Main Page | Month Archive | Library | Email Updates | RSS Feed

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN A CHANGING WORLD
By Geoffrey Cowan and Nicholas J. Cull (Eds.)


Reviewed by Alan K. Henrikson
JUL 10, 2008

This volume of The Annals follows four previous volumes, reviewed in this issue in a reflective essay by Nancy Snow, which the American Academy of Political and Social Science has published on various aspects of the subject now widely called public diplomacy or, for short, PD.  The topics of the earlier Annals issues were the U.S. image abroad (1954), international education (1961), the exchange of persons (1976), and the Fulbright experience (1987).  The present volume edited by Geoffrey Cowan and Nicholas J. Cull of the University of Southern California, with its active Center for the study of the subject, is more comprehensive.  It includes essays on international broadcasting, place branding, and the distinctive PD initiatives of Cuba and Venezuela as well as the People’s Republic of China and, principally, the United States.  Several essays engage in “theorizing public diplomacy,” by attempting to fit it into larger conceptual frameworks.  The volume is rich in historical and institutional information, with ample scholarly references.  With its broad range of coverage, and its scope of ambition, the Cowan-Cull Annals volume on “Public Diplomacy in a Changing World” may well become a landmark, as a valuable reference work and a current assessment of an expanding field. The “field” of public diplomacy is not one that is easy to circumscribe, or to define.  Many attempts have been made to say exactly what “public diplomacy” is ever since Ambassador Edmund A. Gullion, as Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, institutionalized the term in 1965 when he established The Edward R. Murrow Center for the Study and Advancement of Public Diplomacy.  By now, the general meaning of PD—the purposeful use of the press and other communications media and links with elements in the populations of other countries mainly in order to influence their governments, in ways that traditional diplomacy cannot—is fairly well known and understood.  The basic idea, which of course existed “before Gullion,” has proved seminal.  As Bruce Gregory in his essay (“Public Diplomacy: Sunrise of an Academic Field”) in the Annals volume attests, there has been considerable growth of the subject, with an increase in the number of “practitioners” teaching public diplomacy and related courses, “strengthening a trend” that began with the creation of the Murrow Center. The acceptance of public diplomacy as an academic field has not resolved a fundamental issue within it.  This is the question—not just a definitional one—of whether it is the government that conducts it (with diplomacy of any kind being considered properly, even legally, an official function) or whether private persons and groups (individual citizens as well as corporations, unions, churches, universities, foundations, service organizations, and other NGOs) can, as “diplomats,” play in the field too.  Are the latter responsible?  Are they accountable?  Are they as effective as they say they are?  Feelings can run high on these points, although both sides of the PD “ownership” divide now increasingly recognize the need for public-private partnership, both at home and abroad.  The explanation of the…...  -->

Call for Book Reviews The USC Center on Public Diplomacy invites book reviews submission from scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals. To read the Call for Book Reviews, click here