Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy: A Review

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I’ve never been a fan of textbooks but I relied on a few – and I reviewed and rejected a number of others - when I taught international and comparative politics to lower division students at the University of New Mexico after leaving the Foreign Service.  I also wrote the teacher’s manual for a comparative politics text*, assigned a textbook on Global Islam** as a basic reference book to my upper division Islam and Politics classes and co-wrote a chapter on small group communications that appeared in a two volume communications text book that came out in 2006.***

So how does Routledge’s Handbook of Public Diplomacy edited by Nancy Snow and Philip M. Taylor and published in 2009 stack up in my overall text book assessment firmament?  Frankly, as a former political science professor and also a US Foreign Service Officer from 1970 to 1998 who spent a career as a public diplomacy practitioner in Washington and abroad, I think there are serious editorial, organizational and substantive problems that could and should be addressed in any future volumes that Routledge or another publisher publishes on this critical topic that, in my view, deserves a much wider audience than it currently has.

Where to begin?

This hefty handbook is not reader friendly.  It is 382 pages of condensed type printed on way too wide pages interspersed with far too few illustrations.  Too wide pages and crunched together small type make reading anything unnecessarily difficult.  I cannot tell you how many times I fell asleep trying to wade my way through it. And from what I have gleaned from their reading habits, today’s students (the authors indicate that students are a good part of the book’s projected audience) will have a difficult time coping with much of the contents, too.  

Furthermore, this book would have been far more compelling had there been fewer chapters written by theoreticians and more by practitioners.  I am no fan of jargon in any field – and it seems to me that those contributors who used it the most – and also used the most endnotes – had the least useful things to say.  Their chapters were also the longest, heaviest and most pedantic.  Yet from what I could see, their academic qualifications were no more august, perhaps in some cases less so, than most of those who wrote from actual on-the-ground experience.

Experience matters

The chapters that stood out – and in some cases sparkled – were the ones (in order of appearance) by John Brown “Arts Diplomacy,” Sherry Mueller “The Nexus of Public Diplomacy and Citizen Diplomacy,” Keith Reinhard “American Business and its Role in Public Diplomacy, William Kiehl “The Case for Localized Diplomacy,” and Ali Fisher “Four Seasons in One Day: The Crowded House of Public Diplomacy in the UK.” 

What distinguishes these chapters is the fact that they, except for Fisher’s, were written by people who have had substantial and relevant experience on the ground in their field.  Kiehl’s “The Case for Localized Diplomacy” is an excellent example.  As he demonstrates from lengthy personal experience, public diplomacy which - in my view is all about a government’s representatives connecting with people in another country - needs to be field driven to be effective.

Public diplomacy, therefore, needs to be designed to meet specific local needs and conditions at a given time. Certain formulations, program ideas and fragments thereof - may or may not be transferable from one country to the next. But I think that successful public diplomacy is foremost driven by savvy experienced public diplomacy officers who bring to the table ideas and programs – with Washington support as necessary - that they can implement in a particular country, region and/or city at the right time.  Kiehl, a long time former US public diplomacy diplomat demonstrates this in spades.

What made Reinhard’s chapter on US business’s role in public diplomacy stand out was not only his plea to American corporate interests to understand that how the US is perceived abroad affects a company’s financial bottom line, but also his recognition that businesses can be handmaidens of the US government in the practice of public diplomacy.  Reinhard, however, is also careful to note that businessmen are not public diplomacy practitioners themselves because they are not US government employees and are, therefore, not encumbered to represent or even explain administration policies. 

The Chapter Where Practice and Theory Align

 Ali Fisher who had previously headed the British Council’s think-tank but, as far as I can tell never served overseas, brings to the table the only clear headed nexus of easily understandable and succinct communications theory and public diplomacy practice.

The communications continuum he describes is readily understandable and makes sense.  Not surprisingly he comes from a country that did not have its public diplomacy infrastructure needlessly decimated at the end of the Cold War so this makes it far easier for the British to tweak the pieces to include the latest communications tool, the Internet, but not toss the rest of Britain’s programs or organizations into the North Sea.

Nicholas Cull’s “Public Diplomacy before Gullion: the Evolution of a Phrase” was also readable and important for establishing an historical frame of reference for America’s current public diplomacy travails.  All told, however, these six chapters amount to only 42 pages of text.  That includes a few illustrations and endnotes. But is this enough to ask students or others to invest in the entire book?  

Conceptual and organizational problems

Although the authors tell us their primary audience is students and teachers, I still found it difficult to figure out who, in fact, would be the chief beneficiaries.  I’m skeptical, for instance, that 28 different definitions of public diplomacy – every author it seems views the topic through a different lens and offers his or her own definition thereof– make better sense in explaining to the uninitiated the contours and worth of this hybrid “discipline” and subset of diplomacy.  Perhaps, however, the confusion is more a statement of the hydra-headed nature of the public diplomacy beast in the US since the U.S. Information Agency was abolished in 1999 than failings on the part of the editors and their contributors. None the less there were some esoteric definitions included that, at least from a pedagogical standpoint, could have easily been omitted – no harm done. 

Structurally, I also had problems because the book’s organization just didn’t work for me.  Despite the subsection divisions, I found myself wondering why certain chapters were placed where they were and even why the chapter lengths themselves were so uneven.  Putting, for instance, a lengthy and turgid theoretical chapter on one topic by an academic next to a short pithy one about something else by a practitioner leads - I think - foremost to confusion - not enlightenment.    The only part that made obvious organizational sense was the section on public diplomacy in countries other than the US.

Yet, if I were putting this handbook together, I would have been tempted to lead with Fisher’s chapter on British public diplomacy because he was the single author in this volume who places the actual practice of public diplomacy within an easily understandable and sensible conceptual communications framework as I mentioned above.

That this framework is used in the United Kingdom may help explain why the British do not seem to encounter the same difficulties the US government does in explaining, rationalizing and justifying the country’s various approaches to engaging foreign publics.

Questionable ending

Finally, I was flummoxed by the final three chapters under the subheading “Advancing Public Diplomacy Studies.” I still don’t understand how any of the three contribute substantially to what the subheading promises.  Joseph Duffey’s “How Globalization Became US Public Diplomacy at the End of State” is readable but Duffey ignores his own critical role in the dismantlement of USIA as well as fails to explain why public diplomacy is worth studying today – let alone in the past.  The other two chapters by academics are so jargon-laden that the few interesting concepts expressed drown in the verbal seas. 

There is one more problem that negatively impacts the contents of this book that, I think, needs to be considered. This is the question of datedness.  All chapters were written while George W. Bush was president and a number of the contributors take swipes at his and his administration’s public diplomacy ineptness.  Problem is that was over a year ago.

What would have been far more interesting than the handbook’s final chapters or the individual criticisms of the Bush administration (not that I don’t agree) would have been a concluding chapter that compares the differences between the Obama and Bush administrations approaches to public diplomacy and looks to see what changes have occurred in world public opinion and US government public diplomacy operations and policies since then.  I realize this might have been difficult for the publishers and the editors – given the lengthy pre-publication lead-times publishers require – but in the long run I think it would have been well worth the effort.

*Instructor’s Manual to Monte Palmer’s Comparative Politics, Third Edition (Thomson and Wadsworth Publishers 2006);

** Mir Zohair Husain’s Global Islamic Politics, 2^nd edition (Addison-Wesley 2003);

***Lawrence R. Frey (ed) Facilitating Group Communication in Context, Vol. 1 (Hampton Press 2006) coauthored with Beatrice Schultz “Empirically Derived Training Techniques for Facilitators of Group Discussions.”