Communicating National Image through Development and Diplomacy

The Politics of Foreign Aid

James Pamment, Karin Gwinn Wilkins, James Pamment, Karin Gwinn Wilkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319767581
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319767598
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection draws upon interdisciplinary research to explore new dimensions in the politics of image and aid. While development communication and public diplomacy are established research fields, there is little scholarship that seeks to understand how the two areas relate to one another. However, international development doctrine in the US, UK and elsewhere increasingly suggests that they are integrated–or at the very least should be–at the level of national strategy. This timely volume considers a variety of cases in diverse regions, drawing upon a combination of theoretical and conceptual lenses that combine a focus on both aid and image. The result is a text that seeks to establish a new body of knowledge on how contemporary debates into public diplomacy, soft power and the national image are fundamentally changing not just the communication of aid, but its wider strategies, modalities and practices.

© The Author(s) 2018

J. Pamment, K. G. Wilkins (eds.)Communicating National Image through Development and DiplomacyPalgrave Studies in Communication for Social Changehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76759-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: New Dimensions in the Politics of Image and Aid

James Pamment¹ and Karin Gwinn Wilkins²

(1)

Lund University, Lund, Sweden

(2)

University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

James Pamment (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Karin Gwinn Wilkins

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This edited collection draws upon interdisciplinary research to explore new dimensions in the politics of image and aid. While development communication and public diplomacy are established research fields, there is little scholarship that seeks to understand how the two areas relate to one another (Pamment 2015, 2016a, b). However, international development doctrine in the USA, the UK and elsewhere increasingly suggests that they are integrated—and should become more integrated—at the level of national strategy. Similarly, ambiguous concepts such as soft power and nation brands are suggestive of changes in how nations represent their identities and interests to one another. But what are the modalities of these changes when viewed through the lens of international development ? How do these strategies interact in practice? And what can this teach us about the changing nature of twenty-first-century development communication?

The approach taken in this volume is to consider a variety of cases drawing upon a combination of theoretical and conceptual lenses that each in its own way combines a focus on aid with attention to image . The cases in this volume consist of empirical contributions in regions as diverse as Kosovo , Korea , Mexico , Turkey , Afghanistan , Somalia , Sweden , Colombia , Russia , and China . They seek to explore foreign policy trends originating with some of the most powerful Northern donors in order to see how they are influencing patterns of national development . Together, these cases establish a new body of knowledge on how contemporary debates into public diplomacy, soft power, and nation branding are fundamentally changing not just the communication of aid, but also its broader strategies, modalities, and practices.

Research in this direction builds on recognition of intersections between public diplomacy and development communication , each of which engages in strategic intervention meant to benefit the public good . While development communication as a field does not always articulate the importance of politics and political interests , we see this as an integral component of communication for social change, in its implementation as well as articulation. Equally, discussions of diplomacy and the pursuit of national interests often foreground (geo-)politics, while underplaying how these activities directly or indirectly empower and disempower societies and individuals to shape their own development . In order to analyze the layers of overlap between these different approaches, the central conceptual framework is grounded in our understanding of the interactions across strategies promoting soft power , public diplomacy, development communication , and nation branding .

Soft Power

Soft power is key in articulating critical intersections across public diplomacy and nation branding, emphasizing the geopolitics that guide strategies such as nation branding . In the late 1970s, Keohane and Nye (1977, p. 19) sketched an image of a world connected by “networks of rules, norms, and procedures that regularize behavior.” This context of “complex interdependence” paved the way for new theories of “how holders of power could wield that power to shape or distort patterns of interdependence that cut across national boundaries” (Keohane and Nye 1998, p. 82). One of those theories was Joseph Nye’s (1990) soft power thesis, an approach that has inspired a range of studies on international influence and attraction (e.g. Nye 2004, 2008; van Ham 2010; Hayden 2012; Thussu 2013).

Theorizing interdependence between different areas of international affairs was integral to Nye’s earliest uses of the term soft power. In his seminal article from 1990, Nye outlines soft power as a means of transposing power between areas of international relations . He claims that “the fragmentation of world politics into many different spheres has made power resources less fungible, that is, less transferable from sphere to sphere.” Consequently, “other instruments such as communications, organizational and institutional skills, and manipulation of interdependence have become important … interdependence is often balanced differently in different spheres such as security , trade, and finance” (Nye 1990, pp. 156–158).

Nye’s (1990) soft power thesis acted as an influential meditation on how the USA could maintain global leadership in a post-Cold War international system through its superior range of “power resources—military, economic, scientific, cultural, and ideological” (p. 155). An international environment of “unevenly balanced mutual dependence” means that actors should seek “to set the agenda and structure the situations in world politics” through “co-optive power ” (ibid., pp. 158, 166–167). Explicit to Nye’s theory is the notion of steering flows of knowledge in order to shape experiences of international engagement , all the while utilizing structural advantages to reproduce preferred ideologies:

Co-optive power is the ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences or define their interests in ways consistent with its own. This power tends to arise from such resources as cultural and ideological attraction as well as rules and institutions of international regimes. (Nye 1990, p. 168)

Scholars of development communication will recognize aspects of this approach from the perspective of cultural imperialism . Cultural imperialism forms a robust body of research into the interaction between states, boundary-spanning actors, and international power relations (Schiller 1992 [1969], 1976; Boyd-Barrett 1977; Tunstall 1977; Nordenstreng 1984). It raises questions of how political, economic, and technological advantages seated in the West affect international flows of communication, and how influence over international regulation and distribution is leveraged to reinforce the attractiveness and competitiveness of Western values, goods, services, and structures. Herbert Schiller’s much-cited definition of cultural imperialism may therefore be neatly juxtaposed with Nye’s description of soft power to demonstrate some of the similarities between concepts:

[Cultural imperialism ] describes the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the values and structures of the dominant centre of the system. (Schiller 1976, p. 9)

Cultural imperialism research declined during the late 1980s to be superseded by a focus on globalization; however, useful reflection has taken place over the flaws in its methodologies by many of the authors previously working in the field (cf. Boyd-Barrett 1977, 2007; Tomlinson 1991, 1997; or Mattelart 1979, 2002). For example, Thompson argued that a contemporary study of how nations and other transnational actors exert power through communication should acknowledge that there are many players impacting upon these practices, and not just one uncontested national or regional policy . Furthermore, transnational communication patterns engage with long-term pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: New Dimensions in the Politics of Image and Aid
• 2. Communication at the Crossroads of Development, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power
• 3. The Business of Bilateral Branding
• 4. Nation Branding, Neoliberal Development, and the Remaking of the Nation-State: Lessons from Post-war Kosovo
• 5. Odd Bedfellows? US Pub(l)ic Diplomacy, Colombian Industry Policy, and Sex Tourism in Cartagena
• 6. Entitled to Benevolence? South Korea’s Government-Sponsored Volunteers as Public Diplomacy and Development Actors
• 7. The Slow Reunification of Development Assistance and Public Diplomacy: Exchange and Collaboration Activities Through the Swedish Institute 1973–2012
• 8. State–Civil Society Partnerships in International Aid and Public Diplomacy: The Case of Turkey and Somalia
• 9. Communicating Mexico’s International Development Cooperation: An Incipient Public Diplomacy Strategy
• 10. Power Relations in Development Communication and Public Diplomacy: US and Chinese Practices in Afghanistan
• 11. Ambivalent Perception of China’s “One Belt One Road” in Russia: “United Eurasia” Dream or “Metallic Band” of Containment?
• 12. Conclusion
• Back Matter