Citizen Diplomacy Research Articles

Educational and Cultural Exchanges to Restore America's Image

A new public diplomacy strategy to enhance the U.S. reputation will require a thorough understanding of the role of cultural and educational exchanges, or what is commonly called citizen diplomacy, and the many ways it can be more effectively leveraged.

Consolidating the Gains Made in Diplomacy Studies: A Taxonomy

Since the end of the Cold War, the scope and study of diplomacy has expanded. In the modern diplomatic environment, novel terms such as pipeline diplomacy, coercive diplomacy, diplomacy by sanction and citizen diplomacy are common, alongside the more traditional view of diplomacy as state-to-state activity, monopolized by professional, official diplomats. With such a broad range of views, the scholar can become confused as to what actually constitutes modern diplomacy? In this article, it is argued that the disparity of views in the diplomacy studies field must be classified and consolidated before the enhanced role of diplomacy in the twenty-first century can be better understood. In this article, three different classifications or schools of diplomatic thought are introduced and constructed: the Traditional School, the Nascent School, and the Innovative School.

A Note on the New Face of Citizen Diplomacy: Education City and American Universities in the Middle East

A Note on the New Face of Citizen Diplomacy: Education City and American Universities in the Middle East

How to help your country while traveling for your company

PurposeTo remind readers of the decline in America's reputation and the importance of “citizen diplomacy” in addressing the problem.Design/methodology/approachBusiness for Diplomatic Action (BDA) asked people in more than 100 countries to give advice for Americans who travel outside the US. Their responses formed the foundation for a World Citizens Guide produced and distributed by BDA to US youth who travel and study abroad. Based on the success of this students' guide, a business travelers' guide will be released in the first quarter of 2006.FindingsResearch confirms that Americans are broadly seen as arrogant, self‐absorbed, ignorant of other cultures and insensitive. These perceptions are at least partially formed by interaction with the Americans who make 60 million trips abroad every year. By following the advice of people in host countries, US citizens who travel can begin to improve America's reputation.Practical implicationsThe article includes 16 specific suggestions that, followed, will make American business travelers better ambassadors for their country.Originality/valueUnderstanding how Americans are perceived is the first step toward modifying arrogant and insensitive behavior. American business travelers who learn to be more sensitive to the foreign cultures they encounter will not only enhance their chances for business success but will improve the perception of their country at the same time.

Race, Water, and Foreign Policy: . The Tennessee Valley Authority's Global Agenda Meets "Jim Crow"

On 22 June 1963, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis, the United States acquired a new “diplomatic weapon.” In his formal remarks dedicating the Tennessee Valley Authority’s new International Visitors Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, Robert I. Biren, the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), reassured an audience of “citizen diplomats” that in “a divided nuclear-armed world” the new center would have a “real and lasting effect on international relationships.” According to Biren, 10 percent of all government-sponsored foreign visitors to the United States came to Knoxville to witness firsthand the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) internationally acclaimed successes.1 Indeed, since the late 1930s thousands of foreign visitors had come to see and to study TVA facilities and programs. By the 1960s, Knoxville had become one of the top five most frequented cities by foreign visitors to the United States, ranking behind Washington, D.C., Detroit, San Francisco, and New York.2 As early as the 1950s, however, hosting these visitors had begun to create a financial strain on TVA resources. Foreign visitors were overtaxing both TVA budgets and personnel. Seemingly always short of funds and constantly under political attack, the TVA needed assistance to meet its growing obligations.

Call to Action To Elders Worldwide: The Need to Highlight Their Abilities, Wisdom, and Compassion as Citizen Diplomats, and Leaders for Social Change

Kofi Annan (1999), the Secretary-General of the United Nations, noted that, “A Society for All Ages is one that sees elders as both agents and beneficiaries of development. It honors traditional elders in their leadership and consultative role in communities throughout the world.” Older persons are among the world resources most often unseen and overlooked. It therefore becomes necessary to raise the consciousness of older people to their changing role in American and global societies to ensure fulfillment in their eldering years. Prior prejudice against elders has prevented inclusion of their enormous potential, of their accumulated experience and wisdom. This paper is directed toward determining how best to utilize the talents, wisdom and life’s experience of these elders to add meaning and substance to their lives, while affording them the opportunity to continue to contribute their talents and abilities as political activists and leaders directed toward peacemaking and social change.

Making Sense of Citizen Diplomats: The People of Duluth, Minnesota, as International Actors

What is citizen diplomacy and how do we assess its significance? These are important questions because of the recent upsurge in international activity of this kind, and because how we answer them says a great deal about how we “do IR.” By examining citizen diplomacy in Duluth, Minnesota, this paper offers a typology of citizen diplomats organized around the ideas of who or what they are representing and to whom. Assessing the significance of citizen diplomacy is a more difficult problem since individuals tend to generate a priori answers to it based on our respective theoretical orientations to IR as a whole. As a solution to this problem, the paper proposes a “diplomatic” approach which focuses on both the representation of differences to one another and the professional commitment which diplomats have to maintaining the practices and institutions which make such relations possible.

Colombia at War: The Search for a Peace Diplomacy

This essay analyzes Colombian foreign policy over the last three decades with specific emphasis on Bogota's peace diplomacy from 1978 up to 2000 in the context of an ongoing and degrading internal war. Initially, it assumes a modified realist perspective that links international relations with domestic structures. Then, the text defines three models of Colombian peaceful diplomacy according to the purposes, the means, and the rationales employed by the administrations that covered the above-mentioned period. After empirically evaluating the governments of Presidents Turbay, Betancur, Barco, Gaviria, and Samper and the first two years of the presidency of Pastrana, the article concludes with an assessment of the country's peace diplomacy and its impact on internal violence and instability. The foreign policies of the six different mandates show that Colombia never developed an overall, consensual state strategy towards peace, that the multiple peaceful diplomacies were partially successful in terms of sustaining the political regime and that, notwithstanding the latter, the successive governments failed to achieve a genuine resolution to domestic war. Finally, the article calls for a serious, active, and simultaneous state foreign policy and citizen's diplomacy in favor of peace.

Los ONG en la frontera de Baja California : un acercamiento al estudio de la diplomacia ciudadana

En la región fronteriza California-Baja California, zona de grandes interacciones transfronterizas, las ONG de apoyo a los migrantes de Estados Unidos y México, en los últimos años han presentado una serie de respuestas ante las políticas antiinmigrantes del gobierno estadounidense, algunas de las cuales rebasan el control de las esferas gubernamentales para transformarse en una especie de diplomacia ciudadana que trata de influir en las políticas públicas y las agendas de discusión sobre relaciones exteriores de ambos países. En ese proceso han construido estrategias comunes y redes coyunturales de manera informal, que inauguran nuevas formas de participación ciudadana. Este trabajo tiene el propósito de describir precisamente esas respuestas organizadas.

Africa-to-Africa: A Responsible Alternative to Study Abroad for 21st-century African Scholarship

African scholars and activists often suggest that study-abroad programs to Africa be transformed to include an Africa-to-Africa exchange component. Their argument often includes discussion of the possibility that conventional study-abroad programs might perpetuate a colonial relationship between rich nations and those of the African continent rather that developing new relationships among African citizen diplomats. The following is an excellent overview of this debate.

The Politics of Relief: American Quakers and Russian Bolsheviks, 1917-1921

The Politics of Relief: American Quakers and Russian Bolsheviks, 1917-1921 David W. McFadden* Contraryto popularbelief, and the overwhelming majority ofhistorians, Bolshevik seizure ofpower in Russia in October 1917 did not result in the immediate termination ofcontactbetween Westerners, particularly Americans , and the new Soviet government. Even the Civil War and Red Terror, as they developed in the summer and fall of 191 8, did not totally extinguish Americans from Bolshevik Russia, although all official American representatives left by October, 1918.1 Remaining in Russian territory held by the Bolsheviks were small groups ofAmerican and British Quakers, who had come as part ofa war reliefeffort as early as 1916. Although the major Quaker project at Buzuluk, in Samara, was terminated by the late fall of 1918,along with most other allied missions, two Quakers, one American and one New Zealander, Esther White and Theodore Rigg, returned to Moscow and Petrograd, determined to assist the Peregovtsy Society for Russian children to maintain their work for children's victims of the war and to find a way, ifpossible, to expand and revitalize Quaker reliefefforts in Russia even in the darkest days ofisolation and blockade, the winter of 1919.Although Rigg and White did leave in the early spring of 1919, they were succeeded within the year by two others: Anna J. Haines and Arthur Watts who, in painstaking negotiations with Soviet authorities, paved the way for fullscale western relief made famous by Herbert Hoover as the American Relief Administration famine relief in Russia from 192 1-23.2 The story ofthe ARA is well known. That ofthe Quaker reliefeffort less so, yet the outlines, particularly ofthe Buzuluk project and the later famine relief (both under, and independent of, the ARA) have been told in a number of ways before.3 What has remained largely unknown, however, is the extent of the unofficial contacts and negotiations which these solitary Quakers undertook with Bolshevik authorities—Commissars of Foreign Trade, Food production and distribution, Central Association of Cooperatives, Social Service, Children's Homes, representatives in Riga, Berlin, New York— in order to break down skepticism and hostility toward western representatives , expand the scope ofQuaker operations, and enable reliefefforts to *David W. McFadden, Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University (Connecticut), is currently working on a book about Quakers in Soviet Russia, 1917 to 1931. QuakerHistory get underway. These negotiations and the Quaker relief which accompanied them were not only the essential good faith testing grounds for Americanreliefas awhole (leading directlyto theARA),buttheyrepresent something else as well. Together with the much better known efforts of Raymond Robins ofthe American Red Cross, the YMCA and a few others, they also stand as the first stage of what might be called the origins of Citizen Diplomacy, the people-to-people efforts to break down hostility between the United States and Soviet Russia by direct means.4 What remains extraordinary in even a cursory perusal ofthis story is the range ofpolitical enemies with whom the Quakers were able not only to carry on negotiations, but with whom they gained confidence and agreements . Not only didRigg and White have authorization fromthe Peregovtsy and the Tolstoyans of Moscow (both inherently anti-Bolshevik), but they successfully negotiated an agreement with the People's Commissariat to take over and run the Children's Homes. Haines and Watts were able to persuade Narkomprod to give them permission to distribute food and relief supplies, not only their own, but also those of Save the Children and the American Red Cross, both perceived as enemies of the Bolshevik regime. Moreover, they were even able to procure the use of a warehouse from Tsentrosoyuz, and an official office address and cable permission courtesy of Narkomprod. And back in Philadelphia and Washington, the astute Chairman of the American Friends Service Committee, noted Haverford College religion professor Rufus Jones, and his Executive Secretary Wilbur Thomas successfully maneuvered through the shoals ofbitter American politics in the very heart ofthe Red Scare period, earning the simultaneous confidence of Herbert Hoover, the American Red Cross, the American Famine Relief Fund (Allen Wardwell and many establishment liberals) and the proBolshevik Russian Famine Fund runbySovietRussia magazine and, before its forced departure, the office ofLudwig Martens...

The OSCE at 20: Breakthrough for ‘citizen diplomacy'? Towards closer OSCE‐NGO interaction?

The OSCE at 20: Breakthrough for ‘citizen diplomacy'? Towards closer OSCE‐NGO interaction?

Breaking Barriers through Adventure Based Citizen Diplomacy

Breaking Barriers through Adventure Based Citizen Diplomacy

Arms or health? Coventry and Warwickshire Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons.

A report is given of the second conference organized by the Coventry and Warwickshire branch of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (MCANW) on the theme of ‘Arms or Health?’ The papers presented covered a range of topics: the resources needed for ‘Health for All by the Year 2000’ and for maintaining the UK National Health Service; health consequences of excessive spending on arms in both wealthy and poor countries; adverse economic effects of today's military spending; rational alternative defence policies; practicalities of converting from military to civil production; and citizen diplomacy.

Correcting Misperceptions in Soviet-American Relations

As glasnost slowly warms U.S.-Soviet relations, and citizen diplomacy initiatives proliferate, the need for innovative strategies for enhancing U.S.-Soviet communication has increased. Gone are the days when any contact whatever between Soviet and American citizens was cause for celebration. Increasingly, the success of citizen exchange hinges on their productivity and their depth of communication. Now, more than ever, exchanges can be expected to demand of their participants more than superficial mutuality and to produce ongoing alliances for constructive cooperation. The two events reported in this article exemplify productive and probing exchanges. They owe their success to the creative application of theories and techniques from family therapy to the realm of Soviet-American dialogue.

Nuclear Test Watchers Feel Political Heat

One year after US citizen diplomats signed a remarkable pact with the Soviet Union to monitor nuclear bomb tests, they are running into some of the obstacles that regular diplomats encounter - political flak from the Pentagon and harassment by the Soviet military. But they have devised some technical solutions that they hope will get them around the roadblocks. These solutions are discussed.

Encompassing Systems

In a wide range of activities from clinical work to organizational consulting to official and citizen diplomacy, perhaps the most pressing temptation is to take sides. The author develops a framework of emotional inclusiveness in which the therapist, consultant, or official/citizen diplomat in effect becomes an advocate not for one member, psychological agency, or family/organizational/international subunit, but for the maturity of the whole system.

Citizen Diplomacy

One wonders what the ghosts of Talleyrand and Franklin would say were they to visit the diplomatic conferences of today. Where is the suave approach, the graceful phrase concealing bloody warnings dropped by a king to the music of a minuet or passed by an ambassador to a minister of state over the after-dinner port? How surprised they would be at the blunt Bevin with his frequently unconcealed ill humor, at Molotov, rude and blustering, at Byrnes publicly changing his course in midstream, at Marshall announcing state policy in speeches rather than to plenipotentiaries or through official documents.How surprised Talleyrand and Franklin would be to think of international relations carried on pursuant to slogans such as “open covenants openly arrived at.” How their shrewd eyes would have twinkled at the credulity of people who believed that they had democratized foreign affairs through such a slogan. The old school diplomats would scarely have confused headlines which report in large black type the speeches of the diplomats, or the political gossip columns which purport to repeat the whispered asides of statesmen, with covenants democratically negotiated.The fact is that although we have gained publicity for foreign affairs, and that in itself is important, we have not democratized foreign affairs. They are still the business of technicians. They remain the preserve of foreign offices.