U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry takes a selfie at Gandhi Memorial Hospital, Addis Ababa, May 1, 2014. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
January 25, 2015
Ah, the good old days of diplomacy. The men donned
pinstriped suits and the women were draped in pearls. The image of the diplomat
was one of luxury, privilege, exclusivity, and secrecy. The embellishments of
high culture and high education were captured in the rich symbolism of the
famous painting The
Ambassadors, created by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1533, at the
dawn of contemporary diplomacy in the West. Mouse-click forward five centuries
and digital communication technology is not only altering the methods but also
the meaning of diplomacy. By going “digital,” the once secretive and exclusive
domain of the elite has gone public.
In the realm of influencing relations between nations,
digital media has suddenly unpinned the power to communicate from the almost
exclusive control of the state. Thanks to digital platforms such as social
media, state actors must now compete with non-state actors for a voice in the
international arena as well as for legitimacy in the eyes of the
public—including their domestic one. This is the great communication challenge
for diplomats today and tomorrow.
The art of communication has always been central to
diplomacy, from the Byzantine diplomats to the emerging digital diplomats of
our time. Understanding the centrality of communication in the evolution of
diplomacy helps put the angst over digital and social media in perspective.
Currently, diplomacy is associated with the state-centric system of
international relations that developed in modern Europe in the seventeenth
century. Diplomacy and communication are as old as human society itself.
Diplomacy and negotiations were requisite in arranging marriages as well as in
commerce and trade throughout the territories of dynastic China. Among the
earliest recorded diplomatic documents on political relations are the Amarna
Tablets from ancient Egypt.
Even in ancient times, the centrality of communication
in the practice of diplomacy was evident in the value placed on written and
oral communication skills. In ancient Greece, oratory skills were highly
prized, as diplomats had to present their case in open, public forums.
Eloquence was similarly valued in envoys in ancient India. The Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft
believed to have been written by Kautilya, discussed the duties of diplomats in
detail as representatives, informers, communicators, and negotiators. As Trần Văn Dĩnh noted in Communication and Diplomacy in a Changing World, “all
Vietnamese envoys to Peking were top poets and writers—especially those endowed
with a wit, a gift for quick repartee.” The verbal adroitness of the envoys
became part of Vietnamese folklore.
The diplomacy of the Prophet Mohammed is well known
throughout the Islamic world. The Prophet sent special envoys to deliver
letters to the leaders of the region: Emperor Heraclius of the Byzantium;
Sassanid King Khosrow II of the Persian Empire; Ashamat Al-Negashi, Emperor of
the Abyssinian Kingdom of Aksum; and to the Muqawqis who ruled Egypt.
In modern Europe, the term diplomacy was originally
associated with the study of handwriting, which was necessary in order to
verify the inscriptions presented by representatives of neighboring
territories. In his book On the Way to Diplomacy, the political scientist Costas M.
Constantinou notes that it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that the
word diplomacy gained political currency and aligned to statecraft and external
affairs.
Modern diplomatic practice has continued to place a
premium on communication. “The value of a diplomat lay in his ability to
communicate, negotiate, and persuade,” diplomatic scholars Keith Hamilton and
Richard Langhorne wrote in The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration. The
phrase “to be diplomatic” suggests verbal finesse and tact in potentially
disruptive situations. The idea of diplomats as the messengers and builders of
relations between heads of states represents a somewhat nostalgic one, albeit
critical even in this digital era. Speaking of her travels to more than a
hundred countries, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it
“shoe-leather diplomacy” and emphasized the importance of being on the ground.
Today’s diplomats, according to Daryl Copeland, a former Canadian diplomat and
author of Guerrilla
Diplomacy: Rethinking International Relations, also need to be as home
in the bazaar as on the floor of the United Nations Security Council.
Whereas diplomacy and communication have a cordial
relationship, the initial resistance of diplomats to digital media is
emblematic of the rather strained relations between diplomacy and communication
technology. Seemingly every communication innovation has represented at first a
jolt, then a boon, to diplomatic practice. The invention of the telegraph
initially caused an uproar in ministries and chancelleries far and wide, but
then was openly embraced. The “diplomatic cable” became a staple of the trade.
In Real-Time Diplomacy: Politics
and Power in the Social Media Era, Philip Seib, vice dean of the
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former director of the
Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, highlights
the challenge now presented by digital technology. “In a high-speed,
media-centric world, conventional diplomacy has become an anachronism,” he
writes. “Not only do events move quickly, but so too does public reaction to
those events. The cushion of time that enabled policymakers to judiciously
gather information and weigh alternatives is gone.”
Public
Diplomacy or Propaganda?
There is an enduring perception that the media can
often influence international relations more so than the diplomat. When the
mass media emerged in the twentieth century, first radio and then television
were perceived as being all-powerful. During World War I, radio in particular
was associated with propaganda, which could penetrate the psyche of troops and
demoralize them. The prevailing belief at the time, including among the field’s
early researchers, was that propaganda messages delivered by the mass media
would have an immediate and persuasive effect on the audience derived from
deception, manipulation, and coercion. Like a shot from a hypodermic needle,
once the message was injected into a society there would be little resistance
from a passive audience.
After World War I, researchers began an intensive
study of propaganda, the media, and the ways to influence audience attitude and
behavior—a focus that continues today. Not surprisingly, the outbreak of World
War II in Europe saw the deployment of the mass media as part of the war
effort. The Voice of America broadcasting service was launched within months of
the U.S. entry into the war. Later, during the Cold War, the United States
government used Radio Free Europe to penetrate the Iron Curtain.
Such international broadcasts have become a standard
instrument in a nation’s communication efforts to influence publics. Current
government efforts using broadcast media, and now social and digital media as
well, to reach audiences falls within the realm of what has been termed public
diplomacy—a state’s efforts to communicate directly with publics rather than
directly with governments. While public diplomacy strives to persuade based on credibility
and openness, it nonetheless faces a challenge to distance and distinguish
itself from propaganda. Edmund Gullion, a past dean of the Fletcher School of
Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, who is credited with coining the term
public diplomacy, introduced it in a deliberate attempt to find an alternative
to the word propaganda. That term change occurred in 1965, but the term, like
the field itself, was largely dormant until September 11, 2001.
Ambassadors
Who Tweet
The 9/11 attacks on the United
States represented a wake-up call for public diplomacy, underscoring that the
perceptions of foreign publics have domestic consequences. Public diplomacy, or
“the battle for hearts and minds,” as it was more commonly called, was second
to the military offensive when the United States launched the War on Terrorism.
Not surprisingly, given the historical successes of broadcast media and the
continuing perception of media power, post-9/11 American public diplomacy was
driven by mass media initiatives.
The notion of public diplomacy
had already received a boost from its link to the idea of “soft power,”
introduced by the political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990. At the time, Nye
suggested that the world was growing increasingly intolerant of hard power displays,
such as military force or economic sanctions. Soft power, on the other hand,
represented the ability to influence others through attraction and persuasion
rather than coercion. Over the past decade, more countries have increasingly
recognized the importance of public diplomacy and soft power.
The advance of public diplomacy
has coincidentally paralleled the rise of social media. Once again,
communication technology that was first viewed with trepidation is increasingly
being perceived as a benefit to diplomatic practice. In 2009, Shahira Fahmy of
the University of Arizona conducted a search in scholarly databases pairing the
term “diplomacy” with different types of social media tools—“blog,” “YouTube,”
“Twitter.” To her surprise, the search generated zero results. Only a few years
later, Fergus Hanson of the Lowy Institute in Australia wrote about the
development of “e-diplomacy” in the U.S. State Department. He concluded that
most public diplomacy initiatives have social media “baked in” as an integral part
of their designs.
Today, the adoption of digital and
social media in public diplomacy appears to be spreading rapidly, even if many
diplomats remain personally hesitant to take the plunge. In 2009, then Mexican
envoy to the United States Arturo Sarukhan became the first ambassador in the
Washington diplomatic corps to take to Twitter. At a recent forum at American
University in Washington, he noted the inherent risks of using it: errors are
very public, and could even go viral. Of the 183 accredited ambassadors in
Washington, he estimated that only forty have created personal Twitter
accounts.
Tech-savvy diplomats contend that
the benefits outweigh the risks. According to Sarukhan, simply logging in and
monitoring social media “widens the information and intelligence bandwidth.”
Diplomats can complement the often partisan views of media commentators and
policy experts who dominate the air waves with less scripted conversation on
Twitter. He lauds the benefits of social media as a means of circumventing traditional
media, especially when trying to get out a message and influence the narrative.
He believes that his active and persistent presence on Twitter might have
played a role in diluting and quelling a damaging media narrative of Mexico
that had started to emerge.
These new media tools pose considerable challenges for
diplomatic institutions, as a recent Aspen Institute report on integrating
social media and diplomacy noted. One of the major challenges is the different
pace of adoption, integration, and use of the tools between the public and
governments. The diplomatic services of many nations are still inclined to use
social media much like broadcast media: to shoot messages at publics. The
problem, as countries are learning, is that social media has enabled publics to
shoot back.
“Why
Wasn’t I Consulted?”
Early efforts by American diplomats to use media in
cultivating relations with foreign publics seem almost quaint—“telling our
story,” per the motto of the former United States Information Agency. Digital
media has intervened in the relational power dynamics, changing the balance of
power between the state and the public. While on the surface digital media
represents a technological shift, the more important change is in diplomatic
thinking. Digital media has compelled nations to reconsider how they view
publics and communicate with them. The supposedly passive audience of the
information-starved age has been transformed into an aggressive,
digital-media-empowered audience that demands to know, “why wasn’t I
consulted?”
In the first phase of this progression, after 9/11,
American public diplomacy initiatives echoed the Cold War approach and
strategy. The focus was on getting the message out. The mass media was the tool
of choice, not only because of its expansive reach, but also because it allowed
for complete control over the message’s design and delivery. The goal was
information dominance, gaining the upper hand in the battle for hearts and
minds. American public diplomacy after 9/11 produced one high-profile media
initiative after another—Al-Hurra television, Radio Sawa, and Hi magazine—largely aimed at
influencing attitudes in the Arab World. Each initiative introduced with great
fanfare was quickly met with a barrage of criticism because of its perceived
disregard for the cultural and political sensitivities of the publics. As
commentator Rami G. Khouri remarked at the time, “Al-Hurra, like the U.S.
government’s Radio Sawa and Hi magazine before it, will be an entertaining,
expensive and irrelevant hoax.” Capturing the sentiments of many, he added,
“Where do they get this stuff from? Why do they keep insulting us like this?”
Many even portrayed the elusive Osama bin Laden, who periodically released
video tapes promoting Al-Qaeda’s cause to Al Jazeera, getting the upper hand in
this public relations war. The late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke famously
remarked, “How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading
communications society?”
Social media has effectively
rendered this one-way quest for information dominance and control obsolete.
That ushered in a new phase of public diplomacy based on the relational
imperative. A new era focused on relationship-building as the foundation of
public communication was emerging. Governments realized that publics were no
longer content to be the target audience, or “target practice,” for public
diplomacy messages. Social media had greatly expanded the array of media and
information choices. Breaking the barriers of selectivity and gaining audience
attention had become much more challenging for official public diplomacy.
During this early period of social media, official public diplomacy responded
rather quickly with pronouncements of “engagement.” In fact for a while, U.S.
and UK diplomats and scholars stopped using the term “public diplomacy” in
favor of “engagement.” Yet, despite the vocal intent of engaging or involving
the audiences, social media initiatives were rather tepid and consisted mostly
of grafting some of the interactive features of social media onto mass media
initiatives. Hi magazine, as an early example, added a comments
section. Later initiatives in this engagement phase included ventures onto
digital media platforms, for example YouTube video contests, and the mandatory
Facebook page for all foreign ministries.
Proliferation of social media soon spawned a third
phase of public diplomacy in which governments operated on the understanding
that publics were not content with being merely participants in
government-initiated and controlled communication. Thanks to digital media’s
low costs and high capabilities, publics quickly seized the mantle of being
content producers. They now had the ability to augment their voice and initiate
a new communication dynamic in the public arena. Governments, not wanting to
lose relevancy, in turn, quickly lauded the publics, movements, and initiatives
they favored. This phase saw the increasingly organized participation of civil
society organizations and the rise of “relationship building,” “mutuality,” “partnerships,”
and “social networks” in the lexicon of public diplomacy. Many of these words
found particular resonance in pro-democracy initiatives.
The third phase of social media
and public diplomacy solidified the relational paradigm of public diplomacy
with its emphasis on relationship building and networking. Simply crafting
clever messages or developing creative media approaches was no longer enough in
reaching or influencing publics. Effective public diplomacy now rested on a
government’s ability to cultivate relations with publics in order to promote
policy agendas and create policy change. The operative words in this phase are
publics, movements, and initiatives that a government favored. The challenge
for diplomacy is that digital media remained a medium, and policy itself
remained the message. And in the policy battles, publics are using digital
media to go for the political jugular.
Digital
Strategies
In a fourth phase, governments are facing adversarial
relations with publics, be they publics that are challenging the policies of
foreign governments or their own governments. While adversarial publics may
emerge spontaneously, they can quickly become a recognized movement, such as
Occupy Wall Street in the United States, or the Gezi Park protest movement in
Turkey.
The existence of contentious publics—foreign and
domestic—is not a new challenge for policymakers. However, in the past the
suppression of public movements and rebellions was made possible by a state’s
ability to control and if need be silence communication. Government control
over the mass media accorded it that ability and power. Social media, by
definition, does not lend itself to such control. The very visible, global
magnitude of social media in the hands of adversarial publics is new for state
actors. Governments that try to treat the new media like the old media are
suffering the consequences.
As governments struggle to devise
an effective response, publics are further exploiting the capabilities of
digital media. They are not only challenging governments, but challenging their
legitimacy. Communication credibility is one thing; political legitimacy is
another. “Crisis” and “confrontation” are appearing with increasing frequency
in public diplomacy discussions as states struggle to effectively respond to
challenges from their own domestic public as well as global publics.
Diaspora populations, playing a
more prominent role, are a critical public often overlooked in public
diplomacy. Digital media has been called the quintessential communication tool
of diasporas. When disaster and crisis strike, diaspora publics have the most
incentive to respond. How tech-savvy digital diaspora respond is another
matter. Diaspora may respond in an outpouring of support and serve as a bridge
between their country of origin and global publics. Electronic Intifada, an
activist website started during the second Palestinian Intifada, is a prime
example. Diaspora can even use their intimate ties to the home country to
unseat a government. It is perhaps not coincidental that some of the most
piercing foils in public diplomacy-as-regime change have been spearheaded by
leaders in the diaspora. But, this again, is not a new phenomenon. Cassette
tapes were once considered new media and their circulation is credited with
sparking an unexpected youth revolution in Iran and sending a shah into exile.
New strategies are available to
the new cyber publics demanding a voice. All publics are exploiting the
anonymity conferred by digital media. Unlike the traditional media where people
can identify the source, the Internet is a bastion of hidden identities.
The power of anonymity was evident in one of the most
prominent and baffling hoaxes in the early period of the Arab Spring. I
remember reading some of the first reports in the Washington Post about the dramatic abduction of a
Syrian-American blogger Amina Arraf, “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” in June 2011. At
the time, Syrian activists were struggling to get on the radar screen of
Washington policymakers. Amina’s first post had been in mid-February. Two
months later, in late April, her blog gained wide attention after a moving
post, “My Father the Hero.” By early May, she was on the short list of Arab
bloggers in recommended reading for President Barack Obama prepared by Foreign Policy. Then, suddenly on June 6 Amina
was abducted. The New York
Times, Guardian, and
other prominent Western news outlets covered the story. Reporters Without
Borders issued a press release. Supporters created a Facebook page, with more
than 15,000 clamoring for Amina’s release.
This was a heady time for social media in the Arab
World, with global attention focused on the Arab Spring. Andy Carvin, a
prominent blogger with National Public Radio, led a crowd-sourced effort to
find Amina. She never was found because she didn’t exist. She turned out to be
a cyber vehicle created by an American graduate student studying in Edinburgh
who wanted to join the conversation on events in Syria. He did it through
Amina.
While Amina may not have been real, her cyber effect
certainly was. The strategy succeeded in generating attention and compassion
for activists in Syria. As one reader posted on the New York Times blog The Lede, “If she is a real
person or not, or if her accounts are fictionalized or not, to me is
irrelevant. The Syrian government is oppressing its people forcefully—this is a
fact. If the story of her disappearance gets a few more people to pay
attention, then whether true or false, more attention will be focused on the
Syrian government.” Despite being a fictitious person, Amina Abdallah Arraf
al-Omari today has her own Wikipedia page.
Some have suggested that digital
media has evened the communication playing field between state and non-state
actors. Many state actors believe that the activists are using digital
strategies that allow them to gain the upper hand over states—for example in
the case of “digital jihadists,” including the extremist group called the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Here we may pause and reflect again on
strategy. Many Western governments and much of the media appear focused on the
content of ISIS’s messages. While the graphic nature of the content by its very
nature does draw attention, it is not the content that matters in digital media
as much as the relational connections and the exchange of information.
Everything about these tools highlights their interactivity. They are tools for
engagement, for creating conversations, and building relationships. This
relational dynamic is where the communication power is.
Activists have realized this new
dynamic and are exploiting the interactive capabilities of digital
communication tools. Many in government and diplomacy, however, appear still
tethered to the “message-media” mindset of trying to craft messages and control
media. They still struggle to find the right message and miss the importance of
mapping the network of relations that carry, shape, and ultimately distort
their messages.
Governments need to shift from analyzing messages to
studying the online and offline relational dynamics. It is not so much what
adversarial publics are saying, so much as how they are organizing themselves.
Ali Fisher and his colleagues recently noted patterns of “swarmcast”—a tactic
used by groups of protesters to quickly form and disperse to challenge
authorities. Swarming often involves protesters using disruptive, highly
visible events to gain media attention—and then dispersing before security
authorities can respond. This tactic and other interactive network patterns are
part of a “netwar” strategy first identified by John Arquilla and David
Ronfeldt in their study of the “Battle for Seattle” waged by protesters against
a meeting of the World Trade Organization in 2007.
This is just one illustration of how activists are
turning the tables on governments thanks to social and digital media tools. The
pairing of online with offline strategies is particularly powerful, as seen in
reports of how ISIS is also using social media to draw in and connect with
potential recruits in Western countries. A recent article in the New York Times provided a glimpse into how the
group responds to potential recruits on a personal level. While many officials
focused on the graphic message content, the critical feature was how ISIS was
using the social media tools to connect and build relations. British fighters
answer questions on a website called ask.fm as specific as what shoes to bring
and whether toothbrushes are available. When asked what to do upon arriving in
Turkey or Syria, the fighters often casually reply, “Kik me”—the instant
messenger for smartphones—to continue the discussion in private.
This type of outreach challenges government public
diplomacy efforts. One of the crucial things learned in the intensive study
from early propaganda to present studies of mediated communication is that
while the media is good for creating awareness, it is not as effective at
creating attitude change. With digital media, people again flock to sites that
reinforce rather than challenge their beliefs. The prime mode for attitude
change remains interpersonal communication. Trust, which is so critical,
especially in risk taking, is conveyed primarily through subtle nonverbal cues
conveyed through eye contact, facial twitches, or posture. Whereas digital
media may not be able to create attitude change, its portability makes it ideal
for facilitating those offline relations. To overlook these important offline
relations is to ascribe a phantom persuasion element to digital media.
People
Power
Digital media in the hands of
adversarial publics should be a wake-up call to governments. Public diplomacy
is no longer a competition just between states. The perceptions of foreign
publics have domestic consequences. In turn, domestic publics can influence the
global perceptions of a country. Governments need to re-think what the
relational imperative means in a digital era. The relational imperative
represents a mind shift from focusing primarily on messages and media as the
core of diplomatic communication to the relational connections between publics
and nations. Previously there was the “message imperative,” and communication
strategists began with the questions, “what is our message?” and “how can we
deliver it?” The relational imperative requires the questions “what are the
connections or relations among the parties?” and “how are the parties and
publics using those connections to further their cause?” The Gezi Park example
is illustrative of how an innocuous environmental group of protesters morphed
into a much larger alliance of seemingly disparate groups joining together
against Turkish authorities.
One of the reasons that the Arab Spring caught the
attention of Western researchers was because of the way people were using the
social media to “circulate” information and organize themselves. While the
slogans such as “We are all Khaled Said” may have been powerful, it was the
interconnectivity of social media that amplified the message content. This
interconnectivity and relational dimension represents unchartered territory for
governments still operating in a message-media mindset.
Today, relational connections can matter more than
messages. Yet, governments are still concentrating primarily on using digital
and social media to convey the message. The unspoken assumption is that the
governments are still autonomous entities that can still initiate and control
the communication dynamic. Dominant public diplomacy strategies still focus
primarily on control and influence, whether it be controlling the message, the
media, or the narrative. Digital media eludes effort to control.
This relational dynamic is why social and digital
media have usurped communication control from governments. Government control
over the mass media, common in the Arab world, is illustrative of the one-to-many
one-way form of communication power. With social media, publics now have the
communication power to compete with governments in the public sphere. This
observation is not new; media scholars have been waving red flags for several
years. The challenge is not in controlling or countering the public, but
finding ways to respond effectively when the public is in control, when the
audience is seeking to influence governments and their policies. Trying to
counter the communication can be as ineffective as attempts to control the
communication; both rest on the outdated idea that the state and its opponents
are autonomous political entities. In an interconnected and globalized world,
the luxury of autonomy is an illusion; they are all interconnected.
Here, the mutual influence accorded by digital media
takes on a new significance. Digital media is shattering the assumption of
one-way influence, assumption in public diplomacy, that governments can seek to
influence publics without being influenced as well. In an interconnected
sphere, one cannot influence the other without being influenced in return.
Public demands for openness, accountability, and transparency scratch the
surface of this emerging trend. How states will respond to mutual influence—of
being open to public influence rather than only trying to influence publics—is
increasingly becoming the critical unanswered question. It is a question that
more and more nations will need to find answers to soon.
R. S. Zaharna is an associate professor in the School of Communication at American
University in Washington, DC. She has written extensively on public diplomacy,
and has served in an advisory role to governments, diplomatic missions, and
international organizations on communication projects in Asia, Europe, and the
Middle East. Her recent book is Battles
to Bridges: U.S. Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy after 9/11.