Truth and other lies: online foreign image management in Iran during the Rouhani Era

ABSTRACT

States’ communication with foreign audiences is commonly conceptualized as either propaganda (by autocracies), public diplomacy (by democracies), or PR work (by public relations agencies). This article argues that strict separation between these areas of foreign policy communication hinders more than helps our understanding of how states attempt to garner support among a global audience. Theorizing Iran’s ex-foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s communication on Twitter as a fusion of PR, public diplomacy, and propaganda with emotionally evocative performances of nationalism, this article shows how foreign policy communication develops in tandem with, but also in contrast to audience reactions and discussions.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Mohammad J. Zarif, ‘Twitter Account’, https://twitter.com/JZarif (accessed April 4, 2022). Some notes on the citation of tweets and comments: I will use the format @[Twitter handle] + date to indicate the source of the quoted tweet (in this case @jzarif September 4, 2013). All translations of Persian or Arabic content are my own. I am leaving the content of the English tweets in its original form, including spelling and grammar deviations. This approach also protects stylistic choices, such as deliberately incorrect grammar, and retains the genre’s peculiarity as consisting of written text that mirrors spoken language. See Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019).

² In July 2023, its owner Elon Musk changed the platform’s name to X. However, since it was still called Twitter during the timeframe investigated in this study, I will keep referring to it as such.

³ For notable exceptions see Constance Duncombe, ‘Twitter and Transformative Diplomacy: Social Media and Iran—US Relations’, International Affairs 93, no. 3 (2017); and Kaye D. Sweetser and Charles W. Brown, ‘An Exploration of Iranian Communication to Multiple Target Audiences’, Public Relations Review 36, no. 3 (2010).

⁴ Johannes Paßmann, ‘Kurz & souverän: Twittern als sozioliterarische Praxis’, in Kurz & knapp: Zur Mediengeschichte kleiner Formen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Michael Gamper and Ruth Mayer (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017).

⁵ Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, ‘An Iranian Moderate Exposed’, The New Republic, January 24, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/116167/mohammad-javad-zarif-irans-foreign-minister-religious-zealot (accessed May 29, 2023).

⁶ On his YouTube channel one can find mainly Nawruz addresses or messages to Iran’s JCPOA interlocutors, often subtitled in five or six languages.

⁷ Mohammad Javad Zarif, ‘What Iran Really Wants: Iranian Foreign Policy in the Rouhani Era’, Foreign Affairs 93, no. 3 (2014): 56.

⁸ Margaret Brennan, ‘Extended Interview: Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’, Face the Nation, April 24, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrA-pfPbzfg&t=2s (accessed May 29, 2023).

⁹ For an attempt at definition see Thymian Bussemer, Propaganda: Konzepte und Theorien (Wiesbaden: Springer Medien, 2005); for an interesting approach to classify propaganda into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ methods see Haifeng Huang, ‘Propaganda as Signaling’, Comparative Politics 47, no. 4 (2015): 419–37; Haifeng Huang, ‘The Pathology of Hard Propaganda’, The Journal of Politics 80, no. 3 (2018): 1034–38; and Daniel C. Mattingly and Elaine Yao, ‘How Soft Propaganda Persuades’, Comparative Political Studies 55, no. 9 (2022): 1569–94.

¹⁰ Edward Wastnidge, ‘The Modalities of Iranian Soft Power: From Cultural Diplomacy to Soft War’, Politics 35, no. 3–4 (2015): 365.

¹¹ Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), 11.

¹² There have been attempts at theorizing this connection, for example by Sevin (Efe Sevin, ‘Pathways of Connection: An Analytical Approach to the Impacts of Public Diplomacy’, Public Relations Review 41, no. 4 (2015): 562–8.), but they usually go no further than claiming that value-based attraction has an influence on foreign policy without explaining how this process might look like in detail.

¹³ Harry G. Frankfurt, Bullshit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 33–4.

¹⁴ Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, on Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 11–2. Notably, Arendt’s writing on lies in politics referred to the United States, a democracy, after the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

¹⁵ Carl Ciovacco,‘The Shaping of Threat Through Narration’, JSS (Journal of Strategic Security) 13, no. 2 (2020): 56.

¹⁶ Laura Roselle, Alister Miskimmon, and Ben O’Loughlin, ‘Strategic Narrative: A new means to understand soft power’, Media, War & Conflict 7, no. 1 (2014): 76.

¹⁷ Janice Bially Mattern, ‘Why “Soft Power” Isn’t So Soft: Representational Force and the Sociolinguistic Construction of Attraction in World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 583–612.

¹⁸ Ibid., 586.

¹⁹ Walter Posch, ‘Ideology and Strategy in the Middle East: The Case of Iran’, Survival 59, no. 5 (2017): 82.

²⁰ Alexander Dukalskis, Making the world safe for dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 4.

²¹ Dukalskis, Making the world safe for dictatorship, 38.

²² See for example Nikolay Kozhanov, Iran’s Strategic Thinking (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2018), 63ff; Behbod Negahban, ‘Who Makes Iran’s Foreign Policy? The Revolutionary Guard and Factional Politics in the Formulation of Iranian Foreign Policy’, Yale Journal of International Affairs 12, no. 1 (2017): 33–75; David E. Thaler, Mullahs, Guards, and Bonyads: An exploration of Iranian leadership dynamics (Santa Monica: RAND, 2010), chapters 3 and 4; Bayram Sinkaya, Revolutionary Guards in Iranian politics: Elites and shifting relations (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 78ff.

²³ Negahban, ‘Who Makes Iran’s Foreign Policy?’, 36.

²⁴ It is likely that the exact number of likes and comments is somewhat skewed by the intrusion of bots. While this fact should not be ignored, liking and retweeting still increases the reach of a tweet, even if a bot does it. This means that more people are exposed to it, which is the relevant part for this study.

²⁵ I skipped comments that repeated another comment verbatim, which is why there are a little less than 930 comments in my sample.

²⁶ @jzarif October 15, 2019. Imran Khan was Pakistan’s Prime Minister at the time.

²⁷ According to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, Pakistan was rated as partly free in 2019, making it one of the more open states in the region. See https://freedomhouse.org/country/pakistan/freedom-world/2019 (accessed May 29, 2023).

²⁸ @jzarif August 4, 2020.

²⁹ @jzarif May 17, 2018. The ‘first force to liberate Arab territory’ that he refers to is the Lebanese Hizballah.

³⁰ His phrasing, however, is misleading: Israeli forces did wound over 2000 Palestinians protesting at the border fences around Gaza, but ‘only’ 58 people were shot dead. See B.B.C. News. ‘Gaza begins to bury its dead after deadliest day in years’. B.B.C. News, May 15, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44116340 (accessed May 29, 2023).

³¹ @jzarif January 17, 2019.

³² @jzarif September 11, 2018.

³³ Notable examples include the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, which killed 86 people, or the assassination of four Iranian-Kurdish opposition members in Berlin in 1992.

³⁴ @jzarif October 4, 2018.

³⁵ @jzarif May 21, 2017.

³⁶ You can find the full speech here: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/president-trump-delivers-remarks-arab-islamic-american-summit/ (accessed May 29, 2023).

³⁷ @jzarif June 30, 2020.

³⁸ Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), 47.

³⁹ Nikolay Kozhanov, Iran’s Strategic Thinking (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2018), 1.

⁴⁰ @jzarif February 3, 2017.

⁴¹ One could say the same about Israel, but obviously Zarif does not.

⁴² Nikolay Kozhanov, Iran’s Strategic Thinking (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2018), 1.

⁴³ @jzarif January 16, 2019.

⁴⁴ @jzarif January 5, 2020.

⁴⁵ Here it is important to note that the Iranian state restricts domestic users’ access to most social media sites, including Twitter (with varying degrees of success), and has done everything in its power to keep online dissent under tight control since the inception of Iran’s blog boom in the early 2000s. See David M. Faris, ‘Architectures of Control and Mobilization in Egypt and Iran’, in Social Media in Iran: Politics and Society After 2009, ed. David M. Faris and Babak Rahimi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).

⁴⁶ @jzarif April 10, 2019.

⁴⁷ Parisa Hafezi, ‘Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif, architect of nuclear deal, resigns’, Reuters, February 25, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-zarif-resignation-idUSKCN1QE2G4 (accessed May 29, 2023)

⁴⁸ English-language comment on @jzarif April 23, 2018.

⁴⁹ Persian-language comment on @jzarif September 22, 2019.

⁵⁰ Arabic-language comment on @jzarif August 4, 2020.

⁵¹ This also matches Akhavan’s observation that nationalism functions as the glue that keeps the Iranian domestic and diasporic communities together. See Niki Akhavan, Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 110.

⁵² English- (first) and Persian- (second) language comments on @jzarif November 27, 2020. The second commenter probably also blames Zarif for the assassination of Qasem Soleymani in January 2020.