Public Diplomacy and Political Warfare Part 4: Communication and Organization

I started this series of posts with a memo from the Political Warfare Executive.   The PWE had a particular take on political warfare because of its organizational history.  It’s previous incarnation had been as half of the Special Operations Executive, the organization created by Churchill in July 1940 to wage unconventional warfare in occupied Europe.  Because of the tensions between white and black propaganda activities,  the propaganda arm of the organization, SOE1, was split off to become the PWE.  The result was that the PWE definition of political warfare had a particular focus on propaganda and as a result underplayed the idea of political warfare as competitive organization that runs through Marxist-Leninist versions of the idea.

Soviet (and Maoist) political techniques placed a great weight on building organizations (eg Barghoorn 1964, Schurmann 1966).  This reaches an apotheosis  in Chinese and Vietnamese theories of people’s war.  Western theories of strategy assume the existence of armed forces and focus on how to use them.  Mao and Giap assume that you have to build the army from scratch (eg Pike 1986).  This converts strategy into an exercise in competitive  organization.  We attempt to organize while trying to disorganize the other side.  We try to undermine their social bases of their power while constructing our own (Atkinson 1981).  Communication is an instrument that legitimates our activity while undermining their side.   An important part is about creating a vision of the future where our side is going to be victorious.  However, this isn’t just an exercise in technique; if it’s going to work it has to draw on the realities of the situation.

This connection between communication and organization pops up in  Cold War thinking on writings on ‘public diplomacy’ notably in W. Philips Davison’s (1965) International Political Communication. Davison argues that the key role of communication should be to support the organization of pro-US political forces rather than attacking the communists.

There’s a  connection  with more recent arguments about public diplomacy as collaboration (eg Cowan and Arsenault 2008, Fisher 2008), while collaboration is seen as a way of breaking down conflicts it’s important to keep in mind that historically conflict is the most powerful generator of collaboration.  Political Warfare stands for the conflict strand of public diplomacy.  Any comprehensive approach has got to keep both the conflictual and collaborative strands in focus.

Atkinson, A. (1981) Social Order and the General Theory of Strategy. London ;;Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Barghoorn, F.C. (1964.) Soviet Foreign Propaganda. Princeton, N.J: Princeton U.P.

Cowan, G., and A. Arsenault (2008) ‘Moving from Monologue to Dialogue to Collaboration: The Three Layers of Public Diplomacy’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616: 10-30

Davison, W.P. (1965) International Political Communication. New York: Praeger.

Fisher, A. (2008) ‘Music for the Jilted Generation: Open-Source Public Diplomacy’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 3: 129-152.

Pike, D. (1986) PAVN: Peoples Army of Vietnam. Novato, CA: Presidio Press.

Schurmann, F. (1966) Ideology and Organization in Communist China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Press TV and the Regulation of International Broadcasting

A quick comment on the decision of OFCOM the UK communications regulator to revoke the license of the Iranian international  broadcaster Press TV  A lot of  contemporary international broadcasting depends on platforms  (VHF radio, cable TV, national satellite TV) that are under the control of the country they are broadcasting to.

This creates a double problem. The international broadcaster is subject to a regulatory regime that is primarily designed to enforce national broadcasting priorities. This creates the risk that the international broadcaster will fall foul of their license terms.  On the other hand an effort by the regulator to enforce license terms will like be perceived as a political action not as a regulatory.  Press TV has pointed to British and American government concerns about its operations in the Cablegate files which record a meeting between the US Embassy and the Foreign Office

¶4. (S) While lodging complaints at the ITU has symbolic value, Turner said her government recognizes the body has no enforcement authority. Therefore, HMG is looking at other ways to address the issue. HMG is exploring ways to limit the operations of the IRIB’s Press TV service, which operates a large bureau (over 80 staff) in London. However, UK law sets a very high standard for denying licenses to broadcasters. Licenses can only be denied in cases where national security is threatened, or if granting a license would be contrary to Britain’s obligations under international law. Currently, neither of these standards can be met with respect to Press TV, but if further sanctions are imposed on Iran in the coming months, a case may be able to be made on the second criterion.

¶5. (S) In the immediate term, HMG plans to lobby the French government to approach Eutelsat and press it to drop IRIB broadcasts from the Hotbird satellite. The IRIB broadcasts several channels from the satellite, both domestically (even most terrestrial TV channels in Iran are dependent on a satellite and repeaters) and internationally, so it is an important source of income for Eutelsat. While it would be unlikely for the company to agree to drop the IRIB broadcasts spontaneously, Turner believes it would be susceptible to an approach by the French government because of the cover it would gain from complying with an official government request. HMG would appreciate USG engagement with the government of France on this issue.

It could be argued that the operations of Press TV should be treated in political terms for instance by insisting on reciprocity in the treatment of international broadcasters. Press TV should be restricted in its operations as long as Western broadcasters to Iran are jammed.  Of course Iran is more bothered by the operation of Western broadcasters than the other way round and presumably wouldn’t agree to such a deal.

There’s an interesting mismatch between the international politics of the issue and the efforts of Western countries to depoliticize communications policy.  In the wake of the UK action there voices are being raised in the US about the actions of Press TV and other Iranian state funded broadcasters in the US.

21st Century Statecraft and Information Imperialism

I teach international communications and one concept that tends to loom large in the minds of students is cultural imperialism.  From a teacher’s point of view this is both an opportunity and a challenge.  It’s an opportunity because it gives a big body of literature that students are interested in that demonstrates the problems caused by imprecise concept formation and questionable evidence.  It’s a challenge for the same reason; cultural imperialism and its variants mean different things to different people  as well as being a term of political abuse.   If you can get through the topic so that students grasp the debates they will have learned quite a lot about the importance of precision and clarity in academic writing.

It’s always struck me that much of the writing about cultural imperialism is profoundly state centric. It is about the defence of the nation-state against foreign influences.  The problem is that it ignores the fact that the national project is usually one big exercise in imposing a particular culture on everyone within a territory.

This is a long introduction to this link.  At Meta-Activism Mary Joyce has a very interesting post discussing criticisms of US net freedom and democracy support programmes as from a cultural imperialism perspective.  This isn’t a viewpoint that has been widely taken and it provides a valuable perspective.

I think that this reminds us of two very important points.  Firstly, from the perspective of the twitterverse US information policies are unquestionably benign other people may not see things in the same way.  Secondly, sovereignty is an important part of the contemporary international system and the rise of the BRICS is only going to reinforce Westphalian norms.  This means that political and ethical questions raised by information intervention and public diplomacy are going to intensify not disappear.  The politics of these issues are more complex than they might appear from the Googleplex.

PD2.0: How Much Effort Do You Need?

Via Cat Tully’s blog I came across some discussion on the Socialbakers social media measurement site about corporate use of Facebook.  They argue that posting too much can undermine user engagement just as much as too little.  Looking at brands versus media companies thei view is that brands should post 5-10 times a week while media companies should aim for a multiple of this – somewhere up to a maximum of 100.  It woudl then follow that MFAs/Embassies should clarify what the objective of their FB presence.

In a later post they take up the issue of when does managing a Facebook page become a full time job.  Although posting 5-10 posts a week wouldn’t require anything like this they you also need to look at the number of fans and the level of interaction required.  Increasing numbers of fans means more comments and a greater requirement to respond.  Socialbakers point to cases where companies have a team of three people to manage their Facebook presence.  This comes back to the issue of how much resource social media requires if it is to attain its full potential.  The problem is one of relationship management- building a set of social media relationships requires constant attention.  The issue then becomes one of trading off the contribution of a particular level of FB engagement versus other public diplomacy activities.

US Cyberspace Policy in Historical Perspective

The US has just issued its strategy for cyberspace.

The question that occurred to me is how does this relate to the history of US international communications policy? In Telecommunications and Empire Jill Hills sees US communications policy as a push for a global system of liberalized rules. While the idea of ‘free flow’ that emerged in the 1940s had an explicitly political, freedom of the press aspect it was also rooted in the interests of US telecommunications companies in their struggle to gain access to the British imperial markets. The US push for a single global communications market ran up against the norms of sovereignty and was undercut by the resistance to opening the US market.  The result has been a system of communications regulation that combines international rules with national regulatory systems.  The internet has been an exception to this framework a sui generis mix of largely private sector actors.  On a quick reading of the strategy one gets the sense that the policy is converging towards other areas of international communications policy.  The rise of security and law and enforcement concerns means greater importance is attached to interstate cooperation.

Hills, J. (2007) Telecommunications and empire. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Narratives Part 2: Media Narratives, Scripts and Great Powers

In the last post I argued that the characteristics of the social networks within which narratives circulate will tell you quite a lot about their influence. In this post I want to pick up on the examples that triggered this post – the idea of media narrative,  the extent to which it is useful to think about the downfall of Mubarak in terms of a script, and the question of great power narratives.

In the post at Crisisblogger Gerald Baron points to the tendency of the media collectively in covering a story to develop an interpretive framework that guides reporting and comments. This narrative is resistant to new information from the outside – inconsistent information is either ignored or reinterpreted to fit with the overall framework. In network terms media systems (at a national level at least) are tightly connected and relatively stable – media outlets monitor each other and the literature on the sociology of journalism points to the way that journalists manage risk by coordinating agendas and framing. Tightly connected groups are prone to groupthink. Newsvalues select particular types of stories and frame them in predictable ways.

Stability and dense connections produce social configurations where there are shared expectations, narratives that are resistant to change and which in turn have an impact on how people behave.

This is why I’m more sceptical of interpreting a situation like the downfall of Mubarak through the notion of narrative as script. In a novel situation involving a newly assembled set of actors (Egyptian elites, protest groups, a variety of external actors) who come from different social contexts you have to ask where the script is? The different groups may have their own narratives but the overall outcome emerges from the interaction between the different groups and their narratives. Whether a shared narrative emerges is a question for investigation. While narratives certainly provide a basis for expectations about future behaviour expectations are a concept that have broader resonance across the social sciences.

This is not to say that narratives don’t matter only that they need to be tied to a broader understanding of the social world. A nice example of this is the meeting of the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa on Hainan on 14 April – the Third BRICS Summit. The idea of the BRIC countries was put forward in a 2001 paper from Goldman Sachs this idea was taken up within the financial community because it was felt to capture an aspect of the contemporary world – the diffusion of economic activity from the North America-Western Europe-Japan trilateral. In turn the BRIC idea was taken up by the BRIC countries themselves because the narrative fitted with their objectives with the result that they began to meet regularly. The narrative provided the basis for a political grouping. Indeed the incorporation of South Africa into the group reflects and evolution and a step towards using the BRIC narrative as the basis for a broader grouping. An important point here is that there is agency at work – the countries involved chose to adopt and use the narrative because it served their interests. To the extent that the BRIC narrative is shared and repeated it feeds into perceptions of the global order in other countries. The tensions between India and China will limit the scope of BRICS action but for some purposes it provides a useful basis for action.

The wider point about great power narratives is that their success depends on the extent to which they are accepted by other actors. Simply talking about yourself doesn’t ensure that your narrative will be taken up.  The danger for great powers is that the narrative they project internationally (eg US, China, Russia?) is simply an outgrowth of their domestic narratives but sophisticated external audiences are likely to be sceptical if not actively hostile and promoting counter-narratives. Further policymakers choose which narratives to accept on the basis of their conception of their interests. Regardless of the rhetoric of globalization and global networks domestic political-media networks are densely connected and provide a basis for distinctive perspectives on the world. Public Diplomacy has to try and break into these networks which is not easy. In conclusion narrative is a useful concept when tied to an analysis of their social context. We come back to the questions raised by the sociology of culture: who believes what, why and when with what consequences. Network concepts provide an essential route into resolving the complexities of the issues.

Thinking about Narratives: Part 1

One concept that crops up in relation to PD is that of narrative.  It’s an idea that I find interesting but not completely persuasive.  In the last couple of weeks I’ve I come across several items that use the idea of narrative in different ways.  At Duck of Minerva Ben O’Loughlin has a post on strategic narratives which links to a paper he wrote with Andreas Antoniades and Alistair Miskimmon on the way that great powers add to their influence in the world by projecting narratives.  Ben also links to a piece by Monroe Price about narratives and the ‘Arab Spring’  Monroe argues that ‘strategic narratives are something like scripts with their authorial consensus about how actors should function.’ he then comments on the failure of Mubarak and Saif Gaddafi to ‘follow the script’ .

Finally Crisisblogger has a post discussing BP’s communications efforts in response to the Gulf of Mexico explosion and oil spill in 2010 and their inability to influence the ‘media narrative’.

In a later installment I’m going to think about these examples  but first some theory.

The basic attraction of narratives is the view that people make sense of the world through stories.  This can lead to a stronger sense of narrative as script, a set of expectations that people are required to fulfil and where failure to meet expectations lead to sanction.  The consequence of these ideas from from a PD or strategic communication point of view is that it then follows that if we can influence the narrative we can influence how people think and act.

My take on narratives is that we need to understand them in the context of  the set of social relationships that sustain them. Narratives have a sociology.  A narrative is not just a story that exists in a book but is one that is part of social practice.   Napoleon commented that a ‘revolution is an idea that has found bayonets’ -  that is an idea that has gained the ability to move people to action; the questions that then follow are which people and why have they embraced this particular idea? – the view that is sometimes labelled sociology of culture (eg Hannerz 1992)  Talking about narrative in isolation from the underpinning networks weakens the ability to explain why some narratives are powerful and others aren’t. I think that some strands of recent social thought have tended to collapse concepts of social structure in to culture or language – the result is an overstatement of the power of narrative or discourse.

Stephan Fuchs argument in Against Essentialism (2001) is helpful.  The more tightly connected the members of a group are the more they will accept an unproblematized realism about their construction of the world.  Looser network structures produce greater relativism and pluralism in constructions.  This would lead me to the corollary that dense networks have apparently powerful narratives which are very difficult for outsiders to influence while looser networks are possibly easier to influence but where they are less influential.  It’s also worth pointing out that tightly connected groups will have stronger social pressures to conformity than will less connected ones.

In part 2 of this post I’m going to have a look at the idea of media narratives, narrative as script and consider what is arguably the most successful narrative in contemporary world politics that of the BRICs.

Fuchs, S. (2001) Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Hannerz, U. (1992) Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

Attention and Visibility

The attack on the UN in Mazar-I-Sharif came as shock because I, like almost everyone, hadn’t heard about the Koran burning incident on 20 March.

Despite the rhetoric of global transparency we rely on media organizations to gather and disseminate news and despite changes in the media environment the logic of agenda setting continues to operate – already dealing with Libya and Fukushima the news system couldn’t also allocate attention to Pastor Jones.  It was striking that even as the reports of yesterday’s attack came in googling Koran burning brought up stories from last September not March.

On the other hand even if my network of news sources didn’t pull my attention to the events of 20th March enough information about it was out there for people who were sensitive to it.   According to the New York Times today video of the event was shown on TV in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

One of the earliest findings of systematic communication research was that people are selective in what they pay attention to.  In an era when we select the news sources that we use,  its not just that people will read different stories in the same media,  we are permanently in danger of being blindsided by people who are plugged into different sets of media sources who are reacting to a different reality.

A Bit More on Egypt

Two quick comments

Firstly, are we seeing splits between Mubarak and the army emerging?  The messages from the army seemed to be that Mubarak is going and then he says that he’s not going.  This may mean a shift in the political opportunity structure that the protesters are operating in.

Secondly,  at Foreign Affairs Robert Zaretsky invokes Fernand Braudel in relation to the Egyptian situation.  Possibly he is overdoing it a bit but I think the message of looking beyond short term events to the underlying and more enduring structures is correct.  Even if Mubarak goes the basic political economy of the regime will remain.  The army is just as tied into this system as the ruling party is.  You are looking at an embedded system of crony capitalism supported by subsidies that support the poor. A lot of people have an interest in this system.

[From a more theoretical point of view although Braudel emphasizes the persistence of soci0economic structures he also recognizes the impact of evolving communication technologies in reshaping those structures, running through his work  is a concern with space which makes him extremely sensitive to the interaction between communications and the economic networks that sustain the 'deep' structures]

 

 

More on Twitter Revolutions

I’ve been meaning to post a link to this post by Deen Frelon at the University of Washington.  I think this does a nice job of identifying the different types of claims that are being made about technology and I’ll be interested to read the next posts in the series.

My own position is that digital technology has added to the mobilizational resources available to the protesters.  But social movement theory (not to mention historical studies of revolutions) tell you that the ability to mobilize is not the whole story without paying attention to the political opportunity structure and the strategies open to the two sides.  It’s usually splits in the elites that open the way to movement success and at the moment the regime seems quite solid and is playing a game to defuse the situation with some concessions and a strategy of delay.  Hence by only focusing on the technological dimension we are missing the bigger picture.

Looking at this through the lens of social movements or revolutions several issues come to mind.  There are a lot of unhappy people in Egypt who agree that Mubarak must go.  But beyond this to what extent does the January 25 movement actually have a political programme that can sustain it?  Focusing on Mubarak is an excellent way to maximize the size of the mobilization but what comes after this? The normal lesson of revolutions is that organized minorities trump disorganized masses so the real challenge for the January 25 movement is not whether they can bring people onto the streets but whether they can produce a functioning political organization that can provide leadership beyond the immediate crisis.  Can technology allow the development of a programme and and organization that can defeat the existing political groupings?  While the focus is on Mubarak at the moment the real priority should be to create the political space that will allow the organization of new political parties.

While I’m thinking revolutions I’ll also raise the question of the extent to which wired secular young people (eg Ghonim) are actually going to be able to lead.  To put it in Gramscian terms is this class going to be able to establish a hegemony over Egyptian society?

So to conclude I think that ‘technology’ does make a difference but you can’t abstract it from the broader elements of the situation.