Fronts and Forms of Public Diplomacy

Abstract

Public diplomacy becomes a more and more popular area of research due to several global trends: growing interdependence of states and the rise of transnational actors that urge governments to seek ways beyond their military and economic power to achieve their political goals; technological progress that makes information more accessible to the public, enabling international communication, thus increasing the importance of a dominating narrative; the rise of a human-centric approach placing the emphasis on individual people, protection and promotion of their rights, thus making public opinion more crucial to policy-makers than ever. However, there are still a lot of lacunae in the theoretical framework analyzing public diplomacy. Among them is the lack of a clear widely accepted classification of activities that fall into the area of public diplomacy. Some researchers choose to avoid typology altogether, others provide academic community with a variety of overlapping and contradicting approaches and terms, such as “dimensions”, “types”, “media”, “frameworks”, etc. After carefully studying related publications of international and Russian researchers, analyzing them and defining most common trends, the author proposes her own way to classify public diplomacy activities via two synergetic typologies. The first one offers a division by fronts based on the principal of the final goal of each front of public diplomacy: e.g. relationship-building activities and agenda-setting to influence the news. The second one implies a division by forms based on the principal of the general shape of the main types of public diplomacy activities: e.g. cultural diplomacy, international broadcasting. The author highlights that this approach does not involve multiplication of public diplomacy types based on the instrument (e.g. gastro-diplomacy, twitter-diplomacy, sport diplomacy), since each form may incorporate several instruments and the particular toolkit may change in time. The article suggests using both typologies for comprehensive research of public diplomacy (either in a case-study or for a theoretical model). However, a front-based classification can be more useful for studies related to strategic planning, long-term and short-term political goals of government, whereas a form-based classification can be more useful for researchers who focus on measuring a country’s public diplomacy effectiveness or seek to attribute a new instrument of public diplomacy