Data-Driven Public Diplomacy: A Critical and Reflexive Assessment

Abstract

This essay presents a critical and reflexive assessment of contemporary efforts to innovate the measurement and evaluation of public diplomacy. Analyzing a recent and pivotal report called “Data-Driven Public Diplomacy,” it explains how the institutional and ideological residue of the Cold War underwrites these initiatives in the context of American activities in its contemporary “War on Terror.” Inspired by Marx’s concept of the fetish—an under-represented conceptual approach to public diplomacy research—the authors critique the thinking of public diplomacy scholars and officials, arguing that both an omnipresent past and a powerful form of technological fetishism are discernible in the “Data-Driven Public Diplomacy” report. An outcome of the type of thinking represented in the report, they conclude, has been the pervasiveness of contradictions and, in this area of foreign policy, disempowering implications.