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Collaborative/Creative Diplomacy/Partnerships

January 25, 2013 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural exchange, Social Networks

Stephanie Stallings recently suggested that creative collaboration is a useful model for cultural diplomacy. She is definitely onto something. Circumstances have changed around the work of diplomacy. Publics are now much less distant, more assertive, and actively engaged participants in the making of their encompassing cultural worlds. To embrace this new reality likely requires rethinking many of the methods of cultural diplomacy and perhaps its basic goals.

In response to this, significant attention is now given to the pursuit of collaborative diplomacy. The call for more collaborative diplomacy tends to emphasize trust-building through cooperation on mutual objectives and around shared values, often via the “team work” of more inter-agency partnerships in projecting the U.S. image abroad. This is a practical call: in a climate of scarce resources, no one can go it alone. Too, typically problems are interconnected and cross-cutting, and so require partners to address. Likewise, the power of social networking – as a social media-driven basis for collaboration – promises to scale-up outreach and engagement.

A turn to collaborative diplomacy echoes collaboration-talk across a range of related activities, from innovation, to science, to the arts. Thomas Friedman recently added his own to the chorus of voices extolling the virtues of Silicon Valley-style creative problem-solving. For Friedman, such problem-solving is epitomized by platforms like GitHub – the largest open-source computer code-sharing host in the world – and by customer-driven non-zero-sum “co-opetition” networks exemplified by the likes of LinkedIn. Thingiverse, an online platform for artists, designers, and engineers, to share digital design files through creative commons licensing, is on the cusp of this trend. Friedman’s message: innovation is unprecedentedly collaborative.

The information economy represents a public model of innovation through community-building, where distinctions between producers and consumers often disappear. And it includes innovation for diplomacy. An emerging biodiplomacy promotes “new forms of technology-based international partnerships” with the promise to “alter the traditional patterns of international cooperation.”

Science is no exception. Knowledge generation is an increasingly borderless activity, and access to necessary expertise, ideas, samples, funding, equipment and machinery now routinely requires international cooperation. Global scientific challenges – from climate change, and biosecurity, to nanotechnology – are trans-boundary problems requiring CERN-type collaborations in the search for global solutions. And the number of transnational research networks continues to rise steeply. Last year set a record of more than 120 published papers in physics with more than 1000 authors.

The National Science Foundation’s new Science Across Virtual Institutions platform, fostering global interaction among STEM researchers, exemplifies this turn. Science is now anything but the solitary visionary toiling alone in his lab. And as has been suggested, a new more multipolar “era of science diplomacy is emerging.”

We might also consider arts diplomacy. But I do not mean the traditional model, held over from the Cold War, of sending, say, the New York Philharmonic to North Korea for a one-off concert. Instead, as I have previously discussed here, we could consider the work of international applied humanities networks. Whether as a dimension of humanitarian response, conflict mitigation, or peace-building, these networks apply arts-based skills in the theater, heritage conservation, and museum curation to facilitate skills transfers and enable expressive opportunities. Rather than singing the praises of one’s own culture, they represent relationships of collaborative storytelling.

These networks at once create new opportunities for public dialogue, and transform conceptions of participation in such ongoing projects as “Europe.” The Europeana project, a cross-border, cross-domain, user-centered service drawing on the collections of over 2000 European libraries, archives, and museums, offers one ambitious example of this sort of frame-building, creating new ways for users to participate in their own cultural heritage even as they are also empowered to generate original content.

Yet not all collaboration meant to be creative is so. It turns out that “brainstorming” – a widely popularized generative technique taken from American business practice – is counterproductive, if creativity is the goal. It generates fewer ideas than the same number of people working alone.

Research suggests this is because brainstorming encourages groupthink at the expense of debate, dissent, and critical engagement with unfamiliar viewpoints. Brainstorming tends to marginalize encounters along the frontiers between disciplines, industries, and kinds of expertise, encounters that promote what urbanist Jane Jacobs identified as “knowledge spillovers”: the non-rivalrous cross-fertilization of ideas among individuals that advance neighboring fields.

By and large policy rationales for public diplomacy emphasize self-representation, defining the message, and identifying a common basis for cooperation (usually articulated as the promotion of “shared values”), as these promote national interests.

But to take creative collaboration seriously as a model means to think more about how particular forms of collaboration engender different creative outcomes and what these outcomes have to tell us about the changing practice of diplomacy. Instead of an initial – sometimes incorrect or superficial – commitment to searching out shared values or interests to the end of building trust and goodwill, the object would be to focus on the often unscripted results of collaboration.

We should start by distinguish mere partnership – fine so far as it goes – from work associated with creative collaboration. The possibilities of collaboration are minimally addressed with the recognition of the practicality or cost-effectiveness of partnership in the face of resource scarcity. If an enabling prerequisite for collaboration, relationship-building is not a sufficient rationale for attentiveness to creative outcomes.

Networked virtual platforms producing user-generated digital content represent one model for creative collaboration, but certainly do not exhaust the possibilities. Over at least the last fifty years, with one foot in the humanities and the other in the social sciences, cultural studies have documented the historical sources of cultural expression. With regular attention to the multiple sources of any given expressive form – say, the Japanese influence upon the spaghetti western – they have consistently described the hybrid results of cultural engagements, often as these occur along fraught social frontiers, in ways relevant to the practice of diplomacy.

Applied cultural studies have much to offer the practice of cultural diplomacy, starting with the fallacy of understanding creative expression as if derived from a unitary cultural source. It we are to take the possibilities of creative collaboration seriously, a cultural-studies-based appreciation for cross-fertilization might helpfully counter a tendency to view cultural exchange as display in the service of representation, where art diplomacy is too often considered a universal and self-evident language.

Instead, we might consider cultural diplomacy as it participates in the blurring of genres, or the work of bricolage, or more recently as part of a culture jam or a mashup. Each offers a different account of the collaborative multi-vocality of cultural expression with which we might animate international relations.

This post first appeared in the USC CPD blog: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/collaborative_creative_diplomacy_partnerships/

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The Hard and Soft of Cultural Diplomacy: Networks and Stories in Global Affairs

September 28, 2012 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural Policy, Social Networks

Amy Zalman recently proposed that “soft power” – as a conceptual frame for understanding global politics – is too narrow and has outlived its usefulness. Her provocation generated fruitful responses and suggests that we might be ready to stop treading water and move beyond our decade-long fixation with the term to new and more constructive places. Zalman rightly points to the costs of the partial privileging of the “soft” (e. g. cultural narratives, symbols, stories) at the expense of the “hard” (e. g. economic or military force), insisting that these two cannot be pried apart, even analytically, without diminishing appreciation for how power in fact works.

Complementing Zalman is Craig Hayden’s additional suggestion that her critique helps to shift attention to the myriad ways soft and hard power are connected and simultaneously expressed through the continued proliferation of diverse kinds of (often non-state) networks. The increasingly variegated facts of Castells’s “network society” make clear that networks mediate the distribution of meaning and value in ways demanding our attention.

Conjoined, these arguments present a compelling picture. They suggest the need to reframe our analysis of global politics in ways transcending distinctions of “soft” and “hard” while better accounting for the many entanglements of the “symbolic” with the “material.” This is particularly congenial to me, trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, since this discussion has been front and center in the discipline for some time. I too have promoted doing so in my own recent writing on cultural diplomacy.

Together, one question these discussions encourage is: How are stories meaningfully distributed across different kinds of networks and to what effect? Instead of inferring cultural consensus when identifying specific groups, for the practice of public diplomacy such questions help us to a more realistic appraisal of the variety of cultural accounts among people otherwise related.

At this juncture we can offer the inverse of Zalman’s argument about soft power: too often, ever more ubiquitous network analyses seem to privilege the “hard” over the “soft” to the detriment of our understanding of how networks work. Certainly in security policy and studies this is the case. We have seen a flood of so-called link analyses, where the game is always to identify connections between nodes in different networks, or who is connected to whom and how. The emphasis is upon the importance of the “hard” social facts of the shape and distribution of connections within and across networks, in order to identify key “information nodes,” “information brokers,” or, in the War on Terror, the “bad guys.”

Ann-Marie Slaughter’s recent call for more attention from U.S. foreign policy decision-makers to the ubiquity of “network centrality” is timely. But, while she notes in passing network “nutrients” – flows of goods, services, expertise, funding, and political support – she is most interested in the density of connections and positioning of networks. Likewise, a recent study in Nature on social influence across networks of Facebook users concluded that more frequent interactions between friend pairs – “strong ties” – have a much greater influence than do “weak ties” on a person’s behavior. Again, it is all about the facts of connection. We can further note how behavior, composed of empirically observable actions, is prioritized over cultural meaning or belief.

More attention has been given to identifying people, their behavior, their connections, and network nodes than has been given to how information is distributed across networks or what these symbols, values or stories mean to network participants.

The New York Times recently ran a story about researchers who used the computational tools of social network analysis to assess the historical or fictional sources of well-known epics like the Iliad. In other words, they were examining the relation between epic narratives and networks. Their analysis privileged connections that were highly assortative – that is, with high frequencies of people associating with people like themselves – as one key “real-life indicator” corroborating an epic’s likely historical origin. Here and most everywhere else “hard” trumps “soft”.

Assortativity is a useful principle in epidemiology because it helps to explain the behavior of diseases as they spread through a population. But we are too prone to use viral metaphors to describe the movements of information, ideas, or beliefs through networks. Despite our fascination with social media technologies, we should not assume that a contagion model best characterizes the relationship of stories to networks. Instead, this might be a case of misplaced concreteness, to use A. N. Whitehead’s useful term.

Significant work has been done on so-called “knowledge-based networks” and their relevance for public diplomacy. One case is Mai’a Cross’s analysis of networks of policy decision-makers working toward security integration in the European Union. She shows how greater internal network cohesion increases network influence. For the EU case, cohesion includes the ways these decision-makers share expertise, common cultural and professional norms, and regular participation in the same meetings.

Assortative thinking encourages demonstrations of how like seeks like, while the effectiveness of knowledge-based networks is understood to turn on shared commonalities, notably, of culture. But exclusive attention to the social facts of connectivity through networks – rather than how people invest network participation with significance – means we assume that the information, knowledge, symbols, or stories that circulate through networks are shared in the same ways and mean the same things. But this is a poor assumption. Social solidarity (or, shared network participation) does not require cultural consensus.

What about when cultural information – like stories – is unevenly distributed through a given network? We are in dire need of a sharper and more grounded appreciation of how compelling ideas, values, or cultural meanings travel through social arrangements of people and how people differently relate to them. This means paying greater attention to variable interpretations of cultural information across networks beyond the shared facts of membership in networks.

Uneven distribution can take the form of stories that mean different things to different people in different locations across a given network. In the 1990s, while conducting research on political change in Bolivia, I interviewed dozens of men about the start of their political careers. Many cited the decisive influence of radicalized high school teachers who encouraged them into joining the Bolivian Communist Party in the 1970s. These men still consorted as members of informal political networks, connected by shared political and economic ties, relationships of kinship, friendship and heritage, as well as long hours spent in each other’s company. But many cited the party’s ideological intransigence – especially its derision of the relevance of cultural identity in largely indigenous Bolivia – to explain their departure from it. While carrying over much of the party’s discourse, they were swayed to other forms of political participation more consistent with their indigenous heritage. While each told the “story of the Left” in Bolivia to me and to one another, they did not interpret it in the same ways.

Resonant stories, particularly political narratives, can mean many things to those perpetuating them. Even “strong ties” in identified networks don’t guarantee cultural consensus. In a climate of policy and research where our attention to networks is increasing, but where this work is focused on the use of computational tools to identify their shape and constituent parts, we might be neglecting the problem of cultural meaning in networks. And so we risk having little insight into the sense network participants make out of their own participation. If we confuse the facts of sharedness with a potentially nonexistent interpretive consensus, we risk missing the import of the story.

Note: This post originally appeared on the Center for Public Diplomacy blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/the_hard_and_soft_of_cultural_diplomacy_networks_and_stories_in_global_affa/

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Aspiring to an Interest-free Cultural Diplomacy?

April 26, 2012 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural exchange, Cultural Policy, Cultural relativism, Propaganda

When I hear from people about the relative advantages of cultural diplomacy, they often point to the apparent “neutrality” or “apolitical” basis of, say, cultural exchange. Coming from an anthropological background, this often advanced claim has always puzzled me.

At least historically, when anthropologists have talked about cultures – for example, in the typical mode of cultural relativism – they have referred to the ways that different cultures are either configurations of specific “values” or interpret the world around them in ways distinct. And, if this is not exactly how I would encourage us to think about the culture concept today, it is precisely because the meanings people ascribe to things in the world vary so much across cultures that we seek to take account of cultures in the first place. When we refer to “neutrality” in the context of cultural diplomacy, then, it is often unclear how this reconciles with cultural difference.

I am actually pretty sure that the problem of cultural difference is not intentionally being dismissed by these frequent assertions about the relative neutrality of cultural diplomacy. But, I do think that we might be mixing things up here and that we could more rigorously sort out what in fact we are talking about.

Respondents to a cultural diplomacy survey I conducted described some of its advantages this way: Cultural diplomacy is successful because “it is not there to sell a product.” And there is “no message control.” It is typically “most effective when it is politically neutral, non-confrontational and non-ideological.” It is effective when it is “free of state-to-state interests.” And it tends to be ineffective or it fails when trying to “push a policy position” or “when deeply contested interests limit the impact of cultural diplomacy activities.” In a nutshell, the idea is that when cultural diplomacy efforts are perceived as too obviously entangled with “interests” they run the risk of illegitimacy, and so, ineffectiveness.

Policy recommendations for cultural diplomacy also reflect this equation. A White House conference on cultural diplomacy in 2000 touts its advantages because cultural diplomacy “relates to human creativity beyond the scope of politics.” The Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy’s 2005 report confidently notes the ways cultural diplomacy “creates a neutral platform for people-to-people contact.” A 2007 Demos report likewise asserts, “The value of cultural activity comes precisely from its independence.” As such, culture is a “safe space for unofficial political relationship-building.” And as a 2010 report by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation on cultural exchange programs recently emphasized, these exchanges can “remain apolitical.”

“Neutral,” as these several reports make clear, is most often contrasted with “political.” As Cynthia Schneider suggests, the advantage of cultural diplomacy – particularly in the form of citizen diplomacy – is that it provides an “alternative to the official presence of America.” And, indeed, critics of government-sponsored U.S. cultural diplomacy have pointed to the ways the involvement of the State Department – or during the Cold War, the CIA – have tended to politicize, and so undermine the credibility of, U.S. cultural diplomacy. Neutral-as-apolitical, then, is set against the perception of the pursuit of so-called “national interests” in the competition among nations.

But if we are not careful, neutral-as-apolitical can invite confusion, as seems to be the case with Joseph Nye’s counterintuitive conclusion in his most recent treatment of the problem of power, where he observes that “the best propaganda is not propaganda.” We think we know what Nye probably means here: cultural diplomacy is effective when the “culture” part of the intervention is understood to be authentic and credible. It cannot be viewed as contrived or as having an ulterior motive – as Frances Stonor Saunders’s story of clandestine CIA sponsorship of American artists and intellectuals during the Cold War makes clear. Indeed, as Richard Arndt and others have reminded us, it is important to try to rescue “the diplomacy of cultures from the embrace of propaganda.”

However, we also need to take account of the fact that at least beginning with the end of the Cold War the “culture” of diplomacy has significantly changed its location as well as its meaning. If the 2000 White House cultural diplomacy conference unproblematically assigns culture to the activities of “human creativity,” a 2008 report by the Curb Center points to a more recent trend of the supplanting of a cosmopolitan notion of “culture” as the output of artistic and intellectual elites by an increasingly pervasive understanding of “cultures” in the anthropological sense. This shift is evident, for example, in the recent multilateral promotion of the concept of “intangible cultural heritage,” as generationally transferrable and community-based, over and above the previous international consensus for tangible heritage represented by such landmarks as the 1954 Hague Convention.

And when culture – as universal creative expression – is folded into an anthropological conception of different cultures, cultural diplomacy becomes more like an ongoing series of transactions across frontiers resembling intercultural communication. On either side of these frontiers, we suppose, are relatively different configurations of cultural values.

Part of what is conveyed in claims about the potential neutrality of cultural diplomacy is that we can sort out expressions of culture from the narrow pursuit of interests or political advantage, in the competition among nations. But, while realist accounts of international affairs often assume that politics are driven by competitive self-interest, it is nevertheless a mistake to assume any such interests are at the same time value-neutral. In his classic discussion, the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins demonstrated the impossibility of, in his words, separating out the “utilitarian postulates of practical interest” from the “system of symbolic valuations” – i.e. culture – that invest such an interest with meaning.

The politics of our own culture wars in the U.S.should serve as a ready reminder of this. The very notion of a culture war is based upon the premise that so-called “values voters” are motivated to patrol the borders of a particular definition of moral community in ways commensurate with public life in an otherwise diverse society. When controversies over the public appropriateness of cultural expression are touched off in the U.S., as with the case of the Sensation art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum several years ago or in the more recent decision by the Smithsonian Institution to censor the video artwork “A Fire in My Belly,” the difference between what constitutes public interest and what, cultural values, is nowhere to be found. And, of course, it is also that way everywhere else in the world.

Put another way, rather than understanding “interests” to be value-neutral, and as distinct from more authentically credible expressions of culture in diplomacy, we might do better to give our attention to the ways that values determine interests. We might consider how cultural expressions in international affairs are value-laden. In other words, proceeding as if cultural diplomacy is a relatively neutral and apolitical way to build bridges that enable later and more frank dialogue about national interests is likely to cause us to ignore some of the unexpected cultural value commitments – if not narrow national interests, interests nonetheless – that account for the differences we are seeking to bridge in the first place.

The difference between propaganda and an interested or value-laden cultural diplomacy is that the former seeks to manipulate publics, often through purposeful distortion or by withholding key facts, to the end of control. Perhaps, then, the important distinction is not between neutral or apolitical, on the one hand, and interests or values, on the other, so much as between interests or values and manipulation or control. Cultural diplomacy cannot honestly avoid the former – and why should it? But it should take no part in the latter.

Note: This post originally appeared on the Center for Public Diplomacy blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/aspiring_to_an_interest-free_cultural_diplomacy/.

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Dilemmas of a Dyslexic Public Diplomacy

December 15, 2011 in Cultural Policy

Does public diplomacy in the U.S. know how to listen? This was the question inspiring a conference I organized not long ago at American University. Historically the evidence is not encouraging. If it has become routine for new Undersecretaries for Public Diplomacy at the State Department to pledge to “listen more and lecture less,” little programmatic room is made for doing so, beyond symbolic “listening tours” abroad which typically exhibit the form but rarely the function of real dialogue. President Obama’s newest appointment to this position, Tara Sonenshine, might signal a change. With a background in journalism and communications, she is not a corporate manager type and is already on record about the need to meet people where they are at, hear others’ stories, and “to be in the listening mode.” But wanting to listen and knowing how aren’t the same.

If public diplomacy is one of America’s critical avenues for conversing with the world, since 9-11 regular attention has been given to the inadequacies of the state-of-affairs for public diplomacy in the U.S. This attention has too often been fixated on how best to combat the “why they hate us” perception initially framing the 9-11 era.  Ten years on Fareed Zakaria’s answer to that question looks less insightful. Along with military and political responses to the problem, he rightly points to the cultural sources of much of global conflict. But his “cultural strategy” for confronting these has an ideological edge: “help Islam enter the modern world”; “broadcast fresh thinking across the Arab world.” Post-Arab Spring, what appears particularly misguided is the notion that the U.S. should be primarily “broadcasting.”

But this merely describes what passes for prevailing public diplomacy “theory” since well before 9-11. If in different ways, it has mostly been about message delivery. The U.S. Information Agency was primarily concerned with “telling America’s story” to the world. Madison Avenue-inspired approaches to cultural diplomacy as public relations treat their subjects as “consumers.” Experts in strategic communication discuss how best to control and to disseminate messages to “target audiences.” Prevailing soft power conceptions, which include the rhetoric of “winning hearts and minds,” are typically invested in getting them to “want what we want” rather than considering other wants.

More recent has been attention given to public diplomacy conceived as a global “war of ideas”: a way of framing international affairs as a kind of zero-sum competition rather than as a conversation. The latest State Department strategic vision emphasizes a need to “shape the narrative” and to combat “extremist voices.” If rhetorical violence toward the U.S. is certainly troubling, engineering the conversation we think we want is unlikely to help us better understand the meaningful sources of such rhetoric. In cultural terms, even so-called “apolitical” cultural exchange programs are assumed to be representational. We treat them as opportunities to express or to display U.S. values abroad to non-Americans. We expect our jazz ambassadors effectively to perform the “music of freedom” for these others.

There is little here to suggest the importance of listening to other peoples’ stories about themselves. The history of public diplomacy points to a relative absence of dialogue, and comfort with our own echo chamber, alongside a disinclination to plumb the depths of diplomacy as a demandingly reciprocal communicative act. And so we are permanently vulnerable to the probability of the wholesale misrecognition of our interlocutors, friends and enemies alike, at once taking them to mean what they might not while missing or not taking seriously what they try to tell us. And when diplomacy is perceived by “targets” as a campaign to influence or to control – as New America Foundation president Steve Coll recently made the point about the cultural diplomatic efforts built into U.S. counterinsurgency in Afghanistan– it is rejected.

Over the years there has been no lack of discussion of how best to fix public diplomacy. Typically these begin by noting the deterioration of U.S. diplomatic assets upon the end of the Cold War, most obviously: the elimination of the USIA and U.S. cultural centers abroad, the evident lack of language and area studies specialists, a near perpetual budgetary crisis for the funding of arts and culture initiatives, alongside seemingly boundless enthusiasm for promising new digital tools of communication and dissemination.

Highly publicized studies by RAND, the Council on Foreign Relations, the GAO, and others, have offered a range of comprehensive recommendations. These are often about how best to use available resources for effective institutional rearrangement, including addressing the prevailing decentralized public-private model for government cultural programming. Foreign affairs expert Thomas Barnett has proposed a new “Department of Everything Else.” Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill Ivey, has called for the creation of a cabinet-level seat for a national culture czar. And in recent years no less than former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates regularly beat the drum for more resources to support the work of U.S. soft power. But institutional challenges are only a part of the problem.

The Obama administration came into office, in significant degree, under the sign of increasing dialogue with the rest of the world. But do we know how to listen? We can point to a sprinkling of efforts to encourage dialogue, as with the National Endowment for the Humanities program on “bridging cultures.” This is a start. In contrast to the U.S., multilateral organizations like UNESCO treat cultural diplomacy as commensurate with “intercultural dialogue.” But of course the U.S. relationship with UNESCO has by and large been a tortured one, and which we’ve recently decided to defund.

Public diplomacy scholar Nicholas Cull has been an advocate for listening, which, he is clear, can be done badly. If good listening happens in a variety of ways, it is cooperative, not covert, much more than market research; and it is not something we, as listeners, can frame. What would a diplomacy attentive to listening as a meaningful cultural act look like? It would recognize that language is not just a medium of communication but also a vehicle of identity. It would be mindful of the different cultural conventions for language and standards of narrative truth that animate the talk of counterparts. It would consider the contexts of diplomatic dialogue, as socially situated events that are open to multiple interpretations and not just our own.

Anthropologist Scott Atran has described his work talking with terrorists – at least as defined by the State Department’s terror list – as “listening to and talking with our enemies and probing gray areas for ways forward.” The gray areas are critical. When talking to a Hamas leader about the potential for a two-state solution with Israel, Atran notes an important code-shift from the Arabic “hudna,” signifying a temporary armistice, to the term “salaam,” with its connotation of a more lasting “peace.” Atran understands the need for a better grasp of others’ terms of reference, with accompanying semantic possibilities, as a way to broaden the conversation. As such “our story” can better sustain a multiplicity of voices.

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