January 7, 2025
Intended for teachers of diplomacy and related courses, here is an update on resources that may be of general interest. Suggestions for future updates are welcome.
Bruce Gregory
Affiliate Scholar
Institute for Public Diplomacy
and Global Communication
George Washington University
BGregory@gwu.edu | BGregory1@aol.com
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension Archive, Institute for Public Diplomacy & Global Communication, George Washington University
Bruce Gregory, American Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Practitioners as Change Agents in Foreign Relations, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
eBook text and paperback here. Kindle and paperback here.
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century America, (Cornell University Press, 2024). Civil society groups have long partnered with government organizations to advance US diplomacy. Catholic clerics in the US war with Mexico. Journalists, clerics, and political operatives during the Civil War. Educators, philanthropists, celebrities, and Peace Corps volunteers in the twentieth century. Protestant missionaries began to bridge evangelism and diplomacy in the 1810s. Over time, it was a relationship grounded in intelligence gathering, interpreting events for publics at home and abroad, building schools, providing medical care, and collaboration and conflict with US diplomats on policy issues.
In this deeply researched book, brimming with insights, personalities, and anecdotes, Conroy-Krutz (Michigan State University) relates the undertold story of how missionary and government interests did, and often did not, align. Missionaries played important diplomatic roles as the United States displaced Indigenous peoples in North America and grew to become an imperial power. Abroad they often worked as consuls. They served as interpreters, helped to spread democracy, expand commerce, and promote colonial reforms. However, as citizens with private agendas that blurred religion and politics, they often created what the State Department called “missionary troubles.” Missionaries, merchants, and diplomats had overlapping and often conflicting priorities, notably in China and the Ottoman empire. Her book concludes with four case studies on relations between missionaries and the Department at the end of the nineteenth century: US imperialism in the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion, atrocities of the Congo Free State under King Leopold II, and the Armenian Genocide. Missionary Diplomacy fills a significant gap in the study of American diplomacy. Its optic is distinctly an American perspective, however. Ways in which America’s missionaries were perceived by others requires further research.
Magdalena Florek and James Pamment, eds. “Special Issue: Celebrating two decades of the Journal of Place Branding and Public Diplomacy,” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Vol. 20, November 19, 2024. For this PB&PD Special Issue, Florek (International Place Branding Association) and Pamment (Lund University) invited 15 contributors to celebrate the Journal’s 20th anniversary with reflections on the development and future of its related signature domains. Their brief contributions, currently online, provide a range of contrasting and shared perspectives.
Simon Anholt (Anholt & Co.), “Place branding: has it all been a big misunderstanding?”
Bruce Gregory (George Washington University), “Place Branding and Public Diplomacy’s third decade: trends, questions, and opportunities.”
Philip Kotler (Northwestern University), “What’s happening in place branding?”
Nicholas J. Cull (University of Southern California), “The value of a disciplinary platform: Place Branding and Public Diplomacy and the linkage of reputation to security.”
Nicolas Papadopoulos (Carleton University), “Place branding at 20: the history, the challenge, the promise.”
Eytan Gilboa (Bar-Ilan University), “Public diplomacy from global peace to global conflict.”
Mihalis Kavaratzis (Manchester Metropolitan University), “Place branding ‘in colours bold.’”
R.S. Zaharna (American University), “A generational tale of two public diplomacy paths: fierce competition, global collaboration.”
Keith Dinnie (University of Dundee), “Immersive, addictive, and professionalized — emerging trends and future directions in place branding and public diplomacy.”
Kathy R. Fitzpatrick, “Public diplomacy’s social turn: toward a new paradigm.”
Sebastian Zenker (Copenhagen Business School), “Size does matter: city branding versus small city, town, and rural place branding.”
Nancy Snow (California State University, Fullerton), “All women are diplomats.”
Ilan Manor (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), “Whose reality is it anyway? The decline and fall of the common ground in public diplomacy.”
Robert Govers, (Anholt & Co.), “Twenty years of place branding and public diplomacy.”
Alisher Faizullev, Diplomatic Nexus, YouTube Channel, Launched November 2024. Alisher Faizillev (University of World Economy and Diplomacy, Tashkent; former Uzbekistan ambassador to the UK, Benelux countries, EU, and NATO; and author of Diplomacy for Professionals and Everyone, Brill, 2022) has launched a YouTube channel featuring interviews with leading scholars on the study and practice of diplomacy. View conversations with Iver B. Neumann (The Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway), “A Social Evolutionary View of Diplomacy,” November 2024 (58 minutes); Paul Meerts (formerly at Clingendael Institute, The Hague), “Diplomatic Negotiations: The Past Can Overshadow the Present,” December 2024 (67 minutes); Marcus Holmes (William and Mary University), December 2024, “Diplomacy Meets Psychology and Neuroscience,” (80 minutes). Viewers can subscribe through his introductory video at the link.
Paula Lamoso González, “Liberal Intergovernmentalism Under Revision: The EEAS and the Creation of a Supra-State Diplomatic Body.” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 19 (2024), 619-655. Lamoso González (Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Spain) argues the European Union (EU) and its diplomatic service challenge the traditional interstate diplomacy model by “redefining the nature of the international order and diplomacy” – and by embodying the capability to significantly enhance EU public diplomacy. Her article posits answers to two questions. (1) Why did large Member States create a supra-state diplomatic institution, the European External Action Service (EEAS)? (2) Did institutional frameworks affect the negotiated outcome? Put differently, was creation of the EEAS effectively driven by domestic preferences of EU Member States or were outcomes influenced by the institutional framework in which their bargaining occurred? She begins with a survey of the EEAS’s development and gaps in the literature. She then examines theoretical constructs in rational choice institutionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism as a framework for her interviews with sixty negotiation participants and research on official documents. Did the negotiation process, as understood by practitioners, align with the theoretical constructs? Lamoso González concludes that unique institutional settings in which Member States and EU actors negotiated domestic preferences did affect EEAS outcomes. Additionally, she contends that preference formation was “domestic but not liberal” meaning domestic interest groups other than diplomatic corps were not involved. Her practitioner-oriented study offers insights into how an institutionalized negotiating framework influenced diplomacy, tradeoffs, and power struggles in a process that determined how a supra-state diplomatic actor could advance the goals of member states and also be controlled by them. “The bargaining was supra-state rather than intergovernmental.”
Zhao Alexandre Huang, “@China vs. @ASEAN on X: Their Digital Mediated Diplomacy Involving the #SouthChinaSea,” CPD Perspectives, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, September 2024. In this well researched and carefully argued paper, Huang (Université Gustave Eiffel) examines how China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) managed diplomatic relations and used digitalized diplomacy in South China Sea disputes between 2022 and mid-2023. His study employed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the X (formerly Twitter) accounts of four stakeholders: China, ASEAN, one ASEAN country with a pro-China political stance, Malaysia, and one with a more adversarial stance, the Philippines. Three research questions shaped his analysis. (1) How did Beijing and ASEAN use X to establish network structures and disseminate narrative messages about their claims? (2) How did China’s diplomats conceptualize the South China Sea issue and create narrative strategies about ASEAN? (3) What was ASEAN’s narrative strategy and what similarities and differences emerged across the member countries? Huang concludes that stakeholders on both sides in the South China Sea issue displayed caution in using social media to frame geopolitical issues. Both sides were directly critical of the other, but overall “they tended to maintain a positive and friendly stance, albeit with some ambiguity, as they advanced initiatives such as negotiating a code of conduct in the South China Sea.” The value of Huang’s paper turns on its nuanced empirical analysis and illuminating discussion of its research methodology and conceptual issues in digitalized mediated diplomacy.
Sarah J. Jackson, “Book Forum: Jürgen Habermas’s A New Structural Transformation| A New Transformation of the Public Sphere? Questions on Identity, Power, and Affect,” International Journal of Communiction, Vol. 18 (2024). The eminent and still productive Jurgen Habermas (born 1929) published the German edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. Its English translation by MIT Press in 1991 gave wider distribution to his ideas on the public sphere of civil society, communicative rationality, deliberative democracy, pragmatism, and mediated information and ideas. His book and works of the American philosopher John Dewey advanced theoretical concepts that influenced generations of media and communication scholars and, indirectly, informational and relational approaches in public diplomacy.
In A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Polity, 2023), Habermas reexamines his ideas in the context of digitalized communication, social media, transformation of legacy media, the rise of big tech companies, challenges of right wing populism, growing social inequality, and needed conditions for deliberative democracies to function well. He argues algorithmic control of communication flows, self-enclosed echo chambers, and the market power of large corporations necessitate appropriate regulation of digital media. For Habermas, “the deliberative character of public opinion and will formation is not a matter of political preference but a constitutional imperative” (p. 59).
In this book forum, Sarah J. Jackson assembles brief online essays (each four pages) that take the measure of Habermas’s current thinking and responses to his critics. Together they are a gateway for scholars, students, and practitioners to revisit the thinking of one the most important social and communication theorists of our time.
Sarah J. Jackson (University of Pennsylvania), “A New Transformation of the Public Sphere? Questions on Identity, Power, and Affect.”
Ya-Wen Lei, (Harvard University), “The Decay of the Public Sphere and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy.”
Barbara Pfetsch, (Freie Universitat Berlin). “The Decline of Deliberative Democracy in the Age of Digital Capitalism: Revisiting Habermas’s New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.”
Andrea D. Wenzel (Temple University) and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach (University of Southern California), “Can We Revitalize the Public Sphere From the Ground Up?”
Marvin Kalb, A Different Russia: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course, (Brookings Institution Press, 2024). Veteran journalist, writer, and fluent Russian speaker, Marvin Kalb (former NBC and CBS diplomatic correspondent) looks back on tensions between the US and USSR in the early 1960s through his perspectives as lifelong observer of Russia and recollections of his days as a young CBS correspondent in Moscow. In a personal narrative that covers the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna summit, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missile crisis, Kalb’s insights make for interesting history that invites comparison of how a Russia led by Khrushchev differs from a Russia led by Putin.
Anna Popkova, “Indigenous Dissent and Public Diplomacy during Russia’s War in Ukraine: The Case of Free Buryatia Foundation,” CPD Perspectives, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, November 2024. Popkova (Western Michigan University) develops two claims in this study. First, she advances the theoretical claim that indigenous non-state actors engaged in political dissent and disruption of state-sponsored public diplomacy can be considered public diplomacy actors by virtue of their reliance on “diplomatic capabilities in the absence of diplomatic status.” Second, she defends the empirical claim that the Free Buryatia Foundation (FBF), institutionally located in the United States, is a non-state public diplomacy actor. The FBF engages in “dissenting public diplomacy” through its construction and dissemination of strategic narratives that challenge (1) Russia’s hegemonic narratives about the war in Ukraine and (2) the vilification of “savage Buryat warriors” disseminated by international media. Her article provides an instructive overview of recent discussion of diplomacy’s boundaries and the rationale for treating some non-state actors as diplomatic actors. Through her focus on actors attentive to conflict and dissent, she broadens a discourse dominated by finding collaborative solutions to problems. Her article usefully contributes to a fundamental question in diplomacy’s boundaries agenda. How should we distinguish between diplomacy and the interactions of large numbers of activists, political factions, and other groups engaged in domestic politics and forms of cross-cultural communication apart from diplomacy?
Daniel F. Runde and Phillip Arceneaux, “Refocusing U.S. Public Diplomacy for a Multipolar World,”CSIS Brief, Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 2024. Runde (CSIS Senior Vice President) and Arceneaux (Miami University, Ohio) call on the US to reframe its approach to public diplomacy for a future “likely to be dominated by superpower competition between the United States, China, and Russia.” Two decades of democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarian regimes, they argue, make advancing interests, not values, a better cost-benefit strategy for dialogue and cooperation in multipolar world. Their report makes a variety of strategic and structural recommendations. (1) Adopt the “marketplace of loyalties” as a strategic choice, because “the philosophical applicability of the ‘marketplace of ideas’” is failing. (2) Leverage technologies to enhance public diplomacy’s storytelling context, elicit emotional responses, achieve persuasive outcomes, and counter disinformation and influence operations. (3) Broaden the range of foreign audiences and rethink restrictions on engagement with domestic audiences. (4) Position the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) as the central hub in whole of government public diplomacy. (5) Prioritize spending and audience research on countries and regions not aligned exclusively with China or Russia. (6) Keep US government media at arm’s length from “operational interference” by the White House and Congress. (7) Achieve advanced State Department training and professional development through partnerships with academic partners.
This report, like many others over the years, is filled with excellent ideas. Like others, it also will spark debate and rejoinders. Consider two. First, a hard binary between interests and values does not deal with the fact that Americans since 1776 have treated their values as interests to be advanced through example and actions. Second, since 1947 presidents and the National Security Council have repeatedly tried and failed to put a durable interagency coordination hub for large government departments and military services in a State Department bureau. The GEC was terminated in December 2024, the victim of right-wing partisan attacks. Had it survived, it could have coordinated some counter propaganda and disinformation efforts. However, it could not have coordinated diplomacy’s whole of government public dimension more broadly.
US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, “2024 Comprehensive Annual Report on Public Diplomacy & International Broadcasting,” December 16, 2024. The bipartisan Commission’s latest report is the work of new executive director Sarah Arkin, senior advisor Daniel Langenkamp, former senior advisor Jeff Ridenour, and program assistant Kristina Zamary. Arkin, an experienced foreign affairs professional, is a former staff member and Deputy Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She also held staff positions in the House of Representatives and the Department of State. Most of the 223-page report consists of in-depth budget and program information provided by the State Department’s bureaus and overseas missions and the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Particularly useful are the report’s graphics and clear presentation of public diplomacy’s complex funding categories, supplemental funding enhancements, and budget history. Kudos to Commission Chair Sim Farar and Vice Chair Bill Hybl who have served long past their expired terms as the Senate continues to dither on confirmation of their successors and other long pending presidential appointees.
The report’s six pages of recommendations (pp. 13-19) — directed to the White House, Congress, the Secretary of State and Department bureaus, and USAGM — are central to the Commission’s statutory mandate to evaluate and improve US public diplomacy’s capabilities and activities. Many are consistent with recommendations made often throughout its 76-year existence. Key recommendations include:
(1) Increase resources over time to reach peak budget levels just after the Cold War.
(2) Create and resource a “true strategic communications and information space directorate within the National Security Council (NSC)” and ensure greater public diplomacy participation in its PCC and sub-PCC processes.
(3) Update Congressional authorization and appropriations laws to facilitate foreign and domestic audience engagement.
(4) Change USAGM’s legislation to give the International Broadcasting Advisory Board authority to name an acting USAGM CEO during vacancies, exercise “meaningful oversight” to strengthen the journalistic independence of USAGM’s networks, and require that the Board approve the appointment and removal of VOA directors.
(5) Urge the Secretary of State to require greater public diplomacy engagement by senior officials and delegate more responsibility to bureau and mission spokespersons.
(6) If Congressional Republicans end statutory authority for the Global Engagement Center (GEC), State’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy (R) should divide the Center’s functions among the Under Secretariat and State’s regional bureaus. The Commission offers a detailed plan for how this should be done. [Congress terminated the GEC in December 2024.]
(7) Explore ways in which AI can reduce time consuming administration burdens and enable practitioners to prioritize high-value work.
(8) Consolidate information sharing among R’s four separate monitoring and evaluation and audience research entities and make their work more accessible to the public, practitioners, and stakeholders.
(9) Streamline management of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ programs at US missions and utilize new AI tools to reduce administrative burdens.
(10) Prioritize use of experienced Foreign Service Officers, marketing and advertising experts, and subject matter experts in public diplomacy training.
(11) Use USAGM’s move to a new building in Washington, DC to update its headquarters technology and evaluate its own and third-party infrastructure.
Mathew C. Weed, “Termination of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center,” CRS Insight, Congressional Reference Center, December 26, 2024. Because Congress failed to extend the Global Engagement Center’s (GEC) mandate to counter foreign disinformation and propaganda and coordinate related interagency activities, the GEC terminated on December 23, 2024. Veteran CRS foreign policy analyst Weed’s brief paper examines the GEC’s authority and mandate, its operations and activities, and State Department Office of Inspector General assessments of its “generally effective” performance. He also summarizes issues that led groups and Members of Congress to seek to defund the GEC based on its connections with partner organizations accused of restricting free speech on digital platforms in the United States. He concludes with a summary of efforts to extend GEC’s authorization and State Department plans to distribute its activities to other State Department bureaus. See also US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, “A Historical Overview of the Global Engagement Center [GEC]: ACPD Official Meeting Minutes,”May 15, 2024.
Recent Items of Interest
Madison Alder, “From Translation to Email Drafting, State Department Turns to AI to Assist Workforce,” December 11, 2024, Fedscoop.
Alliance for International Exchange, “Policy Priority Recommendations for the Incoming Trump Administration,”and Fact Sheet, November 2024.
Matt Armstrong, “Appointing Kari Lake as VOA Director?” December 12, 2024; “Why Do We Still Have VOA, RFE/RL, and Other Broadcasters under USAGM?” December 5, 2024; “Considering the Marketplace of Loyalty,” November 28, 2024; “Reviewing a Past Attempt to ‘Reform’ US International Broadcasting,” November 20, 2024, Arming for the War We’re In.
Matt Armstrong, “Part I: Why We Have a Voice of America,” December 23, 2024, Arming for the War We’re In.
Mark L. Asquino, “Why a Loyal Opposition is Essential to Democracy,” November 15, 2024, Fulcrum.
Martha Bayles, “The Diplomat Shows Why Soft Power is Hard,” December 19, 2024, National Review.
Maria Briana, “Public Diplomacy Through Networks of Care: The Case of Platforms Project,” November 13, 2024. CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
“Building a Better Diplomatic Service with Curiosity, Optimism, and Perseverance,” [Conversation with Amb. (ret.) Marc Grossman, winner of the 2024 American Foreign Service Association’s Award for Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy], December 2024, Foreign Service Journal.
CPD, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, “Annual Report, 2023-2024,” January 2025.
Nicholas J. Cull, “Gregory, Bruce (2024), American Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Practitioners as Change Agents in Foreign Relations, London, Palgrave,” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Book Review, published October 12, 2024, pp. 572-573.
Nicholas J. Cull, “Refocusing Public Diplomacy for a Dangerous World,” November 5, 2024, YouTube (approx. 1 hour), USC Center on Public Diplomacy and Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
Gordon Duguid, “Advice for New Political Ambassadors from a Foreign Service Veteran,” December 29, 2024, Washington International Diplomatic Academy.
Sarah Ellison, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, and Andrew Jeong, “Trump Wants Prominent Election Denier Kari Lake to Run Voice of America,” December 12, 2024, The Washington Post.
Bar Fishman and Ilan Manor, “Will Diplomats Join the X-odus?” November 21, 2024, CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
Andrew Gawthorpe, “The US’s Foreign Broadcasters May Soon Be Forced to Become Pro-Trump Propaganda,” December 19, 2024, The Guardian.
Rebecca Heilweil and Derek B. Johnson, “Can the Global Engagement Center Make the Case for Itself,” November 18, 2024, Fedscoop.
Kristin Edgreen Kaufman, “Why the Next Trump Administration May Prioritize City-Level Diplomacy,” December 18, 2024, Forbes.
Thomas Kent, “Combating Russia’s Global Disinformation Campaign,” December 9, 2024, The National Interest.
John Lenczowski, “To Win Without War, State Department Reform is Necessary: The US Must Tell Its Story to the World,” December 14, 2024, Fox News.
Jaycob P. Maldonado, “Costa Rica’s Ambassador to US Talks Forging Bilateral Policies,” Ambassadorial Perspectives on Public Diplomacy Series, Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, George Washington University, December 9, 2024,The GW Hatchet.
Sherry Mueller, “Special Gifts,” December 2024, Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Will Oremus, “State Department Disinfo Unit Faces Shutdown Amid the GOP’s War on Censorship,” December 12, 2024, The Washington Post.
Dan Robinson, “A New Trump Administration Faces Decision on Global Media Agency,” January 2025, Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Manuel Roig-Franzia, “Inside an American Reporter’s [RFE/RL] Russian Prison Ordeal,” November 22, 2024, The Washington Post.
Charlie Savage, “Trump Moves to Replace Officials Whom New Presidents Traditionally Leave Alone,”[Includes USAGM and VOA], December 20, 2024, The New York Times.
Michael Schneider, “Promoting Our National Interests Through UNESCO,” December 2024, Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Dan Spokojny, “Can We Monitor and Evaluate US Foreign Policy Strategy,” December 9, 2024; “The Benefits and Challenges of M&E Strategy,” December 16, 2021, Foreign Policy Expertise Substack.
Nahal Toosi, “Trump Pick’s Fox’s Tammy Bruce as State Spokesperson,” January 4, 2025, Politico.
Bill Wanlund, “What Might Kari Lake Have in Mind for VOA?” December 2024, Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Gem from the Past
Andrew F. Cooper, “Adapting Public Diplomacy to the Populist Challenge,” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, Online publication April 22, 2019, open access. Six years ago, diplomacy scholar Andrew Cooper (University of Waterloo, Canada) examined anti-diplomatic impulses in “systematically important states.” He wrote in an era of insurgent populism — Narendra Modi’s populism in India, Jair Bolsonaro’s in Brazil, the Brexit referendum, and threats to diplomacy presented in the first Trump administration. He described it as an operational style characterized by personalism, bilateral one-on-ones, constant surprises, and direct and highly targeted communication with domestic supporters. Cooper proposed a recalibrated model of public diplomacy. His menu listed five ingredients for adaptation to populism’s challenge.
(1) Direct diplomacy toward domestic as well as foreign audiences.
(2) Accept that “the personalistic public diplomatic brand of leaders” can be just as important as the brand of country.
(3) Incorporate and prioritize a transactional component that targets localized interests at home and abroad.
(4) Revitalize some traditional public diplomacy practices including cultural exchanges that place greater emphasis on instrumental motives and means.
(5) Convey positive narratives of how diplomats and diplomacy create value for the activities of domestic citizens.
No longer can public diplomacy be regarded as only externally directed, he argued, it “must embrace an accentuated and responsive domestic turn.” Cooper’s ideas are worth discussion and a fresh look in 2025.
An archive ofDiplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites (2002-present) is maintained at George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. Current issues are also posted by the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy, the Public Diplomacy Council of America, and Len Baldyga’s email listserv.