Nation-branding in Practice

The Politics of Promoting Sports, Cities and Universities in Kazakhstan and Qatar

Kristin Anabel Eggeling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000067903
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates the political implications of country promotion through practices of 'nation-branding' by drawing on contemporary examples from the sports, urban development and higher education sector in Kazakhstan and Qatar.

Nation-branding has emerged as a central practice of international politics, where it is commonly understood as a vain, superficial selling technique with little political salience. Drawing on shared insights from practice theory and constructivist notions of nationalism, identity and power, this book challenges this reading and instead argues that nation-branding is neither neutral nor primarily economically motivated, but inherently politicised and tied to the legitimation of current political regimes. The starting point for the analysis is a range of everyday practices and sites long ignored by international relations scholars. In particular, the book traces how the political leadership in Kazakhstan and Qatar have used participation in the international sports circuit, spectacular urban development, and the construction of 'world-class' universities to first produce and then stabilize new ideas about their state.

Providing a new analytical perspective on nation-branding, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle Eastern and Central Asian studies, International Relations, and Cultural and Political Geography.

Part I
A practice approach to nation-branding

1 Conceptualising nation-branding as practice

This chapter takes the first step towards developing an approach to the study of nation-branding that is both theoretically armed and empirically rich by continuing to conceptualise nation-branding as ‘practice’. Its main ambition is to engage conceptual ideas that help to foreground the making of the nation-brand in interactive textures of doings and sayings, places, people, and objects that can be grasped at different empirical scales. Such an approach allows for an analysis that starts prior to essentialist assumptions that the nation-brand strategically communicates something about the state as dominant scholarly ways of understanding and researching the practice have it. Working within the empirical boundaries established in the previous chapter, this chapter sketches out the theoretical boundaries that will help us to examine the doings of selected branding practices in detail, and to grasp nation-branding in more abstract terms to lay the groundwork for more conceptual and comparative analyses of branding in world politics.

The chapter is split into three parts. In the first part, I introduce core ideas within the critical nation-branding literature that have inspired the theoretical pathways chosen in this book. In general, I survey how existing studies begin to stress the political work of nation-branding by pointing to its involvement in consolidating state-society relations or its role in constituting political self-esteem. In particular, I outline how these studies implicitly rely on the concept of practice to shift the analytical focus from the economic or reputational effects to the political and practical constitution of the nation-brand. While this body of work evokes many key ideas of practice-theory, I argue that it has so far failed to harness the concept’s full analytical potential by using it as a shorthand for ‘activity’ or ‘project’ rather than making practices their core unit of analysis.

In the second part, I introduce and weave together key ideas on how we can understand nation-branding as a political practice of making identity claims, and its particular relevance if such claims are linked to concerns of political legitimation. Conceptually, this move leans both on practice theory’s understanding of the social and constructivist approaches to the study of nationalism, identity, and political power. While numerous debates persist in the field of IR whether and how practice-based approaches differ from other modes of culturalist theorising, the discussion here seeks to avoid engaging in a potentially unproductive debate about ‘-isms’. Instead, this part of the chapter opens an intellectual ‘trading zone’ on which the overlapping insights offered by these two approaches are made to speak to each. What makes the establishment of this intellectual trading zone possible is the shared stance the interpretations of the concepts I draw on have in relation to the range of deeper philosophical commitments outlined in the previous chapter. To recall, the meta-theoretical ground that binds this book’s together rests on an interpretivist stance and its specific commitments to both a social ontology and epistemology. These stances are shared across practice theory and constructivist interpretations of identity, power, and the state, which both understand the world as coming into being through sayings and doings and understand academic knowledge about such processes as one culturalist domain among others.

In the third part, I synthesise these discussions into the book’s overall theoretical framework. As stated in the general introduction to practice-theory above, this framework resembles a ‘sensitizing’ tool that guides the analysis in the chapters to come, rather than a clear-cut outline of theoretical grids or expectations. As a positive heuristic to structure the analysis, the framework develops along six signposts that prompt us to think through nation-branding according to its ontological work, initiation, content, mode of communication, temporal dimensions, and audiences. Analysing nation-branding along these lines will help us to theorise nation-branding and produce some analytically general insights about its implications as an international political practice.

The presence of ‘practice’ in existing scholarship

Irrespective of the form and shape they come in, nation-branding practices are generally involved in making favourable character claims in relation to an existing nation-state. Given the close proximity of such practices to more contentious forms of political communication such as aggressive public diplomacy or propaganda (for a discussion of the difference between them see Browning and de Oliveira 2017), the analytical questions most often asked about the phenomenon focus on their strategic ambition, normative bias, and effectiveness in the political realm. From this perspective, the nation-brand is treated as a thing, as something we can be more or less fond of, and as something that we can think of as better or worse, and more or less useful. The questions asked about nation-branding from this perspective are why-questions: why do political actors brand, and why are some brand more successful than others? In Doty’s (1993) words, they take the existence of the object of their study to be unproblematic, inquiring primarily into what we can do with the practice rather than how it is done in the first place. This latter question has received more attention over the last years from scholarship across social science disciplines that problematises the production of the nation-brand as a constituent element of more general political practice. Reviewing this body of literature, five broad themes stand out that are relevant to the current discussion. Crucial in setting the stage for the approach developed in this and the next chapters, existing scholarship often implicitly conceptualises nation-branding as a ‘practice’ without yet harnessing the term’s full conceptual and analytical potential.

First, there are a number of scholars who explicitly explore branding as linked to practices of identity politics and the (re)negotiation of legitimate state-society relations. In 2011, Kaneva noted that there is a growing body of scholarship grounded in critical theories of culture, communication, and society that are “not concerned with advancing a theory of nation branding that could inform its applied practice … [but that] focus on elaborating a critique of nation branding’s discourses and practices as they relate to national identity, culture and governance” (Kaneva 2011, 127). Examples include the work of Aronczyk (2008), who has connected nation-branding to constructivist readings of nation-hood in the tradition of Anderson and Gellner; Janine Widler (2007), who draws on Foucault to discuss nation-branding’s impact on citizen participation and the definition of national identity; Ishita Roy (2007), Dina Iordanova (2007), Zala Volcic (2008), and Catherine Baker’s (2008) work on how nation-branding re-models national identity for the benefit of external (Western) audiences; as well as Kaneva’s own work (2007; Kaneva and Popescu 2008) that draws on Bourdieusian approaches to analyse the practices of national and international stakeholders in recent efforts to re-brand Bulgaria. In her work on South Africa, Scarlett Cornelissen (2017, 2) has moreover argued for moving beyond conceptualising nation-branding as a tool for identity construction as an end in and of itself, and to look at nation-branding “through the prism of political legitimation by state actors”. Nation-branding, according to her, is not merely aimed at projecting an image to “lure transnational capital” (2017, 3), but involves “discourses and practices of symbolic imagineering” that may be used by the political elite to claim their legitimacy.

Second, the political dimension of nation-branding has been highlighted through the concepts of ontological security and national biographic narratives. Central here has been the work of Christopher Browning, who stresses branding’s ontological work and defines nation-brands as a form of identity narrative that practically tells us “who we are” (Browning 2007, 31). In that sense, a brand for the nation is similar to a brand for a product in that it is involved in creating a “particular version of a particular thing” (2007, 29). To conceptualise this process, Browning (2015, 197) employs the idea of ontological security to stress states’ needs to “uphold consistent self-narratives and to maintain positive recognition from both international and domestic audiences”. This matches another interpretation made earlier by Kaneva (2012, 7) that nation-branding is marked by concrete “ontological aspirations related to the re-inventing of national identities”, which highlights how the practice carries political implications far beyond commercial motives. It is here that it becomes obvious that nation-branding is not “simply about policy, but identity, and not simply about reflecting identity, but actively constituting it” (Browning 2015, 202).

Third, nation-branding has recently been approached through a critical geopolitics lens by scholars interested in tracing its historical emergence and ‘geopolitical scripts’ (Browning and de Oliveira 2017). Central contributions to this line of inquiry have been published in a recent special issue of Geopolitics entitled Nation Branding and Competitive Identity in World Politics. An important point of departure for the collection is van Ham’s (2001, 4) claim concerning the ‘shift’ from the modern world of geopolitics to the post-modern world of images and influence; in other words, the shift from a world where ‘space matters’ to one in which it is replaced by intangible assets of status and prestige. Contra the prevalence of this idea in much of the nation-branding literature, Browning and de Oliveira (2017) argue that a “categorical shift from a world of geopolitics to one of geoeconomics may lack sufficient nuance” [sic] (483). It is problematic, they argue, as it, on the one hand, suggests that image-making is “the only game in town” (ibid, 488) and, on the other hand, implies that “states trapped in the world of modern geopolitics lacked a concern for images and their manipulation in order to achieve influence” (Browning and de Oliveira 2017, 488). To study nation-branding critically, they argue, it is therefore important to identify both the context and the ‘geopolitical scripts’ on which the practice builds, which are evident, for example, in attempts to ‘re-position’ places as ‘gateways, bridges, or crossroads’, or attempts to reinforce cosmopolitan notions of identity that seek equivalence with the developed, global core and differentiation from the marginal periphery.

Fourth, there is a burgeoning literature on the links between nation-branding, the work of private consultancy firms, and the rising influence of rankings in world politics. In 2008, Aronczyk was among the first to observe that

[i]n the past years, countries with such diverse political programs as Poland, New Zealand, Taiwan and Botswana have jumped on the “brandwagon”, engaging the profit-based marketing techniques of private enterprises to create and communicate a particular version of national identity.

(42)

According to her, this causes a particular concern, as national identity is by definition a “public good” and hence “an object of democracy, encouraging collective participation from its citizens and procuring just and equitable rewards for the benefit of all” (ibid, 43). Yet, through nation-branding, questions of identity increasingly fall under the “authority of private branding and advertising agents” (emphasis in original), which replaces accountability with facilitation and fits “discussion of the nation into categories that privilege a particular kind of collective representation over diverse expression” (Aronczyk 2008, 43). A key contribution to this literature has been Alexander Cooley and Jack Snyder’s Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance (2015). Drawing especially on case studies from the former Soviet sphere, the volume unpacks the central claim that “rakings are playing an increasingly important role in the domains of international relations and public policy, yet scholars and commentators have not yet fully appreciated their scope and impact on state behaviour and global governance” (2015, 2). Speaking about the entanglement of ranking and nation-branding more specifically, Cooley argues that in an increasingly “crowded [global] market”, states’ response to rankings varies. While some “flaunt their improving performances in glossy large ads in international publications such as The Economist or Financial Times … [others] use these rankings as focal points to identify areas of policy priority and launch new initiatives” (Cooley 2015, 4; italics in original). In other words, the activities adopted to engage with branding as a political practice are diverse.

Fifth, a number of scholars across political geography, IR, economics, and philosophy have explored bran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• About the author
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I A practice approach to nation-branding
• Part II The promotion of sports, cities, and universities in Kazakhstan and Qatar
• Part III Nation-branding in practice
• Conclusion: Brand new world?
• Index