BOOK REVIEW: Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Era
By Nicholas J. Cull
Reviewed by Jeff Patterson, PhD
Jeff Patterson, PhD, is a lecturer in strategic communications and political strategy at The University of Texas at Austin.
In his latest book, Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age,Nicholas J. Cull provides a much-needed modernization of public diplomacy textbook for international affairs and communications students.
While a lot has been written in recent years about the transformations of public diplomacy, Cull’s work stands out for shaking off the dust of traditional public diplomacy concepts and for bringing them into a new world of international discourse.
A professor of Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California (USC), Cull makes clear early on that we are no longer operating in the macrocosm of the Cold War, when public diplomacy was primarily seen as a bipolar competition of government-supported cultural exchanges and propaganda.
Today, economic and cultural globalization have transcended and eroded nation-state boundaries and opened the public sphere to concepts of branding and identity politics. The field of international discourse has now grown to include a dizzying number of state and non-state actors, criminal enterprises, regional interests, corporations, non-governmental agencies, and individuals who connect with one another through digital networks that facilitate their relationships with varying degrees of transparency.
Not only has the technology and practice of public diplomacy changed over the past two decades, but so have the nature and expectations—even if we may still be uncertain of the terrain. Interestingly, Cull quotes British analyst Simon Anholt at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2010, noting that, “There is only one superpower on the planet. That superpower is public opinion.” Any player seeking to affect the international public arena does well to find the means to influence that superpower.
As a historian, Cull is careful to provide context and continuity to the classical concepts of public diplomacy that have remained even as the public arena has changed: listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchange diplomacy, and international broadcasting. To those five, he extends his analysis to two additional concepts: national branding and partnership.
While neither branding or inter-governmental partnerships are “new” to international relations, Cull argues that the rapid pace of globalization and the ubiquity of media technologies have elevated their importance. Increasingly, nations have begun to adopt the commercial notion of “branding,” when projecting an image on the international stage. Media technologies have allowed this image formation to be appropriated away from a centralized governmental program, to the framing of cultural identity (for good and ill) by numerous social and commercial actors.
At the same time, globalization has both caused, and prompted attention to, transnational partnerships to address regional and global problems (e.g., illicit trade, human trafficking, global climate change, misinformation campaigns) and opportunities (e.g., trade, fluidity of capital and labor). The level of cooperation and collaboration has a proven impact on the nature of public diplomacy and the nature of how governments and nongovernmental organizations set the tone for global dialogue.
The only critique of the book comes from the conclusion, where Cull provides a listing of the most important lessons for contextualizing public diplomacy, and three “needs” to be addressed. It is specifically Cull’s second need, which addresses the use of “sharp powers” (a term by the National Endowment for Democracy for a country’s manipulative activities to influence and undermine a target country) which sparks greater interest. Given the ongoing intense concern about election interference, deep fake forgeries, and manipulation of political discourse social media, one is left wishing Cull would have elaborated more on the potential impacts and remedies for this issue.
Nevertheless, that is a minor regret for a much-needed textbook about the modern circumstances of public diplomacy, one that will certainly serve well as an introductory foundation for students and teachers of public diplomacy and international engagement.
Public Diplomacy earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
The reviewer, Jeff Patterson, PhD, is a lecturer in strategic communications and political strategy at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founder of GlobalPublicSphere.org, an online forum that encourage dynamic interdisciplinary research and dialogue on the emerging concepts and trends in global communication, public diplomacy, and civic engagement.
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