Conventional Diplomacy Research Articles

MODI 3.0 AND INDIA’S FOREIGN POLICY

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed power in May 2014, there have been substantial changes to India's foreign policy. With the goal of raising India's profile and influence internationally, Modi's strategy has been characterized by a fusion of conventional diplomacy with cutting-edge tactics or a unique blend of hard and soft power. During his leadership, a bold and assertive foreign policy that prioritizes strategic alliances, economic diplomacy, and a strong defense posture has been implemented. This paper examines the main tenets of Indian foreign policy under Modi, such as its economic goals, regional engagements, strategic components, and reactions to international issues. It is also an attempt to explore the future course of IFP under Modi 3.0.

Unconventional Diplomatic Initiatives of Nascent Turkish Republic: The Karadeniz Expedition in 1926

ABSTRACT This study analyzes an unconventional diplomacy initiative by the nascent Republic of Turkey. Upon the proposal of the President Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk], the ship Karadeniz (Black Sea) was transformed into a public diplomacy cruiser in 1926, sailing to western ports to promote Turkey’s newly established republican regime. After a long decade of wars and diplomatic hardships, the Revolutionary cadre in Turkey turned to unconventional means to generate a new identity for the country. This study examines the motives behind this unconventional diplomacy attempt over the Karadeniz Floating Fair case, which was a foresighted public diplomacy project. Karadeniz was furnished with a variety of exhibition items ranging from the popular products of the country to the newly developing artistic forms and displayed them in the port cities of Europe and the USSR. It is argued that this unconventional diplomacy formulation ensued from certain restraints of conventional diplomacy related to the national image.

Peran Organisasi Kerjasama Islam (OKI) dalam Penguatan Diplomasi Islam

Diplomacy is commonly understood as a country's art, practice, and negotiation activity to advance that country's interests. Currently, conventional diplomacy is being practised, which is seen as having many flaws. Conventional diplomacy appears relatively unclean, so it is necessary to build and strengthen clean diplomacy based on an Islamic perspective, also known as Islamic Diplomacy. The OIC's Islamic diplomacy is very different from conventional diplomacy, which has flaws and is relatively dirty in its execution. This article attempts to analyze the role of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in strengthening Islamic diplomacy using a descriptive qualitative approach. Islamic diplomacy, which prioritizes peace and cooperation to solve problems, is deemed appropriate to protect and defend Muslims' vital interests and to find solutions to conflicts. The authors also found that the OIC plays two essential roles in strengthening Islamic diplomacy. First, by prioritizing cooperation and peace, the OIC optimizes diplomacy. Second, diplomacy focuses on conflict prevention and resolution. This finding could be an alternative to developing Islamic diplomacy as another way of international relations.

Power and Culture Redux

John Gripentrog’s Prelude to Pearl Harbor: Ideology and Culture in US-Japan Relations, 1919–1941 is a throwback to a transitionary era in the historiography of U.S. foreign relations. On the one hand, it is a traditional, chronological diplomatic history of bilateral interwar relations, with six of its substantive chapters covering the 1930s. On the other hand, throughout the narrative, Gripentrog weaves themes of ideology and culture, the major preoccupations of the field in the last three decades. But the author’s approach to both themes dates to the 1980s, when historians like John Dower and Akira Iriye first started incorporating them into the study of war and peace between Japan and the United States. In Prelude to Pearl Harbor, ideology is how elites view the world, and culture is “the arts” (6). Despite this traditional approach, Gripentrog’s history of “ideology, cultural interactions, and conventional diplomacy” offers a thoughtful reassessment of the United States’ and Japan’s march to war (7).

Brazilian foreign policy for the Global South: The creation of the Centre of Excellence against Hunger

AbstractMotivationThis article analyses the conception and implementation of the Centre of Excellence against Hunger, established through a partnership between Brazil and the World Food Programme in order to disseminate Brazilian practices relating to school food and nutrition.PurposeThe Centre’s headquarters are in Brasília, primarily funded by the Brazilian government, and it aims to share Brazilian expertise while being part of the United Nations institutional board. This article assesses why and how such a sui generis institution came to be set up in 2011?Approach and methodsMethodologically, this case study is based on semi‐structured interviews with key stakeholders who participated in this institutional construction.FindingsWe argue that the Centre has its roots in a transnational government network animated by Brazilian officials. This idea originated primarily outside the context of international relations, fostered by education and school meals managers and technicians. It did find some development support within the sphere of international relations, involving the Brazilian government and the United Nations, and with the backing of actors invested in the new foreign policy guidelines presented by the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (henceforth “Lula") administration.Policy implicationsThe trajectory of the Centre of Excellence against Hunger derives from the role of networks in the international system alongside the influence of individuals during periods of change or uncertainty in bureaucracies and international regimes. Conventional diplomacy and international organizations can benefit from cross‐fertilization with networks that include government actors.

Book Review: Social Media and the Islamic State: Can Public Relations Succeed Where Conventional Diplomacy Failed?, by Ella Minty

Book Review: <i>Social Media and the Islamic State: Can Public Relations Succeed Where Conventional Diplomacy Failed?</i>, by Ella Minty

EllaMinty. Social media and the Islamic state: Can public relations succeed where conventional diplomacy failed?. London, NY: Routledge, 2020, XV, 98 pp. £29.99 (paperback) (ISBN 9780367188160).

EllaMinty. Social media and the Islamic state: Can public relations succeed where conventional diplomacy failed?. London, NY: Routledge, 2020, XV, 98 pp. £29.99 (paperback) (ISBN 9780367188160).

INDIA’S SOFT POWER DIPLOMACY UNDER THE MODI ADMINISTRATION: BUDDHISM, DIASPORA AND YOGA

This paper examines the Narendra Modi administration's use of three specific soft power assets of India – Buddhism, Diaspora, and Yoga – in diplomacy in service of the country's national interests. It attempts to address the following questions: What is the main purpose of the Modi administration's soft power strategy and the reasons behind the promotion and utilization of these three assets? What are the impediments to India's soft power projection ability? Finally, how can the Modi administration better exploit India's soft power advantages? This paper demonstrates how the Modi administration is making efforts to project India's soft power in the service of larger strategic goals. The use of soft power is designed to complement India's conventional diplomacy, boost its international image, project it as a peaceful rising power, improve relations with other countries, and help attract foreign investment, technology, and tourists in order to promote economic growth and development.

Problem ruchu bezwizowego w stosunkach polsko-amerykańskich po 1989 r.

The issue of visa-free travel in U.S.-Polish relations after 1989 In the recent decade, the Polish efforts seeking extension of the U.S. Visa Waiver Program to Poland have been one of the major themes in U.S. -Polish relations and an important issue for the Polish public opinion. Polish politicians and media have often presented it in terms of American “ingratitude” for Polish support for U.S. positions like the Iraq war and the Ballistic Missile Defense program. This article, after brief outline of the provisions of the U.S. law governing visas and the Visa Waiver Program, presents a historical account of the issue and its role in bilateral relations since 1989, and describes legislative responses to Polish requests that have been introduced in Congress. After the analysis of those measures, the article concludes that the failure of Polish efforts for Poland’s inclusion in the Visa Waiver Program was caused primarily by mistaken strategy (overemphasis being put on conventional diplomacy over congressional lobbying), congressional reluctance to single out individual countries for exemption from generally applicable rules, and post -9/11 political climate, unfavorable to easing of immigration rules.

Tourism, modernization, and difference: a twentieth-century Spanish paradigm

This essay explores the role of tourism in Spanish cultural and political history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although Spain developed modern domestic leisure practices in the nineteenth century, tourism promoters were dismayed by the small numbers of foreign visitors they received. By the early twentieth century, the project of developing a receptive tourism industry became a major component of a broader modernization programme. The economic potential was clear, but tourism's political value did not end there. Successive Spanish governments regarded the tourism industry as an auxiliary to conventional diplomacy, hoping to present their oft-maligned country as modern and hospitable and to stimulate the development of a modern leisure infrastructure suited to cosmopolitan tastes. After 1945, when Franco's right-wing dictatorship faced international ostracism, foreign tourism became an important form of international relations. In the subsequent three decades, tourism became arguably the Franco regime's most important political and economic good until problems of overbuilding and corruption ended the euphoria of Spain's so-called ‘tourist miracle’.

The transnational construction of “national allegory”: China and the cultural politics of postcolonial Indonesia

“The story of the private individual destiny,” declares Fredric Jameson, “is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” Using the case of China's involvement in the cultural politics of postcolonial Indonesia, this essay examines the transnational dynamisms of the making of a national allegory and discusses the production and reception of the China images in Sukarno's Indonesia (1949–65), with a focus on the PRC's cultural diplomacy and how Chinese literary principles were appropriated and domesticated, subsequently constituting an integral component of Indonesian cultural politics. Arguing that the narratives about China (both as a sociopolitical entity and a cultural symbol) served as an important transnational inspiration to public deliberations and cultural polemics—thus contributing to the formation of national allegories in postcolonial Indonesia, this essay takes the Jamesonian thesis a step further by suggesting that a transnational imaginary within Third World countries plays a significant part in the making of domestic literary politics. This essay may also be taken as an exercise in going beyond the nation-state-centric historiography that has been the defining characteristic of Asian Studies and pointing to the need to study Sino-Southeast Asian relations from the angle of cultural politics and its intertwining ambiguities with conventional diplomacy.

American Perspectives on Turkey: An Evaluation of the Declassified U.S. Documents between 1947 and 1960

During the interwar years, U.S.-Turkish relations had been confined within the boundaries of conventional diplomacy. By the end of World War II, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the military assistance agreement that drew on it marked the beginning of a series of bilateral and multilateral agreements that bound the two nations together in the military as well as political, economic, and cultural fields. However, relations between the two states did not always proceed on a smooth path. Hence, the relatively optimistic, formative years of 1947-1960 were followed by the troublesome decades of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, mutual relations settled back on an upward track, reaching a peak during the Gulf War of 1990-91. With the demise of the Soviet system, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Cold War, some commentators expected the eventual dismantling of NATO and with it the waning of the American connections with Turkey. Turkey's “strategic value” in the eyes of the Americans, it was being argued, would necessarily diminish as the Soviet threat-the main component of this “value”-was disappearing. Developments throughout the 1990s, however, did not fully justify those pessimistic scenarios. In fact, by the mid-1990s, Turkey and the United States, with the occasional participation of other states such as Israel, began to build a so-called strategic partnership to contain regional and local threats (arising in the areas surrounding Turkey and ranging from the Balkans to the Middle East and the Caucasus) that had been unleashed by the destabilizing forces of the post-Cold War period. It should be noted that, during about the same period, U.S.-Turkish relations gained unprecedented new dimensions, economic and cultural, complementing and sometimes overshadowing the military one.

Stochastic models of war alliances

Lewis F. Richardson, the British physicist and meteorologist, devoted much of his life and scientific work to the study of the quantitative aspects of warfare. It was his firm belief that wars arise from measurable relations between nations and groups and that an understanding of these relationships would contribute more to the furtherance of peaceful coexistence than would conventional diplomacy. In a sense, his work was pioneering. The application of the methods of measurement and analysis of the physical scientist to the statistics of wars was unique. However, wars represent only a particular type of social phenomenon and the widening interest in the use of mathematical models in the social and psychological sciences suggests that Richardson's work should be viewed in the broader context of the mathematical revolution in social

A Case Study in the Diplomacy of Social Revolution

American experience with the ill-fated governments of the newer nations—most recently Turkey, South Korea, and Cuba—raises the question whether we can ever select a policy generally suited to the growth of stable, effective government among the developing nations. In all three of the cases mentioned, the United States followed the canons of conventional diplomacy while contributing substantially to monumental economic and social changes. Our commitment meant reliance on and support for the regime in office, although our own actions were gradually creating forces and sentiments favoring radical change in the internal political system. Whenever the pressures for political change were sufficient, adjustments were made with an abruptness that may well have left the United States in a worse position than if we had done little or nothing to assist long-term development.