R.S. Zaharna on Diplomacy and Relations

Over at Battles2Bridges Rhonda Zaharna is exploring the links between relational public diplomacy and the historical forms of diplomacy.  I think that this is an extremely promising avenue  of investigation.

A couple of thoughts

The links that Rhonda makes are important because it’s possible to construct two different genealogies of public diplomacy.  The first of these, the more common one in the US and the UK, tells the story of public diplomacy in terms of the development of an evolution of propaganda and psychological warfare from the World Wars to the Cold War and the War on Terror.*  A second genealogy sees the growing prominence of PD as part of the expansion of diplomacy over the last two centuries.  Seeing PD as part of the story of diplomacy helps to explain the growth of PD activities across numerous countries which don’t share the Anglo-American history.  Making the link with diplomacy it unlocks a different set of intellectual resources.

The other comment is the relational vs messaging distinction is a useful shorthand  that captures different approaches to how public diplomacy is done.  It is a distinction that maps quite closely onto the ‘informationalist’ vs ‘culturalist’ approaches that existed within the American PD establishment (see for instance Arndt 2005) or in the UK between the FCO and the British Council.  However,  it’s possible to make too much of this distinction.  It blurs the fact that effective messaging often depends on the careful cultivation of relationships – for instance between the information officers and journalists and that one of the things that relationships let you do is spread messages.   This is one of the reasons for my enthusiasm for relational sociology and network approaches.  These provide conceptual and research tools that allow us to think about what mean by relationships and their relative importance.   I think that these approaches also offer insights into newer modes of doing public diplomacy, for instance the embrace of coalition building with different types of actors as a political tool rather than a cultural strategy or the question of the extent to which social media should be been seen in terms of messaging or relations.

*Susan Carruthers (2005) has a nice take on the way that links between the practice of psychological warfare and its study have continued to shape academic studies of propaganda.

Arndt, R.T. (2005) The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century. Washington  D.C.: Potomac Books.

Carruthers, S.I. (2005) ‘Propaganda, Communications and Public Opinion’, pp. 189-222 in P. Finney (ed) Palgrave Advances in International History, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

 

 

 

 

 

Three’s a Crowd: Dyads, Triads and Networks, Part 1.

Back from my holiday and back to the blog…

From my point of view the key insight from network sociology is that your relationships affect each other.  Country A’s relationship with Country C affects its relationship with Country B.  It’s noticeable that conceptual discussions of public diplomacy tend to assume a relationship between two countries,  but the history of PD suggests that for major powers at least,  it’s about the relationship between my country, your country and my enemy or  my country, your country and my ally.   As soon as you move away from the dyad the diplomatic and public diplomatic task becomes much harder.

I’ve been reading James Vaughan’s book about British and American propaganda in the Middle East in the 1950s so lets take some examples from there (anyone who is tempted to write about recent, current or future public diplomacy in the region needs to read this book).  Western PD efforts were about  other things than improving relations between two countries.  Attempting to mobilize resistance to  Communism was an obvious issue.  Essentially our PD is not about our relationship with your but in persuading you to see a third country as a threat.  In the middle of the decade both Britain and America were trying to build up Iraq as a regional counter to Nasser and Egypt.  At the same time the US and UK were periodically conscious of the fact that their relationship with each other was damaging their own position in the region – for instance the British record of colonialism and US support for Israel – but sought to moderate their own activities to avoid placing an undue strain on their own relationship.

We often hear complaints about the lack of alignment between policy and communication but part of the difficulty with policy is that it’s trying to balance different relationships.  If PD was simply about improving relations with one other country it would be pretty straightforward.

Vaughan, J. (2005) The failure of American and British propaganda in the Arab Middle East, 1945-57 : unconquerable minds. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Relations and Messages: The Case of the Information Research Department

Over the past few years public diplomacy scholarship has increasingly advocated a focus on relationship building rather than messaging.  That is the typical emphasis on ‘getting the message out’ misses the point that it’s not going to do any good if no one is listening.  Of course when you start looking at real cases the opposition between messaging and relations tends to be less clear cut.

The history of British public diplomacy contains a very nice case of this in the work of the Information Research Department.  Active between 1948 and 1977 the IRD was a semi autonomous department of the Foreign Office and a major element of the UK’s Cold War information activity.

The IRD gathered information on Soviet and communist activities produced reports and talking points and disseminated them domestically and internationally (no Smith-Mundt in the UK!) through a network of trusted contacts.  Drawing on experience from the Second World War  the IRD approach was that information work should be truthful but would be more credible if it wasn’t linked to official sources hence their mode of operation was grey propaganda – their bulletins were circulated to embassies and other offices with a cover sheet that had to be removed before it was passed to journalists, foreign officials or other contacts.  The information could be freely used but should not be attributed to the UK government.

The point is that for this strategy to work the IRD had to have access to a network of trusted contacts who could disseminate its messages – here the overt work of information officers in UK embassies provided the channel through which IRD material could be disseminated.

The IRD is one of the most controversial aspects of British information work (The introduction to Defty 2004 has a useful discussion of the historiography of the IRD).  On one hand the work is very similar to the way that political parties or PR companies operate but because it was being done by a semi-secret government department it attracted considerable suspicion as more material on its work became available.

Defty, A. (2004) Britiain, America and Anti- Communist Propaganda, 1945-53. Abingdon: Routledge.

The USSR and the Limits of Relational Public Diplomacy

I’m reading Gienow-Hecht and Donfried’s very interesting edited collection Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy. I was struck by an interesting juxtaposition of two chapters; the first by Jean-Francois Fayet on VOKS:  the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries that operated from the early 1920s to the late 1950s,  the second by Rosa Magnusdottir  on the Soviet embrace of cultural relations in dealings with the US at  the end of the 1950s.

VOKS operated by building relationships with the intelligentsia in non-communist countries in the hope that these networks offered to develop a more positive portrayal of the Soviet Union.  In retrospect this can be seen as an application of what we would now call relational public diplomacy.  The emphasis on combining communication and organization strikes me as a signature of 20th century communism but it’s interesting to note that this was an insight that wasn’t confined to the communists,  in International Political Communication W. Phillips Davison (1965) argues that the most important impact of public diplomacy communication is in supporting friendly organizational efforts a thought that hasn’t had much prominence in recent thinking.

In a sense Magnusdottir is pointing to the limits of the VOKS model, She argues that in 1950s America the only people who were listening to the USSR were the members of the CPUSA and its associated front organizations. In network terms the pro-Soviet organizations were suffering from closure (eg Burt 2005) they were unable to effectively form new relationships to expand their reach. Part of this was due to the comprehensive ideological opposition in 1950s America but also reflected the type of stereotypical propaganda material that circulated within the network. The lesson that the more thoughtful Soviet observers drew was the need to use alternative networks with different content in order to have a real impact in the US, for instance publishing magazines with interesting content and decent translations.

The broader lesson is that network building is a powerful tool but one of its characteristic pathologies is closure. The network turns in on itself and doesn’t allow engagement beyond. This can happen for reasons of protection as in the case of the Soviets sympathisers  in 1950s  America but can also happen because people gain status as insiders and have an incentive to keep others out.

Burt, R.S. (2005) Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital. Oxford: OUP Oxford.

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

Fayet, J.-F. (2010) ‘VOKS: The Third Dimension of Soviet Foreign Policy’, pp. 33-49 in J. Gienow-Hecht and M.C. Donfried (eds) Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Berghahn.

Magnusdottir, R. (2010) ‘Mission Impossible?: Selling Soviet Socialism to Americans, 1955-1958′, pp. 50-72 in J. Gienow-Hecht and M.C. Donfried (eds) Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Berghahn.

US Launches Diaspora Diplomacy

Over the last couple of days the State Department twitter feeds have been chronicling the Diaspora forum that has been held in Washington.  Given that the US is a key destination for immigration exploiting the diplomatic possibilities of diasporas seems a n0-brainer.  The intention is to take this forward with an International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (iDEA) with the five themes of diaspreneurship, diasplomacy, diasporacorps (volunteering), diaspora 2.0, diasphilanthropy.  Not sure about the labels but seems like a good idea.  Details are here.

The UK Diplomatic Network Expands (more or less)

William Hague has announced some changes to the UK diplomatic network

We will strengthen our front-line staff in China by up to 50 officials and in India by 30, and will work to transform Britain’s relationship with their fastest growing cities and regions. We will also expand substantially our diplomatic strength in Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia. We will add diplomatic staff in the following countries and places: Thailand, Burma, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Angola, Botswana, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Philippines…

With those additional resources we will be able to open new British embassies, including in places where they had previously been closed. We will reopen the embassy in El Salvador, closed in 2003, as part of a major diplomatic advance in Latin America after years of retreat. We will open a new consulate general in Brazil at Recife, which will be one of approximately seven new consulates general that we will open in the emerging powers. We will open a new embassy in strategically important Kyrgyzstan, and another in July in the new nation of South Sudan

How is this being financed given the economic situation? Part of the answer is more money from the Treasury – the last government abolished the mechanism that protected the FCO budget against exchange rate fluctuations this is being restored. Part of the answer comes from cost saving measures within the FCO and part comes from further reductions in the diplomatic network in Europe. Hague also points to savings from promises of reductions in the size of the embassies in Baghdad and Kabul.

These changes are very much in line with the strategy that Hague has set out since coming into office.  He seems to take the view that under the last government especially under David Miliband bought too heavily into the mantra of ‘global solutions for global problems’ and neglected bilateral relations.  Hague’s line is that 1)stronger bilateral relations with key allies and rising powers are important in themselves and 2)are a source of influence in bilateral contexts.

The statement and the debate that follows start about halfway done this page. For background Chris Bryant was a junior FCO minster in the Labour government and Jack Straw was the Labour Foreign Secretary before David Miliband – who he seems to be having a dig at.

Live by the Network, Die by the Network

Two points in the initial reports of the death of the Obama Bin Laden caught my attention.

From The Cable at Foreignpolicy.com

“One courier in particular had our constant attention,” the official said. He declined to give that courier’s name but said he was a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a “trusted assistant” of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a former senior al Qaeda officer who was captured in 2005. “Detainees also identified this man as one of the few couriers trusted by bin Laden,” the official said.

The U.S. intelligence community uncovered the identity of this courier four years ago, and two years ago, the U.S. discovered the area of Pakistan this courier and his brother were working in. In August 2010, the intelligence agencies found the exact compound where this courier was living, in Abbottabad, Pakistan….

“When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw,” one official said. …. The compound was 8 times larger than the other homes around it. It was built in 2005 in an area that was secluded at that time. There were extraordinary security measures at the compound, including 12 to 18 foot walls topped with barbed wire. There were other suspicious indicators at the compound. Internal sections were walled off from the rest of the compound. There were two security gates. The residents burned their trash. The main building had few windows.

‘The compound, despite being worth over $1 million, had no telephone or internet service. ‘

The key tool of intelligence has always been the detection of network flows – interception of mail has a very long history – even without being able to read the content who writes to who provides important information.  Today monitoring of telephone traffic, money, data movements are the staples of surveillance.  The implications of this for covert organization has been obvious for quite a while – the key to survival is to not just hide these connections but to avoid them completely.

It looks like bin Laden managed to minimize the risk of compromise by his electronic connections but was still done in by his social connections. He protected himself from the electronic network but his social network still gave him away.

Incidentally there is a well established line of thought about covert organization in the face of surveillance that connects groups as diverse as Al Qaeda, American survivalists and British animal rights activists. The theory of ‘leaderless resistance’ was originally put forward put forward on the American extreme right. In the Al Qaeda context Abu Musab Al-Suri (see Lia 2008, Sageman 2008) explicitly rejected hierarchical organization in favour of autonomous cells. In this model the leader broadcasts guidance to autonomous groups and by avoiding connection minimizes the risk of detection.  This line of reasoning also suggests that the implication of the death of bin Laden should be sought at an ideological and narrative level not an operational one.

Lia, B. (2008) Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri. New York: Columbia University Press. Sageman, M. (2008) Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

UK Relational Public Diplomacy in Pakistan

David Cameron has been in Pakistan this week and causing a certain amount of controversy(in the UK at least) by pointing to the UK role in creating the tensions in South Asia and by agreeing to £650m of aid for education in Pakistan. In discussions of  counter radicalization the state of public education in Pakistan has been a recurrent theme with the argument made that the weakness of the state school system pushes children into madrassas where they are at risk of radicalization.

Given the context it seems appropriate to post this cable from the US embassy in London reporting on a UK-US video conference from 2009 discussing British efforts to build relationships with Pakistani civil society groups.  The cable expresses a degree of surprise that government funding doesn’t seem to fatally undermine the credibility of the civil society partners.  It also points to the problems of developing metrics for this kind of activitity.  Also note the list of different UK government agencies involved – both domestic and international.  PREVENT is part of the broader CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy and has proved controversial  because of the perception that it is overly focused on the muslim community and is currently under review.

Theorizing Twitter Revolutions: Part 1 There’s no such thing as technology

Having been reading Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion on my recent travels and getting home in time for the Egyptian upheaval I thought that I’d just throw in a couple of comments about ‘Twitter revolutions’ and ‘Facebook uprisings’ etc. I’ll post part 2 tomorrow morning.

The psychologist Kurt Lewin made the comment that ‘there’s nothing more practical than a good theory’ and of course Keynes observed that ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’  My thought here is that in trying to make sense of what Twitter, Facebook, SMS etc have done in Egypt it’s useful to flag up the way that thinking about these questions have been developing in Science and Technology Studies.

One of the basic thrusts of science and technology studies over the past couple of decades is that on close inspection the society/technology distinction doesn’t hold up. ‘Technologies’ have been conceptualized as systems that mix material and ideational elements in social practices. Bruno Latour has developed a particularly radical take on this and argues that precisely what distinguishes humans is that they have always and everywhere co-evolved with their technologies hence trying to define ‘the human’, ‘the social’ and ‘the technological’ as distinct essences is mistaken and just gets in the way of understanding what is going on. This has been parodied as the view that ‘things are people too’ – but as an example of this mode of thinking take how people in modern societies deal with time. There is a universal system of abstract time measurement, we carry watches – which we could set for any time we like but don’t – we have been inculcated with a sense of time management through the way that this abstract system of time is embedded in everyday practices like how long a university class is. Time needs clocks, people, ideas, collective practices mixed together. For this reason Latour and others of a similar ilk prefer to talk about ‘actor-networks’ or ‘technosocial assemblages’. The take away from this is that ‘technologies’ are never just technologies they are actor-networks that may or may not grow to involve more components (including people).

The point here is any attempt to set up an opposition between technological and social explanations of the upheaval in Egypt is ontologically flawed. All revolutions have a ‘technological’ or ‘media’ component but at the same time they all are ‘social’ phenomena. In the case of Egypt the question is more about the emergence of actor-networks that were in part at least constituted around ‘technologies’ . If we recognize that ‘technologies’ are not ‘objective’ ‘autonomous’ entities but are co-constructed by their users we are taking a big step away from naive technological determinism and towards an understanding of the possibilities and limits of ‘technologically’ driven change.

Latour, B. (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. Oxford: OUP Oxford.

Morozov, E. (2011) The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. London: Allen Lane.

Tomorrow: Part 2 A short summary of social movement theory.

Facebook Activism

Media/Anthropology has posted some links to interesting material on digital activism  including the Digiactive guide to using facebook for campaigning.