In this issue, Martin Rose, director of the “Our Shared Europe” project at the British Council, the UK’s cultural diplomacy agency, explains that the social marginalization of Muslims in Europe over the past thirty years has led them to identify themselves through the religious prism to the detriment of their national identity.
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In this issue, Dr. John Brown, adjunct professor of Liberal Studies and an Associate of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, defines cultural diplomacy as “a government’s presentation of a country’s culture(s) overseas.” In doing so, he deplores the gap to date between candidate Obama’s pledges on promoting cultural diplomacy and President Obama’s actions since assuming office.
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Ambassador William Rugh, the Edward Murrow Visiting Professor of Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, criticizes the public diplomacy literature for representing a Washington-centric point of view that omits the key role that Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) in the field play in explaining and implementing policies, "thus leaving out an important part of the story."
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Dr. Morris Kalliny, Assistant Professor of International Business and Marketing at Missouri University of Science and Technology, discusses how Arab media underwent a democratization process over the past twenty years through marketing politics and technological innovations. Traditionally a platform for nationalist movements, media institutions progressively came under the control of Arab governments through “political patronization,” restricting any dissent from the public debate.
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Philip Seib, Director of the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy, discusses the power of technology and new media as a public diplomacy tool to build bridges worldwide. However, the persisting lack of coherence between public diplomacy and foreign policy remains a major obstacle in a successful engagement with communicating America’s intention to the Muslim world.
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Alan Heil, former deputy director of VOA, discusses the benefits that new technology and the internet bring to Washington’s global engagement endeavors through U.S. publicly-funded civilian overseas networks and broadcasting. New technologies can bring people together and provide them with a voice over the internet, giving them a global outreach; this is what one knowledgeable observer defines as "a global electronic town meeting."
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William P. Kiehl, Editor of the online journal American Diplomacy, argues that funding imbalances and a lack of internal cohesion and interagency coordination have made the Department of State into "a junior partner [to the Department of Defense (DoD)] or an afterthought" in foreign affairs. Kiehl remarks that reform similar in scope to the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act is necessary for State to reassess its organizational structure. He concludes that State should be restructured to accommodate the many roles it must play through a broader mandate and authority to "encompass wide-ranging end-to-end coordination and management of foreign affairs from public diplomacy to development to trade."
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Nadia Bilbassy, Chief U.S. Correspondent for the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation, discusses how the U.S. response to the Goldstone report stood as one true test of President Obama's administration's rhetoric in promoting engagement with the Arab world. Bilbassy makes the case that he U.S. veto of the Goldstone report damaged America's credibility in the Middle East as reliable partner in promoting democracy and respect for human rights and further confirmed an accused bias towards Israel.
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Dr. Nancy Snow, Associate Professor of Public Diplomacy at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, discusses how U.S. credibility and standing abroad cannot solely hinge on the positive image of President Obama.
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Dr. Nicholas Cull, Professor of Public Diplomacy and Director of the Masters Program in Public Diplomacy at USC, marks the ten year anniversary of the failed merger of USIA with the State Department. Once a "necessity of the Cold War," Dr. Cull remarks that the agency was quickly relegated to the back burner from the mid-nineties on, bringing about the demise of effective public diplomacy efforts until very recently.
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Philip Seib, Director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, analyzes the discrepancies between public diplomacy and U.S. foreign policy, pointing at the fact that a balanced partnership between both is essential to achieve U.S. policy goals.
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Ambassador James K. Glassman, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, analyzes President Obama's speech in Cairo and some pernicious stereotypes about the U.S. across the Muslim world. Glassman highlights that U.S. public diplomacy requires a new narrative and emphasizes the need for a more focused strategic communications effort.
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Dr. Abderrahim Foukara, the Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Jazeera Network discusses the cultural subtleties affecting reporting between American media outlets and a major Arab one such as Al-Jazeera.
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Matt Armstrong, co-founder of Armstrong Strategic Insights Group, consultant, and publisher of MountainRunner, discusses the relevance of social media in today's public diplomacy.
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Iraqi Ambassador to the U.S. Samir S. Sumaida’ie analyzes the development of the media in Iraq in the post-Saddam era, where unregulated freedom of expression, sectarianism and violence have come to shape a public sphere that previously did not exist.
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