looks at the rise of illegal radio stations in the context of President Musharraf’s decision to withhold licenses from jihadi and pro-Indian groups and the availability of inexpensive, portable broadcasting equipment. Since 2002, when all Pakistan radio was state-owned, the government has licensed more than 50 private radio stations; most are in the Punjab.
Nathalie Frensley and Nelson Michaud. “Public Diplomacy and Motivated Reasoning: Framing Effects on Canadian Media Coverage of U.S. Foreign Policy Statements,” Foreign Policy Analysis, (International Studies Association) 2, July 2006, 201-221. Frensley (University of Texas, Austin) and Michaud (Ecole nationale d’aministration publique) use statistical modeling and media frame analysis of Presidential speeches to provide empirical evidence for including public diplomacy in “take offs” and “crash landings” in foreign policy process — a metaphor often used by former USIA Director Edward R. Murrow. The authors show that Canadian prestige press reporters responded to U.S. policy statements as “motivated reasoners” rather than on the basis of “tabula rasa” or Bayesian reasoning. Their empirical data confirm what most practitioners have argued intuitively: “a take off role for public diplomacy is more likely to achieve a more meaningful hearing abroad for U.S. foreign policy positions.”
[Note: Murrow famously used the “take offs” and “crash landings” metaphor in a public diplomacy context. The metaphor originated, however, in a 1939 Gridiron speech by former Minnesota governor and Presidential candidate Harold Stassen according to an oral history interview with Stassen in the Truman Presidential Library. Stassen said he used the phrase when encouraging FDR to bring senior Republicans “along on the foreign policy takeoffs as well as on the crash landings.” The metaphor was used subsequently by Senator Arthur Vandenberg in urging bipartisan support for the United Nations and other foreign policies in the 1940s and by Murrow in the 1960s. BG]
The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. HJD, launched earlier this year, is an academic journal devoted entirely to diplomacy, which its editors define as “the institutions and processes by which states and others represent themselves and their interests to one another.” Articles in the first edition can be downloaded without charge. Several are annotated in this email. HJD is published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. It is co-edited by Jan Melissen, director of the Clingendael Diplomatic Studies Programme, Netherlands Institute of International Relations and Paul Sharp, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. The editors welcome http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mnp/hjd/2006/00000001/00000001 articles for review from scholars and practitioners.
The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, “After Secularization,” (Spring & Summer, 2006). The latest edition of the University of Virginia’s Center for Religion and Culture is devoted entirely to 17 articles on the secularization debate and its impact on the social sciences and the place of religion in today’s world. Articles of interest to public diplomacy teachers and students include:
Jose Casanova (New School for Social Research), “Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective” 7-22.
Talal Asad (City University of New York Graduate Center), “French Secularism and the ‘Islamic Veil Affair,'” 93-106.
Thomas Albert Howard, (Gordon College), “American Religion and European Anti-Americanism,” 116-126.
Olivier Roy (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Institut d’Etudes Politiques), “Islam in the West or Western Islam? The Disconnect of Religion and Culture,” 127-132.
Charles T. Mathews (University of Virginia) and Peter Berger (Boston University), “An Interview with Peter Berger,” 152-161.
Kevin M. Schultz (University of Virginia), “Secularization: A Bibliographic Essay,” 170-177.
Alan L. Heil, Jr. “America’s Vanishing Voice,“ Transnational Broadcasting Studies, June-December, 2006. The Voice of America’s former Deputy Director and author of Voice of America: A History (Columbia University Press, 2003) argues that VOA is on the verge of disappearing as a global network. Heil takes issue with priorities in U.S. international broadcasting’s budget request for 2007, the Broadcasting Board of Governor’s abolition of most VOA broadcasts in English, disproportionate spending on Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV (U.S. funded Arabic language services) “despite growing doubts about their overall impact,” and reductions in shortwave and other VOA language services.
Alan K. Henrikson. “Diplomacy’s Possible Futures,“ The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, I (2006), 3-27. The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s Henrikson discusses five possible models for diplomacy: (1) “disintermediation” in which diplomats adopt business methods and the Internet to compete with a dynamic private sector; (2) “Europeanization,” subordination of bilateral diplomacy within a regional framework, leaving space for public diplomacy functions; (3) “democratization” which expands diplomatic roles for civil society institutions and states previously excluded from decision-making in multilateral organizations; (4) “thematization” requiring more flexible diplomacy in dealing with terrorism, disease, and other threats; and (5) “Americanization” where diplomacy is “conducted along the lines of US domestic politics, with lobbying and advocacy becoming major activities.”
Brian Hocking and Donna Lee. “The Diplomacy of Proximity and Specialness: Enhancing Canada’s Representation in the United States,“ The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, I (2006), 29-52. Hocking (University of Loughborough) and Lee (University of Birmingham) examine conceptual, structural, and process changes in diplomatic representation driven by changes in international and domestic political environments. The authors focus on spatial and issue-related aspects of proximity; characteristics of “special relationships;” the increasing importance of diplomatic missions as nodes in knowledge networks; and diplomacy as a “consumer good” in the context of mass tourism, crisis management, and the increased importance of consular services. Includes a case study of the Canadian-U.S. relationship and Canada’s Enhanced Representation Initiative — a “whole of government approach” involving 14 government departments “in the delivery and management of Canadian diplomacy across North America.”
NAFSA: Association of International Educators. “Restoring U.S. Competitiveness for International Students and Scholars,“ June 19, 2006. NAFSA finds the absence of a national strategy has diminished U.S. capacity to attract students and scholars with adverse consequence for U.S. security, economic, and leadership interests. The report updates and expands earlier NAFSA recommendations with emphasis on greater U.S. government coordination (Departments of Homeland Security, State, Commerce, and Education) and reforms in excessive barriers in the U.S. immigration system.
Joseph S. Nye., Jr. “Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2006, 139-148. Nye compares the Bush Administration’s transformational grand strategy with those of twentieth century presidents and offers a critique of Bush’s leadership style and policy choices. Nye’s analysis includes an assessment of soft and hard power capabilities. He concludes that Bush’s legacy and a successful transformation depend on the “still uncertain outcome of the preventive war in Iraq” in which “the odds are against him and he is running out of time.”
Orphan Pamuk. Snow, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; Vintage International paperback edition, 2005). Pamuk’s political novel about an exiled poet who returns to Turkey to find love and report for a German newspaper on suicides by Islamic girls forbidden to wear head scarfs has been widely acclaimed as a compelling narrative of secularism, religious fanaticism, modern Turkey, and East-West relations. Useful also for its handling of television and other media influences on the political agendas of its protagonists.
Robert Satloff, Eunice Youmans, and Mark Nakhla. Assessing What Arabs Do, Not What They Say: A New Approach to Understanding Arab Anti-Americanism, The Washington Institute, Policy Focus #57, July 19, 2006. This report on the Institute’s Keston Project on the Battle of Ideas in the Middle East is based on inventories of media-reported anti-American demonstrations in Arab countries between 2000 and 2005. The authors argue that “regional animosity toward the United States and its policies is episodic and event-driven, with little evidence of a continually rising tide of popular hatred.” Questioning excessive reliance on opinion surveys, they urge policymakers “to pay at least as much attention to Arab behavior as they do to potentially distorted and easily manipulated perceptions of Arab public opinion.”
Chris Sullentrop, “Playing With Our Minds,” The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2006, 14-21. The author of The Opinionator, an online column for The New York Times, examines the growing cultural impact of video games and concludes they are powerful teaching tools with positive and negative characteristics. Sullentrop looks at the uses of games for recruiting, training, sports, education, and promoting values agendas. Contains numerous examples and references to theoretical literature.
Sydney Tarrow. The New Transnational Activism, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hailed as a major contribution to the literature on transnational movements, Cornell University’s professor of government and sociology addresses three central questions: (1) how does growing transnational activism change actors and their connections, claims,and political strategies; (2) are links between nonstate actors, their states, and international politics creating a new political arena that “fuses domestic and international contention; and (3) how does this affect “inherited understanding of the autonomy of national politics from international politics?” Tarrow argues that while globalization provides incentives and themes for transnational activism, it is internationalism that offers a framework, focal points, and structured opportunities for activists many of whom are “rooted cosmopolitans.” A rich mixture of history, case studies, and analytical depth. (Courtesy of Donna Oglesby)
Gabriel Weimann. “Deadly Conversations,” YaleGlobal Online, July 13, 2006. Weimann, professor of communication at Haifa University and author of Terror on the Internet (2006), argues that the Internet provides terrorists with a forum for debating ideas and strategy. Attention to online controversies and conflicting perspectives between Al Qaeda and other factions, he suggests, reveals insights into mindsets and offers practical ways to support voices that oppose terrorism and “channel the discourse to non-violent forms of action.”