Political Dissent as Non-State Public Diplomacy

Principal Investigator:
Anna Popkova, CPD Research Fellow 2023-25

The goal of this project is to examine political dissent as a form of non-state public diplomacy. Most research on non-state actors (NSAs) as agents of public diplomacy (PD) focuses on collaborative or at least non-confrontational relationships between states and non-state actors. What happens, however, when certain groups of people disagree with a state’s foreign (and domestic) policy and therefore its PD objectives as well? These groups of people frequently organize – inside and outside the country – and challenge their respective states and their PD efforts. The central argument of this project is that non-state actors that engage in political dissent can claim a stake in their country’s public diplomacy by: a) disrupting the official state-supported PD narratives, and b) presenting a more complex picture of their country-of-origin to the foreign publics.

Engaging with the idea of dissent as a form of PD can help move the field and the practice of PD further by examining such concepts as agency, representation, power and legitimacy. Gaining a deeper understanding of the role of these concepts in PD can help better understand the shifting dynamics of global politics and the role of PD in these dynamics. As such, this project asks three broad conceptual research questions: How do competing forms of state and non-state governance that emerge worldwide challenge established notions of legitimacy and representation in PD? If diplomacy is inherently about representation, who has the right, capability, and ability to represent a nation on an international stage? What are the possibilities and the limitations for the dissenting non-state actors to obtain representational power and use it to achieve their political and diplomatic goals?

This project will develop in two directions. The first direction will examine the topic cross-nationally, drawing on cases from various countries, and in collaboration with several other scholars. The second direction will extend my work on the public diplomacy of Russian political dissent by conducting empirical research on how it evolved and transformed during Russia’s war in Ukraine.