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Cultural Diplomacy and Heritage Wars

May 16, 2013 in Applied cultural research, Cultural diplomacy, Cultural Policy, Culture and the Securityscape, Soft power

Over the past two decades cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, has become an increasingly evident – and fraught – subject of foreign affairs. One reason is a recent proliferation of multilateral conventions by UNESCO, among others, more specifically articulating international frameworks for the protection and conservation of cultural heritage globally. These include the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the 2005 Diversity Convention, and the 2008 ratification by the U.S. of the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, among other precedents. New collaborations between cultural professionals and the U.S. military, in the context of this increasing attention to heritage, constitute non-traditional opportunities for cultural diplomacy.

One effect of the recent push for international normative frameworks governing the conduct of persons, communities, and states with respect to heritage has been to identifiably constitute “cultural heritage” as a kind of scarce local or national resource, as a well-defined potential subject of state action, and as a basis of international relations and of conflict. Tracking this trend, some historians have referred to the contemporary onset of “heritage crusades,” which can lead to “heritage wars.” In other words, attitudes about cultural heritage have changed over time, and international actors increasingly seek legal redress, or take violent steps, in relation to an increasingly prevailing conception of heritage as: rivalrous, non-renewable, specific in time and place, and exclusively owned by people, communities, or nations.

Not coincidentally, the potential destruction of cultural heritage has become a major preoccupation, not only for particular communities and nation-states, but also for the U.S. military. Recent history is replete with multiple examples of the destruction of heritage sites or objects in active conflict zones, or leading to conflict. A short list would include the 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, the 2003 looting of the Baghdad Museum, the devastation of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the destruction of Timbuktu’s sacred tombs during the conflict in Mali, and ongoing heritage loss as part of the conflict in Syria, among others. Heritage destruction, looting, and the illegal antiquities trade are one front in these heritage wars. Conflicting claims, the definition of heritage as property, and calls for repatriation, are another front.

Unsurprisingly, then, international organizations, U.S. and other government agencies, have begun to consider more closely the vulnerabilities of heritage in circumstances of conflict alongside the growing importance of “cultural security,” as an emerging feature of international affairs and as a dimension of responsible engagement in conflict zones. For the U.S. military, this has led to a largely unprecedented set of often remarkable collaborations with an array of civilian archaeologists, museum curators, art conservators, and arts and culture organizations, and others, as part of the military’s growing awareness of the ways the mismanagement, neglect, or lack of protection provided heritage resources can actively generate conflict.

The U.S. military’s efforts to protect and conserve cultural heritage in conflict zones is part of a broader cultural turn over the past decade. And it has taken various forms. These include the development of a “No Strike List” for Libya in 2011 to insure heritage sites were not targeted, in collaboration with the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield. They also include military logistical support as part of humanitarian interventions to save endangered heritage in the aftermath of disasters, natural and man-made. They include the innovative use of new tools, such as the coordination of GIS, digital databases, and archives. And they include cultural diplomatic interventions, such as the use of cultural mapping technologies to identify an ancient Afghan irrigation system inadvertently compromised by a U.S. military base. The base was redesigned.

This work also includes the consolidation of new lines of communication and networks of collaboration between military and civilian personnel and applied practitioners in diverse fields of the arts and culture, such as the new CHAMP initiative hosted by the Archaeological Institute of America. These networks cross what have been seldom crossed boundaries between the humanities and the military. On the one hand, they highlight an emerging military footprint in humanitarian “operations other than war,” as a feature of peacekeeping, stability operations, and cultural diplomacy. On the other, collaborations with the military to safeguard heritage illustrate new directions in the applied arts, where working artists and cultural professionals are extending their skills, techniques, and creative visions as a part of the U.S. response to global crises and conflict.

The cultural diplomatic potential of U.S. military cultural heritage management is not without risks. At times the military has been so intent upon developing its cultural capacity that it has not appreciated conceptions of culture other than its own tendency to view culture as an asset and mission resource. It can also be deeply problematic for the safeguarding of heritage to be directly implicated in strategic or tactical military “soft power” objectives. Cultural professionals can be perceived as agents of coercion and control. It is, therefore, critical for them to develop robust parallel humanitarian networks in ways enabling a legitimating autonomy rather than have their work defined primarily through military mission priorities.

This post originally appeared on ARTSblog as part of an Americans for the Arts salon on the “Arts and the Military”: http://blog.artsusa.org/2013/05/15/cultural-diplomacy-and-heritage-wars/.

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Cultural Exchange and the Politics of Suspicion

March 28, 2013 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural exchange, Soft power

This past week the Washington Post ran a story about the troubles of Russian lawmaker Dimitri Gudkov, assailed by his government for having the temerity to visit the U.S. and address U.S.-Russian relations on Capitol Hill. As the short article explained Gudkov was in the U.S. to participate in a forum dedicated to “democracy and human rights,” organized by Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Institute of Modern Russia, a 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in New Jersey in 2010 “to support democratic values and institutions in the Russian Federation,” and whose president is the son of a Russian oil tycoon jailed by Putin in 2003.

For his trouble, Russian parliamentarians immediately pilloried Gudkov, while accusing him of treason, espionage, betrayal of national interests, ethics violations, calling for U.S. interference in Russia, and potentially damaging state security. If brief, the article paints a picture of surging Russian animosity toward the U.S. amid the curtailment of public freedoms, with Gudkov at the center of a witch-hunt.

Left unreported by the Post was a next level of context for the ire directed toward Gudkov by his fellow Russian lawmakers: Putin’s ongoing “war on civil society,” which he has been ramping up, against foreign NGOs described as “foreign agents” who use “soft power” to “meddle” in Russia’s affairs. From Putin’s perspective, Freedom House has been particularly problematic. It is regularly criticized in Pro-Russian online forums, and Russia has accused it of bias and of promoting U.S. interests in Russia.

The activities abroad of U.S.-style democracy promotion NGOs like Freedom House have, of course, not been a sore point just among members of the Russian Duma. The sharp debate over tensions created by Freedom House activities in post-Mubarak Egypt in late 2011 readily comes to mind. Nor is Putin alone in vilifying international NGOs and depicting them as foreign political operators bent upon undermining national sovereignty or security. Venezuela’s Chávez also regularly did the same, as do others.

I have no wish to extol the authoritarian behavior of a Putin or a Chávez. But too often U.S. responses to hostility regarding democracy promotion abroad tend to ignore that government “by the people” can mean many things in practice, and that authoritarian or populist leadership does not exhaust the reasons for why foreign governments (or publics) do not always eagerly adopt the liberal and secular “transition toolkit” of democracy assistance, as peddled by the Freedom House’s of the world.

As Thomas Carothers has highlighted – and what Freedom House, and in this case the Post, too often ignores – is that in parts of the world where “identity-based divisions” are basic features of the political landscape — like Russia or the U.S. — the problem is often a lack of legitimacy. Voluntary associations with an ethnic or religious component are often assumed to be more legitimate and locally grounded than are their international human rights or democracy-promoting counterparts.

In other words, these are cultural arguments, as Putin indirectly recognizes with his charges about “soft power” manipulations. As an explanation, Russia’s own culture wars, including the relationships among rising Russian nationalism, the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet-era nostalgia, or Pussy Riot, rarely find their way into journalistic accounts, except as epitomizing Putin’s prickly paranoia amid the Manichean struggle between “freedom” and “authoritarianism” – threadbare Cold War distinction though it might be.

The Post might not understand contemporary Russia that well. But it often also appears thoroughly unconvinced about, or just uninterested in, the salience of cultural agency as a variable in international affairs, except to dismiss it or to make it disappear. And making culture disappear as a geopolitical global factor (except as aesthetic window dressing), has been an ongoing epidemic in U.S. foreign affairs.

Several weeks earlier the Post also published a gotcha-style investigative exposé, framed in the familiar terms of a story about congressional profligacy, which of course is low-hanging fruit in this era of dismal approval ratings and fiscal austerity. In brief, this story documented the frequency of overseas trips by congressional representatives and staff, “arranged by lobbyists” and funded by foreign governments, with what the Post described as a loophole Congress granted itself from oversight of travel restrictions “for trips deemed to be cultural exchanges.”

China is the biggest sponsor of such trips. The Post cited all-expenses-paid trips to China, organized by the U.S.-Asia Foundation, and described staffers staying at “luxury hotels” and indulging in “recreational activities.” It noted “briefings” about Chinese history and culture, and went on to quote the concerns of watchdog groups about “propaganda junkets” that generate a “conflict of interest” for Hill staffers. The article, which could have been written by a pro-Putin Russian legislator, raises ethical concerns, noting the nondisclosure of trip itineraries and the lack of a requirement to itemize time spent on congressional work while traveling.

The exposé appeared intent upon rehearsing the same kinds of objections as raised by the irate Duma members over Gudkov’s trip to the U.S. That article sought to highlight the deterioration of democratic freedoms in Putin’s Russia, while the cultural exchange-as-loophole exposé opted to use the language of conflict of interest and of sympathy-peddling to suggest the need for more oversight over congressmen perhaps not sufficiently dedicated to the peoples’ business. Both articles participate in the same way in a larger universe of skepticism.

Whether intentional or not, the exposé’s point of view is reactionary with regard to the value of cultural exchange. It does not seriously entertain the idea that congressional types would want to improve their foreign policy chops by learning first-hand at no cost to taxpayers about the history, society, and culture of their hosts. But skepticism about cultural exchanges between U.S. and Chinese policy-makers is hard to fathom. Surely, U.S. decision-makers need a regularly updated and first-hand account of China’s ongoing and far-reaching social transformation, as a responsible basis for “dialogue” between Washington and Beijing.

Skepticism about the value of cultural exchange programs is not uncommon, particularly among critics in and out of government looking to trim the budgetary fat. Partly, this is because “cultural exchange” – as a concept— is understood to be vague and can encompass a lot of different activities, while also resisting the technocrat’s need for oversight and metrics. The experience and effects are not best understood as quantifiable and so become illegible in such numbers games.

Distance-learning is no substitute. The study of cultures from afar might produce best sellers, like Ruth Benedict’s 1946 study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which influenced a generation of U.S. decision-makers. But understanding U.S.-Japanese relations as a subset of the distinction between “guilt” and “shame” cultures is akin to understanding U.S.-Russian relations as the difference between “freedom”-loving and “authoritarian” politics. Such distinctions are neither descriptively nor analytically helpful, and they entrench geopolitical boundaries of difference that make dialogue harder.

For China, even if – as is most definitely the case – Chinese counterparts view visits by U.S. delegations as soft power opportunities, there is still much to be learned. This includes the extent to which, and the various ways in which China’s command and control apparatus understands foreign affairs as a cultural encounter. But when not phrased as a sweeping dichotomy, cultural explanations have been a hard sell in the U.S. and skeptical journalists are not helping matters.

An earlier version of this post appeared in the USC CPD blog: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/cultural_exchange_and_the_politics_of_suspicion/

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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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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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