No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Unwanted participation? Defector public diplomacy in South Korea
Abstract
The controversy surrounding defector balloon launches into North Korea is often viewed as a bizarre example of Cold War legacies on the Korean peninsula. However, it is also a unique case study of non-state public diplomacy because these groups are attempting to engage in cross-border communication against the wishes of their host government. This article argues that South Korea’s unique interpretation of public diplomacy as a participatory activity has proven vulnerable to non-state organisations with divergent views of the national interest, which has resulted in two different types of public diplomacy being directed at North Korea. Subsequent attempts by the South Korean government to control the dissonant public diplomacy of non-state groups resulted in reputational costs for both sides and ultimately failed to prevent defectors from advancing their claim to a human right to communicate across national borders. Even though this case study broadly supports a polylateral interpretation of public diplomacy, it cautions that human rights discourses may obscure the fact that the traditional diplomatic system was designed to mitigate many of the risks associated with non-state diplomatic actors. Therefore, this paper suggests the need for more discussion about the consequences of a right to communicate across national borders.
Under the authoritarian regime, earlier iterations of Vietnam’s public diplomacy (PD), especially during wartime, reassembled propaganda and psychological warfare. But thanks to Doi Moi (i.e. “renovation”) in 1986, new understandings of PD were made possible with a revamped foreign policy of multi-lateralisation and diversification. This article argues that information and communications technologies (ICTs), especially the internet and social media, have further transformed the practice of Vietnamese PD. Focusing on the period from 1997 when the internet was introduced in Vietnam, this article first provides a general analysis of the influence of ICTs on Vietnam’s politics. It then delves into how ICTs have transformed Vietnam’s PD. The key takeaway is that the internet and social media have significantly empowered public opinion in foreign policy, giving rise to cross-border cyber communities that can play the roles of both recipient and practitioner of PD.
This study of the U.S.–China trade war investigated how Beijing (a) uses institutional discourse and rhetoric to conceptualize digital public diplomacy based on the autocratic system of the Communist Party of China and (b) legitimizes its highly centralized and politicized international communication practices. We also investigated how China’s domestic public diplomacy practices affect its international communication. Comparing the online activities of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs domestically (i.e., Weibo) and internationally (i.e., Twitter) revealed (a) that China first centralizes and politicizes communication content production and distribution to ensure that all messages follow the desired political direction and promote the desired value orientation; and (b) that, although inspired by the network communication perspective, Beijing’s digital public diplomacy emphasizes advocacy and narrative, ignores listening and exchange, and does not seek mutual cross-cultural adaptation. Digital public diplomacy is an instrument that serves China’s internal affairs, controlling and guiding domestic public opinion online to defend Communist Party of China leadership.
Civil religion refers to a country’s beliefs, symbols, and rituals that bolster national unity and strengthen its citizens’ sense of identity and belonging. However, the literature on civil religion is divided between those who attribute it to bottom-up cultural spontaneity and those who see it as an ideological top-down construction. Moreover, there has been a relative lack of scholarly attention to Korean civil religion. This paper addresses both issues by arguing that a strong civil religion indeed exists in the country and that it has been an important part of the “nation-building” process since the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948. The paper highlights how a succession of authoritarian regimes (1948–1987) successfully mobilized a strong civil religion for political purposes. The resulting civil religion targeted economic growth as the national goal to overcome all social ills, focused on the country’s ethnic and cultural homogeneity to boost national confidence and pride, exalted its traditional religions, especially Confucianism, as repositories of Korean traditional culture, and rendered sacred meanings to national symbols such as the flag and national anthem. Even after democratization, Korean civil religion remains largely ideological, as the Korean government is heavily involved in framing, planning, sponsoring, and promoting the country’s civil religion. Nevertheless, the paper concludes by observing that this civil religion is entering a period of crisis due to political fragmentation among Korean elites and deeply rooted cultural and societal change.
This chapter argues that Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) and embassies must contend with disinformation and propaganda if they are to practice public diplomacy online effectively. The reason for this is that digital disinformation campaigns target the same publics that MFAs and embassies seek to interact with in cyber-spaces. Moreover, the goal of such campaigns is to warp public perception of global events and actors, sow the seeds of societal discord and polarize public debates. Failure to contend with such campaigns therefore risks losing the ability to interact with digital publics who increasingly become alienated. This chapter reviews five different tactics that MFAs could use separately or in combination to counter disinformation and propaganda campaigns. These tactics include ignoring, debunking, turning the tables, discrediting and disturbing. Using recent case studies such as the Twitter activity of the Russian embassy to the UK, or the Israeli MFA’s digital engagement with Iranian leaders, each tactic is analysed in terms of costs and benefits, and the new working routine or norms that diplomatic institutions must adopt to employ these tactics.
In a global pandemic, public health outcomes are not the only variables at stake. Also at stake are countries’ nation brands and influence, which hinge on how a country responded to the crisis. Based on a case study of a middle power, South Korea, one of the more successful COVID-19 national responses so far, we offer an exploratory conceptual explication of pandemic public diplomacy that is grounded in a normative framework of substance, information, trust, collaboration, and mutual benefit. Sentiment analyses of social media and international news media suggest that the country is perceived as a model on how to cope with the pandemic by international audiences. Unlike other public diplomacy contexts, pandemic public diplomacy challenge conventional assumptions about public diplomacy and nation branding. As nation-states confront a common enemy, how public diplomacy and nation branding play out in COVID-19—arguably the most socially disruptive event in modern history—helps to shed light on the dynamics of mutual interdependence in an interconnected yet competitive world fraught with fear, uncertainty, and information deficiency.
There is great confusion over what constitutes public diplomacy (PD), who its actors are, and the relevance of non-state actors. In the Korean context, in addition to the general fuzziness of the concept, linguistic peculiarities of the terms gonggong and gongjung both of which refer to public, waegyo, which is interchangeably used for international affairs, foreign policy and diplomacy, and juche which is simultaneously used for actor and agent, add more layers of confusion. While the term PD in Korea is based almost entirely on Western conceptualization, these linguistic peculiarities prevent fruitful conversations among scholars and practitioners on PD. Against this background, this research note explores and addresses conceptual ambiguities that pertains to PD and the policy discourse on the topic, particularly on non-state PD in Korea. The paper draws on Korean government’s PD-related policy documents and Diplomatic White Papers and all relevant academic articles found in Korean-language journals registered in the Korean Citation Index (KCI), which are analysed to gain an understanding of the PD-related policy discourse in Korea.
Discussions about state-sponsored communication with foreign publics are increasingly framed in the language of "information war" rather than "public diplomacy," particularly in Eastern Europe. For example, media projects supported by Western governments to engage Ukrainian audiences, and Ukrainian government efforts to engage international audiences via the media, are considered necessary responses in the information war with Russia. This article highlights several potentially problematic assumptions about communicative influence that are embedded in the language of information war. First is the assumption that communication can be targeted like a weapon to achieve a predictable impact. Second is the assumption that audiences engage with communication from an adversary because they are "vulnerable." Third is the assumption that "winning" in an information war means getting citizens to believe particular facts. Although these assumptions may hold to some degree, this article argues that adopting them uncritically can have detrimental consequences in policymaking.
Most research on social media as a tool for public diplomacy focuses on its use by recognized international actors to advance their national interest and reputation, deliver foreign policy objectives or promote their global interests. This article highlights the need for paying more attention to non-state diplomacy in conflict situations outside the western world. We examine how rebel groups use new media to enhance their communications, and what the motivations behind this are. Our public diplomacy perspective helps convey the scope of rebel communications with external actors and provides insights for policy-makers seeking to ascertain the nature, intentions and capacities of myriad rebel groups. Our focus is on the Sahel region, where numerous such groups vying for international attention and support make use of multiple social media channels. We analyse two groups in Mali: the MNLA, a Tuareg secessionist group; and Ansar Dine, a Salafist insurgency with ties to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Our qualitative analysis of Ansar Dine and MNLA communications on several digital platforms helps identify these African rebel groups' international and local framing activities. Rebel groups use public diplomacy nimbly and pragmatically. The digital age has fundamentally changed which stakeholders such groups can reach, and we suggest that social media increase the power they are able to carve out for themselves on the international stage.
Despite a rising academic interest in South Korea's public diplomacy, little is known about its origins and evolution. Most existing studies have focused on the modern period of South Korea's public diplomacy, in particular the government's new foreign policy agenda since the late 2000s. Contrary to popular belief, this article argues that the recent infiltration of public diplomacy into South Korea's foreign policy represents de jure intensification of activities that de facto have been practiced from the second half of the 20th century. The present research divides the evolution of South Korea's public diplomacy into four periods: origins, diversification, polycentrism, and institutionalization. Each period has its own specific patterns, ends, and means. For instance, whereas the origins period arose with cultural and sports diplomacies, diversification included specific areas of engagement with foreign publics through official development assistance , knowledge, and exchange diplomacies. In turn, polycentrism has structurally transformed public diplomacy from a solely state-led activity into a polycentric framework of public and private partnership. Lastly, the institutionalization period re presents the government's recent efforts to establish a universal coordinative authority above its public diplomacy, which represents a fragmented set of activities conducted by various governmental institutions.
South Korea’s (hereafter Korea) recent middle power diplomacy has attracted worldwide attention. Korean administrations have attempted to steer the country along a middle power path, where it can play a more active global role that is commensurate with the size of its economy. Most accounts take Korea’s self-declared identity as a middle power for granted; that is, they do not evaluate the non-conforming data. On the other hand, this paper traces the process of why the country projects a middle power identity. This paper first addresses alternative explanations of the positional, behavioral and identity approaches to answer this question. Following the failure of these explanations, this paper proposes that Korea’s more assertive projection of its proclaimed middle power identity was a nation branding project that aimed to tackle the so-called Korea discount and to achieve its aspired place in the global prestige and status hierarchy. In turn, Korea envisioned its improved standing in the world helping it achieve its preferred global outcomes, particularly in shaping a favorable international environment surrounding the country.
Public diplomacy (PD) lacks an agreed-upon definition and boundaries. The ambiguity surrounding the conceptualization of the term leads to confusion among scholars and practitioners and hinders the consolidation of PD as an academic field. This article surveys 160 articles and books on PD, categorizes diverse perspectives into a taxonomy, and explores the coherence of each. The taxonomy can be categorized into these perspectives: state-centric, neo-statist, nontraditional, society-centric, and accommodative. The article maps the boundaries of public diplomacy with much needed clear and coherent criteria and positions PD within the broader discipline of international relations. © The Author(s) (2018). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved.
Digital diplomacy is the latest technological advance to push change in diplomatic practice. It relates to the application of digital technologies, including information and communication technologies, software engineering and big data, and artificial intelligence, to the practice of diplomacy.
Positioned in the top ranks of connectivity, internet speed, smartphone ownership, and social media usage, South Korea should be a leader in the use of digital technologies in diplomatic practice. However, South Korea is not a leader; indeed, it has been left behind.
I explore digital diplomacy as a “disruptive technology” and look at criteria for organizational adaptation. I then use these criteria to assess South Korea's adaptation and draw from these the specific policy challenges facing South Korea. To conclude, I propose four core criteria to aid digital diplomacy adaptation in South Korea and other similar states.
The manner in which public diplomacy is being practiced is constantly evolving, new means are being developed to create political relationships between states and international publics. Countries are competing globally for the hearts and minds of international publics in their quest for gaining and accumulating soft power. This quest is driven by the assumption that soft power gives countries that possess it advantages, such as a freer hand in foreign policy or attracting foreign investment. Russia is one of those countries that is competing in the global arena, and have been developing their tools of new public diplomacy. One of these tools is the creation and the use of NGOs, which are directed at creating an information environment where Russian policy better placed to be realized.
Public Diplomacy (PD) is an important tool that Korea uses in reaching its goals in international politics. One of Korea’s goals is persuading the global community to favor Korea’s position in the territorial dispute with Japan regarding Dokdo islands. In August 2017 government-supported NGOs conducted an event called “Dokdo Global
Youth Summit 2017” (DGYS). As a part of the event more than 100 international students visited Dokdo islands. This study investigates this event, identifying two PD mechanisms that were utilized within this event and demonstrates how they function.
Investigation of relevant data reveals that this event, as a part of the PD approach, reached a certain level of success in norm diffusion by increasing legal cases of visiting Dokdo by international students with documents issued by Korean authorities. A further PD mechanism utilized in this event was agenda setting and rhetoric control which was reflected in topics discussed during the event and the program of the summit. DGYS's success in shaping the opinions of selected publics was limited due to some pre-existent opinions about the issue among selected publics and organizational flaws that resulted
in misconceptions of the event’s original goal by the international students.
The role of non-state actors in public diplomacy remains an unsettled question in the literature. However, various transnational activities of non-state actors are often called public diplomacy, without discrimination. The lack of empirical studies on non-state public diplomacy is to blame for this conceptual confusion. Analytical and empirical studies of non-state public diplomacy are needed to consolidate this phenomenon, which is relatively new, while maintaining the conceptual clarity of public diplomacy. This study explores how Voluntary Agency Network of Korea (VANK), a Korean NGO, conducts public diplomacy and nation branding of Korea based on its members’ relationships with foreigners. To gain an in-depth understanding of VANK’s activities from the perspectives of public diplomacy and nation branding, this study follows an exploratory single case study method. The findings of this article suggest how VANK and similar non-state actors offer potential for public diplomacy and nation branding that can be utilized also by state agencies.
In the last few decades, terrorism has become a global threat and challenge, which many countries have had to face and fight. Conflicts involving terror organizations are, to a large extent, battles of ideas, and are not focused only on physical violence or military confrontation. This reality creates a need to better understand the tools through which terror organizations promote their messages, and to distinguish between different types of terror organizations. The current study examines different types of terror organizations’ messages targeting foreign audiences. The analysis focuses on the organizations’ usage of public diplomacy in promoting their messages and distinguishes between the different types of organizations (limited- versus total-conflict). Messages promoted by four terror organizations—Hamas and Hezbollah (limited-conflict organizations) and Al-Qaida and the Islamic State (total-conflict organizations)—are analyzed. The findings reveal that while limited-conflict organizations communicate with the international community, and use public diplomacy to try to change the international environment in which they operate, total-conflict organizations do not use public diplomacy; they talk about the international community rather than communicating with it.
The first decade of the new millennium witnessed the rising importance of public diplomacy across the globe. The elevation of public diplomacy has a dual dimension, as a new field of diplomatic practice and a new field of academic research. What should be the Korean model of public diplomacy? How can Korea shift to the emerging paradigm of diplomacy? To address these simple but fundamental questions, this paper provides a conceptual model of Korea's public diplomacy within a five-phase framework, emphasizing the production of diverse soft power assets based on competitive advantage and the development of knowledge diplomacy as a complementary alternative to a narrow cultural diplomacy. Given Korea's "middle power" status in the international society, we argue that the new model should combine universal values with Korea's historical experience in such a way that Korea could play a role in bridge-building between advanced and developing nations. We also suggest adopting a geographic-thematic approach in combination with a modular approach, taking into consideration the needs and demands of object nations and groups. Networking of subjects and objects is another crucial element of the new model, while new digital media should provide the necessary instruments for networking and other activities throughout nearly the entire process of public diplomacy.
Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in Africa and public diplomacy has emerged as the vital tool being used to cultivate these relations. China has been leading in pursuing stronger economic partnership with Africa while middle powers such as Korea are also intensifying engagement with the continent. While previous studies have analyzed the implications of China’s activities in Africa on advanced powers, none has examined them from the paradigm of middle powers. This study fills this gap by assessing China’s activities in Africa, their economic engagement and implications for Korea’s interest in Africa. The analysis is qualitative based on secondary data from various sources and literature. The study shows that China’s public diplomacy strategy involves a high degree of innovation and has evolved to encompass new tools and audiences. China has institutionalized a cooperative model that permeates many aspects of governance institutions in Africa, enabling it to strengthen their relations. This could also be helping China to adjust faster leadership transitions in Africa. Whereas the US is still the most influential country in Africa, China is influential in economic policies and has outstripped the US in infrastructure diplomacy. This could be because African policy makers align more with China’s economic model than the US’ mainstream economics. Chinese aid to Africa has been diversified to social sectors that are more responsive to the needs of Africa. Trade and investment relations between China and Africa have deepened, but so does trade imbalance since 2010. China mainly imports natural resources and raw materials from Africa. But this product portfolio is not different from Korea and the US. China’s energetic insertion in Africa using various strategies has significant implications for countries with ambitions in Africa. Korea can achieve its ambitions in Africa by focusing resources in areas it can leverage its core strengths-such as education and vocational training, environmental policy and development cooperation.
This article identifies and analyzes economic and political factors behind the polarization of Korean civil society. Both the growing economic disparity between the rich and the poor and the tightened job market for the younger generation since the 1997-1998 financial crisis have contributed to a sharp divergence in views on how best to approach reforms. More importantly, political flux and instability deriving from the current "transitional politics" have aggravated the political polarization. The three major actors in this transitional poli- tics—power elites, civic movement organizations, and the media—play a divisive rather than unifying role. Given that political institutions are still weak and a political culture for compromise remains largely absent, polarization of Korean society is likely to continue until the intense passions of the politicized civil society are dampened by successful institutio- nalization of conflict resolving mechanisms.
Why has the practice of nation branding and its competitive imaginary become common sense in Korea? This article retraces the domestication, in Korea, of nation branding into an unquestioned policy imperative and of a competitive common sense. It shows how, in Korea, nation branding emerged as a policy solution to four national urgencies in the post-democratisation political economic context. It was adopted in conjunction by the state and the chaebol to resolve obstacles to capital accumulation. Korean policy-makers hired promotional consultants to participate in agenda -making processes. However, these consultants were not hired by the Korean government to design Korea's branding policies. Their power was essentially cultural. Their discourses provided policy justification and functioned as a governing device to exhort citizens to accept global competition as an unquestionable social reality and the pro-capital reforms that are (supposedly) needed to cope with competition.
The article examines how the “human rights industry” has used the narratives of North Korean human rights activists and how actors are connected through their networks from a discourse-network perspective. It focusses on the coverage of the three most-cited North Korean refugee activists in the English-language Western media in recent years – Shin Dong Hyuk, Park Yeon Mi and Lee Hyeon Seo – and analyses their memoirs, public speeches and newspaper articles. The study finds that Western publishers have followed Makau Mutua’s “savage–victim–saviour” story grammar in their portrayal of the North Korean activists’ public discourses and that politically conservative, economically libertarian, ideologically anti-communist and religiously Christian groups have influenced these activists. While the political and material environments provided similar structural conditions for all three activists discussed in this study, there were variations among them in terms of access to resources and their exercise of individual agency. The author argues that by employing the voices and performances of North Korean activists, the human rights industry has played a significant role in strengthening and legitimising the hawkish policy of political conservatives in Seoul and Washington against Pyongyang.
For all the rhetorical rage surrounding 'hybrid warfare', Western democracy is being threatened more acutely by hybrid interference. Using liberal democratic values and infrastructure for cover, authoritarian actors use a panoply of covert, non-military means to subtly drive wedges between democratic societies and undermine their internal cohesion. This paper outlines the strategic logic of hybrid interference and shows how it puts Western democratic governability in jeopardy. It argues that deterrence policies need to be revamped in the face of this new challenge and suggests a new strategic concept-democratic deterrence-as a framework for dissuading hybrid interference. The concept of democratic deterrence shows how liberal democratic values need not be security vulnerabilities, as often presented in the current debate, but how they can be turned into strengths and tools for a credible deterrence response against hybrid aggressors, all the while making our Western democracies more robust and resilient.
In this chapter, the author argues that the traditional framing of far-right extremist discourse in terms of race-based nationalism, while highly relevant, is not of itself sufficient to explain recent developments in extremist discourse. Such discourse has proliferated and changed in nature in the era of online media and in particular social media. To encompass these developments, the author uses the term ‘anti-publics’, to describe how extremist groups increasingly position themselves in counter-hegemonic opposition to democratic processes more generally, including normative ‘public sphere’ processes of deliberation, rules of evidence, egalitarianism, mutuality, reciprocity, and so on. The chapter analyses the Facebook pages of eight Australian far-right groups to show how their ‘anti-public’ discourse counterposes itself against democratic processes, is transnational in its derivation, and ‘intersectional’ in its concerns, which converge race, gender, and science, among other issues.
Soft power is the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment. A country’s soft power rests on its resources of culture, values and policies. A smart-power strategy combines hard- and soft-power resources. Public diplomacy has a long history as a means of promoting a country’s soft power, and soft power was essential in winning the Cold War. Smart public diplomacy requires an understanding of the roles of credibility, self-criticism and civil society in generating soft power. As authoritarian states today use new cyber technologies and other means to disrupt political processes in democracies, questions arise about the boundaries of soft power and the appropriate policies for public diplomacy.
In this chapter, the newest diplomatic mode, polylateral diplomacy, is analysed. Spies explains the catalytic processes that constitute this interface of official diplomacy with private initiatives. Non-state actors operate at domestic, transnational, international and global levels, and their de facto diplomacy often happens in parallel to that of sovereign states, challenging the latter’s jurisdiction. This has made the contemporary diplomatic arena pluralistic, dynamic and complex. Spies identifies the main categories of non-state diplomatic actors and explains their comparative advantages vis-à-vis state actors. The global public commons, where delivery of global public goods is at stake, is discussed to contextualise the intersection of state and societal interests. The intersection makes it imperative for joint ventures in statecraft and civilcraft—essentially the networked model that polylateral diplomacy entails.
This article argues that a common pattern and set of dynamics characterizes severe political and societal polarization in different contexts around the world, with pernicious consequences for democracy. Moving beyond the conventional conceptualization of polarization as ideological distance between political parties and candidates, we offer a conceptualization of polarization highlighting its inherently relational nature and its instrumental political use. Polarization is a process whereby the normal multiplicity of differences in a society increasingly align along a single dimension and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of “Us” versus “Them.” The politics and discourse of opposition and the social–psychological intergroup conflict dynamics produced by this alignment are a main source of the risks polarization generates for democracy, although we recognize that it can also produce opportunities for democracy. We argue that contemporary examples of polarization follow a frequent pattern whereby polarization is activated when major groups in society mobilize politically to achieve fundamental changes in structures, institutions, and power relations. Hence, newly constructed cleavages are appearing that underlie polarization and are not easily measured with the conventional Left–Right ideological scale. We identify three possible negative outcomes for democracy—“gridlock and careening,” “democratic erosion or collapse under new elites and dominant groups,” and “democratic erosion or collapse with old elites and dominant groups,” and one possible positive outcome—“reformed democracy.” Drawing on literature in psychology and political science, the article posits a set of causal mechanisms linking polarization to harm to democracy and illustrates the common patterns and pernicious consequences for democracy in four country cases: varying warning signs of democratic erosion in Hungary and the United States, and growing authoritarianism in Turkey and Venezuela.
This article bridges diaspora studies and diplomacy studies by proposing the concept of ‘diaspora diplomacy’, which considers the components of diplomacy and the changing relationships that diasporas have with states and other diplomatic actors. First, we ask who are the key actors engaged in diaspora diplomacy? Second, how is diplomatic work enacted by and through diasporas? Third, what are the geographies of diaspora diplomacy? Diaspora diplomacy directs researchers to reconsider the distinction between domestic and foreign policy, and the territorial dimensions of both diaspora and diplomacy. We engage with assemblage theory, highlighting the polylateral and multi-directional aspects of diaspora diplomacy.
This study analyses linguistic meanings of songs and their effectiveness of psychological influence from a propagandistic perspective with the case of South Korean loudspeaker propaganda targeting North Korean soldiers over the border. The two Koreas resumed to use loudspeakers to inflict psychological pain on each side in 2015, and the South chooses K-pop songs to execute the twenty-first century propaganda. More importantly, a linguistic and psychological analysis of the impact of K-pop songs on North Korean soldiers takes a greater part in this study, in addition to a demonstration of musical influence on emotions, induced by rhythm, beats and lyrics.
The term “soft power” was coined by Professor Joseph Nye, who first introduced it in a book he published in 1990, and in two scholarly articles that came out in the same year.1 His concept was built on an idea discussed much earlier by two other scholars who talked about “the second face of power.”2 Then after 9/11, Professor Nye further refined his concept in several new publications. His book, The Paradox of American Power, which came out in 2003, fully developed the soft power idea, just at a time when the Bush administration was using hard power to bring about regime change in Iraq.3 Nye quickly followed that in 2004 with another book on soft power that devoted an entire chapter to public diplomacy, and another scholarly article summarizing his thesis.4
This paper argues that in the case of Korea, cultural diplomacy (CD) has been explicitly implemented in a top-down and unilateral approach by government to enhance national prestige abroad, underpinned by the institutional legacy of a ‘developmental state’ model of governance. Yet, an implicit approach has also emerged, associated with capacity building of the domestic cultural industries through promoting ‘international cultural exchange’. Whilst the top-down unilateral approach has persisted, a disarray of policy rhetoric and institutional fragmentation surrounding CD, as well as the blurring of cultural industries development policy with the CD agenda has led to gradual convergence of both explicit and implicit approaches.
This article argues that the rise of associational life across East Asia in the 1990s has increasingly challenged states’
monopoly over the collective remembrance of war. Civil society actors are capturing or subverting state memory-making apparatuses,
creating their own commemorative devices and using litigation to publicize the voices of forgotten victims. The activities
of oppositional memory workers, although deeply concerned with local issues,1 are contributing to the formation of a body of transnational memories infused with human rights. These memories are even
spreading beyond the region. However, this ongoing transcendence of East Asian war memories into cosmopolitan memory is not
inevitable – ultimately the process depends on the vibrancy and openness of civil society itself.
Orthodox Diplomatic History, with its focus on government sources, aims to piece together the decision-making reasoning of policy-makers and the apparatuses and outcomes of foreign policy implementation. In contrast, New Diplomatic History looks to broaden and deepen the analysis of international interactions along three planes: spatially, in the sense of granting more importance to the role of individuals and non-governmental institutions; temporally, since the examination of a wider field of diplomatic ‘actors’ challenges the standard periodisations; behaviorally, in that the very nature of diplomatic practice and the role (indeed the very notion) of the diplomat is being transformed in an ever-more-dynamic global context of multilateral agreements and transactions. Once the frame of ‘diplomacy’ is altered, so the kinds of actors who become visible change with it – and the designations ‘diplomacy’ and ‘diplomat’ become more fluid. The articles collected in this special issue of New Global Studies examine the input and influence of particular individuals in international relations who were able to pursue their own agendas either in alliance with, separate from, or sometimes against the interests of states. Such ‘private international relations’ opens up a rich research field highly relevant in the context of increasing global flows of people and ideas.
States use public diplomacy (PD) to transmit information, ideas, and values that support their interests. Despite the centrality of emotion to early academic accounts of propaganda, emotion has not yet been addressed in contemporary PD studies, even in the context of the field's recent engagement with relational communication models. This oversight leaves the current scholarship on PD with an underspecified account of what PD actually does when it works—when it influences and persuades—because emotion is involved in these functions. At the same time, investigating these questions shows that PD practices deserve greater attention in debates within International Relations (IR) about language, power, and persuasion. Drawing on theories of emotion within constructivist IR and political theory, this article reviews two key functions of PD and asks how they engage public emotions. I show that emotions are present in argument, reasoning, and persuasion—particularly in the context of discourse about values. I then show how emotional expression reflects cultural difference, thereby influencing cross-cultural dialogue, and how emotion constitutes collective identities.