Ambassador Richard Verma Visits Twitter India Office, by U.S. Embassy New Delhi

Digital Diplomacy: Are We There Yet?

Ilan Manor of the University of Oxford has recently penned a new piece on digital diplomacy as part of the Brill Research Perspectives in Diplomacy and Foreign Policy. Looking specifically at Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs), Manor evaluates the extent of digitization in national public diplomacy strategy. He does this through a series of cross-national comparative interviews with the MFAs of Finland, Israel, Norway, and Poland. While MFAs seem to have institutionalized the use of social media, they fail to collaborate with non-state actors, keeping digital diplomacy as state-centric as traditional diplomacy. What’s more, MFAs tend to engage elite audiences rather than foreign publics. Thus, the practice of digital diplomacy has yet to achieve its full potential.

The full article is available here.

Photo by U.S. Embassy New Delhi I CC 2.0

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