PUBLIC POLICY ANTHROPOLOGIST

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.

If only because it runs counter to familiar American exceptionalist arguments about culture, now is a very good moment to contemplate a cultural listening project, a dialogue with the many ways cultural claims now form the basis for diverse political, economic, and legal priorities beyond the U.S. but in ways that nevertheless matter for the U.S. These priorities are taking shape in terms of arguments, policies, programs, and politics about culture as the basis of claims to: rights, property, digital access to information content, heritage, security, goods and services, and identity. While we seldom hear about any of this in the U.S., we should be giving more attention to the reasons why culture has become a basis for claim-making, friction, and competition, and a subject of multilateral policy making in these and other terms. These are not trivial issues. They passionately matter to people around the globe.

What are the ways culture matters for the rest of the world? I am not talking about the need to fix public diplomacy by improving unilateral U.S. efforts dedicated to message delivery nor sounding a cross-cultural communication-inspired call for better understanding of “Chinese culture,” “Iranian culture,” or “Russian culture.” I am talking about the expanding relevance of culture as it is incorporated into national and multilateral policy making. In short, culture – as a subject of policy – is a basic feature of political decision-making, global problem-solving, as well as new knowledge production and innovation, in ways both different than in the past and growing in importance. Missing – if sorely needed – is a more regular engagement between domestic U.S. cultural policy and the very different international conversations about cultural priorities and investments now carried forward by states, global civil society, and multilateral policies, programs, actors and institutions. But cultural policy in the U.S.– historically largely dedicated to promoting “arts and culture” on the home front – is barely engaged with the global rush to promote and to protect cultural expression, representation, and practice.

Currently U.S. cultural policy tends toward a relatively narrow commitment to arts policy, and as such is primarily dedicated to defining public support for the arts and U.S. national heritage in partnership with private support. If support for the arts in the U.S. is itself important, it should not be the only priority. Domestic goals, in turn, are often disconnected from considerations of culture in U.S. international affairs, dedicated to the promotion and deregulation of U.S. cultural goods and services as an economic concern and to the branding of the U.S. image as a strategic part of diplomatic efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of different publics. These commitments deserve more regular discussion, evaluation and critique. But the evident lack of communication between domestic and foreign cultural policy in the U.S., as a problem, is nothing compared to the near total neglect of global cultural concerns, formulated as policy.

We are not served if we continue to view them through the narrow lens of our own arts policy in the U.S. Counting how many people “participate” in the arts, NEA-style, might be a necessary rearguard action in the U.S. to defend budgets, particularly during economic crisis and as a way to survive domestic “values” debates. But it is also insular. State Department cultural ambassadors are fine, but offer little opportunity to hear from other corners of the world about how culture matters in their lives. Massive exports of U.S. popular cultural content might be the key to soft power, but encouraging people to “want what we want” obviously actively discourages listening. It’s not surprising, then, that recent NY Times articles have, in different ways, pointed to the thoroughgoing inadequacies of U.S. cultural policy for Afghanistan, in China and Iraq. This is a dismal record. And it results from the long history of U.S. neglect of culture as a serious subject of policy and of international affairs. This is, too, about a legacy of exceptionalism that has never advanced more meaningful engagement with other peoples’ desires, commitments, values, and attitudes.

The terms of globalization and global conflict are not defined simply by the global economy, new media technologies, or transnational movements of people, but also by the meaningful cultural frames that organize the ongoing significance of globalization as an everyday lived experience in both these and other ways. These cultural frames include the stories and forms of representation publicly mobilized to convey diverse circumstances of cultural identity, which, if they acquire global circulation often have specifically local origins. Particularly in the post-colonial, post-Cold War and post-9/11 era of international relations, culture is a more self-conscious fact embraced at once – if differently – by communities, civil society, and states as a basic transversal factor and framework for a variety of public, political, technological, economic, and security goals.

Cultural identity is a source of new social movements but also of exclusionary politics, conducted in terms of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, language, the built environment, and more. Culture has at once become a basis for the power politics of advancing political claims and a creative source driving new global developments. This is the case for: the creative sector and the post-industrial information economy, new international legal and human rights frameworks, and approaches to public diplomacy, efforts in sustainable development, multicultural state reforms, and democracy promotion, as well as the work of civil society, and the advancement of community claims, among comparable local and global projects. These developments have far reaching implications for the changing public role of cultural institutions – museums, libraries, and archives – which now often function as important sites of convergence for interactions among cultural producers, communities, and international policies, and as key nodes in global cultural flows.

Constructive engagement with this emerging international cultural division of labor has never been more important. Understood as a question of policy, this includes not simply the recognition of culture as: an expressive basis of identity, source of conflict and potential obstacle to desired change; but also: as a resource, and asset, as empowering, and as creative capital, as a means of self-definition, basis for expanding choices, and as an essential element of basic freedoms. At the same time cultural policy and practice are directly implicated in such wide-ranging priorities as: the expressive life of nations, humanitarian aid, the content of the information economy, urban planning, the application of so-called soft or smart power, and efforts to understand the meaning of political change, among others – all evidence of the ongoing international renovation of the culture concept as a component of global events.

But in the U.S. we pay little attention and there appears to be little room for such a cultural listening project. Despite: a regular concern about the decline of the U.S. image abroad, growing appeals to uses of soft power, a recognized deficit in applied cultural knowledge and training, and the encouraging fact that the Obama administration is the first ever to formally present a cultural policy platform prior to the election, there is little sign that the U.S. is ready to change its exceptionalist ways in cultural terms in the interest of real global dialogue.

A recent article in the New York Times Book Review surveys new anthropological writing on Afghanistan, with an eye to contrasting this with ongoing U. S. military efforts to carry out effective culturally-informed counterinsurgency in that country. The reviewer wants to underscore the considerable challenges the U. S. — or any military — faces when it aspires effectively to apply cultural knowledge to its missions. Highlighting these difficulties, the review contrasts ethnographically-grounded insights about the workings of local politics, power, and culture from anthropologist Noah Coburn’s book Bazaar Politics with the often very different top-down efforts of “centralizers, modernizers, and humanitarians” in Afghanistan to apply cultural knowledge to encourage particular outcomes.

The review also makes passing reference to a report written by a commission I chaired for the American Anthropological Association, which described in some depth many of the concerns anthropologists have had about a U. S. Army program to collect and apply cultural knowledge to its decision-making in theater. Even as the U. S. mission in Afghanistan follows its long and winding path toward an end-game, the question of how the military chooses to make sense out of, and to apply, local cultural knowledge, promises to be a significant feature of its mission for years to come. The U. S. military is likely to continue to have an interest in developing its cultural assets, as it is deployed in the context of varieties of “operations other than war,” including humanitarian, stability, development, and diplomacy operations. And, just as the Times review reflects on the U. S. military’s “applied anthropology” in Afghanistan, now is a timely moment to sort though what the military’s cultural turn might mean for the U. S.’s foreign policy and global footprint for the foreseeable future.

This is exactly the spirit behind a conference I’ve organized together with Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center, to be hosted by the Wilson Center in Washington D. C. this December 9th. The conference offers a snapshot — along with discussion of associated implications — of ongoing developments across the U. S. military dedicated to cultural capacity-building. Giving particular attention to clusters of activity around: cultural training and education, cultural data collection and analysis, and cultural heritage conservation and management, this conference also locates this conversation on the frontier between the U. S. military’s cultural policy-making, program-building, and operations, on the one hand, and diverse humanitarian efforts into which it is often drawn, on the other. Further details about the organization of the conference, including speakers, can be found here. What follows is the conference precis:

Invited Conference:

Accounting for Culture in the Military:

Implications for Future Humanitarian Cooperation

This one-day conference, organized by Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy and hosted by the program in United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., builds directly upon the success of the Curb Center’s Arts Industries Policy Forum. Since 2003, this forum has convened cultural policy experts and government decision-makers to discuss the policy implications of key cultural issues through a participant-driven, nonpartisan program of information exchange. This has included attention to the implications of culture for national security, as represented by 2008’s Cultural Diplomacy and the National Interest, and which the present conference actively extends. As host, the Wilson Center’s program in United States Studies has a track record of attention to complementary concerns, including: the relationship between U.S. culture and Muslims in the U.S., the domestic impacts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the work of citizen diplomacy. As partners, the Curb and Wilson centers are well-prepared to take the next step to examine the varied connections between culture and security in greater depth.

This conference takes that step focusing specifically upon the U.S. military’s efforts to develop cultural expertise and the forms that this expertise is currently taking. While the military has made the question of culture a focus of particular attention starting in the mid-2000s, in the process elaborating doctrinal, strategic, and operational ways both of understanding and applying cultural knowledge, this conference seeks to build a broader inter-agency conversation among military and non-military stakeholders about implications of the U.S. military’s several approaches to cultural problem-solving. If these approaches are non-traditional for the military, they are nevertheless becoming increasingly relevant to the work of other government agencies and non-governmental actors, across a wide array of efforts in diplomacy, development, and humanitarian relief, among others. This makes the present moment a good one for a fruitful exchange with stakeholders across government and outside of government regarding the ways that the military understands the relationship of culture to security.

Rationale

That the purposes, methods, and organization of the U.S. military have changed dramatically since the Cold War is now taken largely for granted. Nowhere have these changes been more evident than in the pursuit by the military in recent years to increase its cultural understanding, and to incorporate cultural knowledge into its operations. And while the military’s cultural turn has been widely noted, most often as represented by the so-called “Petraeus doctrine” of culture-centric counterinsurgency, implications of the military’s turn to culture are still not widely recognized or well-understood beyond the military itself.

This turn is not illustrated by a single overarching approach, so much as by multiple parallel approaches across the services meeting a variety of different needs, among them: training and education, cultural intelligence and analysis, and culturally-informed decision-making in theater, including cultural heritage resource management. As the military has developed a variety of culture-based policies, programs, and operational goals to meet its current mission requirements, these developments have remained largely siloed within the DoD. But, as present and future military missions increasingly include traditionally non-military dimensions, forms of expertise, and priorities, civil-military collaborations are becoming more regular and routine. This makes the need for a more comprehensive inter-agency understanding of the military’s particular approaches to culture more urgent, both at present and during peacetime after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down.

Since the military’s commitment to cultural capacity-building has been widely discussed, we will not rehearse the details of this story here. But, briefly, the more important drivers include the following: 1) In broad terms, post-Cold War and post-9/11 realities have been regularly referenced by the U.S. policy community using “clash of civilizations” frameworks, for which soft power becomes a crucial tool, and which are understood in essence as cultural conflicts; 2) for the military this has meant refocusing basic objectives toward waging asymmetric warfare, that is, unconventional conflicts among non-state actors and with culturally distinct populations; 3) for which counterinsurgency doctrine, requiring significant awareness of and sustained engagement with non-combatant cultural communities, has become the answer; 4) and where its ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred the military to seek to rapidly raise its perceived “cultural knowledge gap” and to build up a sustainable cultural capacity.

5) Paralleling these developments, as the U.S. military’s global footprint has shifted significantly away from preparing for the next large conventional conflict, its logistical capabilities have been utilized as a first responder and global backstop for diverse humanitarian disasters, ranging from the 2004 Banda Aceh Tsunami to the 2010 Haiti earthquake; 6) As a humanitarian agency, the military must frequently coordinate with such diverse civilian and NGO actors as the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the Department of State, other development, refugee, and human rights organizations, and including the Smithsonian; 7) If many of these activities are incorporated into counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan (often in the form of civil-military cooperation on provincial reconstruction or civil affairs teams), they are also recognized parts of military doctrine as “operations other than war” (MOOTW) or as “stability, security, transition and reconstruction operations” (SSTR), 8 ) which complexly combine work in development, diplomacy, peace-keeping, human rights, governance, and reconciliation, among other activities, requiring an in-depth concern for relevant “socio-cultural dynamics.”

The increase in civil-military collaborations in this changing environment of military cultural initiatives has also been characterized by regular reaching out to new interlocutors, in government, in academia, and in the private sector. This involves a broad range of “culture experts” historically not looked to by the military, and including: sociocultural anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural geographers, cultural psychologists, people with backgrounds in communications, international relations, cultural studies, and other subject matter experts from the humanities (e. g. experts in Arabic literature). However, such military-academic relationships can present conceptual, practical, and even ethical, dilemmas, where differences in background and training, in conceptual framing, and in modes of analysis can mean that potential collaborators find it challenging to bridge these divides. They are often working with different definitions of culture and its relationship to policy in the first place, which makes constructive exchanges about cultural interpretation, analysis, assessment, or metrics, difficult to achieve.

Another collaborative challenge, in the context of inter-agency whole-of-government efforts, is that the different historical roles of stakeholders lead to distinct assumptions about best practices and tools, which can be perceived as competitive rather than complementary. Finally, discussions of new cultural initiatives that require coordination across agencies, such as standing up rapid cultural response teams dedicated to helping secure national heritage or patrimonies in the aftermath of humanitarian disasters, also create new working relationships between the military and counterparts, which would benefit from substantial ground clearing. For these reasons, this conference seeks to open up a space for dialogue about military-culture efforts along the frontier of potential collaborations between military and non-military counterparts.

Dilemmas of a Dyslexic Public Diplomacy

A Cultural Policy Listening Project? Long Overdue

A New Conversation about Military Approaches to Culture