Martin Löffelholz
Swiss German University, Indonesia
Since the term public diplomacy was coined in 1965, both scientific concepts and political practices were recurrently adapted to developments in the international arena. Nowadays, the term refers to communication activities of governmental and non-governmental organizations as well as individuals addressing foreign (and partly domestic) publics to promote nation-states by generating sympathy for a nation’s ideals, policies, institutions and models of society and by fostering mutually beneficial relationships. Upon briefly recapping the state of research on public diplomacy, the paper will theoretically elaborate dimensions to empirically analyze public diplomacy strategies. Based upon this theoretical framework, I will compare respective strategies of Asian, European and North American countries examining, among others, the goals, organizational structures, resources and target groups of public diplomacy. Particularly, I am interested to advance the question whether national public diplomacy strategies already consider the growing relevance of global citizenship. The so-called global citizens form multiple cross-cutting and network-based communities opposing and collaborating with traditional governmental actors redefining the procedures of conducting foreign policy urging governments to acknowledge the plurality in international relations.