The past and future of cultural diplomacy

ABSTRACT

This article is based on a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the academic literature on cultural diplomacy since its official inception during the midst of the Cold War, in 1959. It draws on mapping, chronology building, and thematic analysis of all scholarship published on cultural diplomacy in the Scopus database, the largest academic database in the world. The research explores how the discipline has evolved, what geographies and thematic areas it covered in the past, and what is the future of this discipline. These explorations start a conversation on cultural diplomacy as an independent academic discipline that most recently has gained a wider and stronger attention and reached a higher stage of scholarly maturity. This article is evidence that the research on CD is rapidly progressing with time, incorporating new thematic areas for exploration as well as covering wider cultural and political geographies. The research findings suggest further trajectories for the development of cultural diplomacy as an academic enquiry, focusing on different diplomatic channels, modes of operation, structures, actors, meanings, and implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural diplomacy
• cultural relations
• arts diplomacy
• diplomacy actors
• diplomacy tools

Introduction

The history of Cultural Diplomacy (CD) as an academic field of study is full of contradictions and complexities. They pertain to many factors, including its late emergence as an academic discipline as well as its accurate universally accepted definition, which does not exist until today. First, these disparities concern a comparatively young age of CD, by contrast to a long history of cultural sharing, exchanges and influences that spans from the beginning of the human civilisation. As Trivellato, Halevi, and Antunes (2014) observed, ‘ordinary people, travellers, pilgrims, missionaries, and interlopers across the globe, concocted ways of […] establishing relationships with people who did not speak their language, wore different garb, and worshipped other gods’ (2). These cross-cultural interactions have always had a strong influence on other societies, either by bringing new cultural products into active use in other countries or transforming cultural beliefs and traditions as well as by facilitating the spread of languages across geographical borders (Bentley 2011).

While in the early times these cultural exchanges happened quite sporadically, in the 19th century, cultural sharing transformed into a more strategic policy exercise (Clarke 2020). These activities gave a birth to the field of actions that we would now call ‘cultural diplomacy.’ Initially, they were narrowly limited to communications between the courts of sovereigns, but by the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 expanded to wider public and reached broader audiences (Welch 2017). A rapid development of the modern state system in the 19th century reinforced the significance of CD as a means for emerging states to craft, communicate, and share their national identities in the global arena. Despite the institutionalization of CD since 1910, when the first dedicated cultural agencies, like Alliance Francais or British Council, were established to coordinate cultural activities abroad (Paschalidis 2009), the practice remained vaguely referred to as ‘cultural policy/activities abroad,’ ‘cultural exchanges’ or ‘cultural relations,’ even in the academic scholarship (Malik 1961; Merritt 1965; Spiller 1966; Barghoorn 1967).

Only in the second part of the 20^th century, in the midst of the Cold War between the U.S.A and the Soviet Russia, the term achieved its wider employment and acquired its name as we know it now. Cull (2019) spotted the earliest use of the term CD in English text in 1954 in a New York Times piece by the art critic Aline B. Louchheim. But CD was first defined only in 1959 by the U.S. Department of State as ‘the direct and enduring contact between people of different nations […] to help create a better climate of international trust and understanding in which official relations can operate’ (U.S. Department of State 1959, iv). Since then, CD as an object of study was marked as ‘a product of academia originating from the Cold War’ (Paquette and Beauregard 2018, 23). CD which referred to different cultural programs and activities facilitated by states to conduct their international politics has become broadly recognised as a strategic tool in the conduct of foreign affairs, especially in the Western scholarship (Schroeder-Gudehus 1970).

By the 1970s, CD has become ‘a label’ that had gained international recognition not only among nation states but also among intergovernmental organisations, like the Council of Europe or UNESCO (Haigh 1974). Nevertheless, CD finally entered the common parlance in other countries, especially beyond the Western world, only in the 1990s (Ang, Raj Isar, and Mar 2015). Since then, the discipline enjoyed a special interest in the academic research (Singh 2010), rapidly progressing and increasing until today. Though through this quite short history, CD conquered its dedicated place in academic scholarship, there is still a distinct lack of clarity on what exactly this practice means, how it works or what it entails. A loose definition of CD spans various interpretations of this term from interest-driven governmental practices (Faucher 2016; Mark 2010; Arndt 2006) to more broad cultural relations, inspired by ideals rather than dictated by foreign policy agenda (Mitchell 1986; Cummings 2003; Isar 2017).

Some understand CD as just a sub-field of public diplomacy, alongside other elements of international engagements like listening, advocacy, exchange, and international broadcasting (Cull 2008). Some even use CD interchangeably with ‘soft power’ and ‘culture in external relations’ (Isar 2015) or ‘cultural brokering, and promotion of culture’ (Robertson et al. 2013). On the top of that, ‘the definition of cultural diplomacy is almost as varied as the number of countries that claim to use it’ (Zamorano 2016, 169). For instance, Cull (2019) and Clarke (2020) observed significant national differences in using the terminology, where CD is the most frequently employed in the U.S.A, while the UK scholarship favours ‘cultural relations,’ Japan prefers to use ‘cultural exchange,’ Germany opts for ‘foreign cultural policy,’ and France refers to CD mainly as ‘exterior cultural action.’

This semantic constellation complicates the discursive field of CD on both practical and academic sides. As a result, the discipline keeps receiving criticism in terms of a lack of clearly defined terminology, scope of involved activities, range of engaged actors and illusiveness of its implications and impacts (Goff 2020; Ang, Raj Isar, and Mar 2015). Finally, it is challenging to situate CD within a single academic discipline, considering that it is ‘inherently interdisciplinary endeavour,’ that currently struggles to draw on a coherent set of theoretical models (Clarke 2020). Historically, CD was mainly explored from the perspectives of International Relations theory (IR), political sciences, or international communications (Gilboa 2008; Cull 2019). However, Jessup and Brison (2020) argue for situating CD beyond the dominating contexts of IR, Political and Policy Studies and stress its belonging and contribution to such disciplines as Creative Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, History, Philosophy, Cultural Sociology, Cultural Geography, Cultural Studies and even the Fine Arts (29).

This article is an attempt to historically track the development of CD as a focused field of study in the international academic scholarship. It aims to reveal the most significant gaps in the past research and identify critical trajectories for further evolution of the discipline in the future. The research explores a large corpora of English language publications on CD to spark inconsistencies in the developments of the discipline and to suggest avenues for its more comprehensive and focused explorations. Following the discussion of the research methodology and its limitations, the article proceeds with three main sections. They consequently focus on (1) the geography of CD research, (2) its thematic coverage and, finally, on (3) debates regarding its nature and mechanics of operations.

Research goals and methodology

This article is a historical overview of the evolution of the academic literature on CD since its inception in the early 1960s. This work is the first one of its kind that offers a rigorous summary and analysis of all academic scholarship on CD published in the Scopus database, the largest curated bibliographic abstract and citation databases in the world (Baas et al. 2020). At the time of writing, it totals more than 84 million records, covering publications from 1788, and sourced from over 26,000 serial titles and 243,000 books from over 7,000 different publishers worldwide (Scopus 2022). The body of relevant data on CD scholarship was collected via Scopus API data aggregation in February 2022 by mining the repository textual data using just one keyword: ‘cultural diplomacy.’ I collected information on all publications in the English language, which contained this search term either in the abstract or in the list of the publication’s keywords.

While the previous section explained that the term CD is frequently used interchangeably with such notions as ‘foreign cultural relations,’ ‘international cultural relations,’ ‘cultural exchange’ or ‘international cultural cooperation,’ the mining of the Scopus database was strategically limited within the selected key term ‘cultural diplomacy.’ It helped to narrow down a wide semantic field of the term to distinguish literature that focuses specifically on the study of CD, rather than on research of other interrelated activities, which could stretch sometimes too far and arguably could be applied ‘to pretty much any practice that is related to purposeful cultural cooperation between nations or groups of nations’ (Ang, Raj Isar, and Mar 2015, 366). While acknowledging the limitations of this methodology, the focused search for a single term was necessary to identify scholarship that explicitly engages with the term CD and as such acknowledges it as an independent field of study.

My search in the Scopus database resulted in 1663 items (after removing duplicates), for which I retrieved such data characterising each publication as (1) publication type (journal article, book article or book), (2) publication year, (3) author/s and academic affiliations including geo-data, (4) key words and abstract as well as (5) a full reference. Employing mapping, chronology building and focused content analysis of all publications’ data as well as a more rigorous thematic analysis of selected articles, I analysed CD scholarship to identify key thematic and geographic coverage gaps and to propose trajectories for its future development.

First, putting all existing scholarship on the timeline (see Graph 1), I revealed that only a small portion (around 30%) of all existing scholarship on CD was produced before 2010, while a huge body of relevant literature published in the past twelve years. More importantly, only recently, the academic field of CD has become the most fruitful with around 200 pieces published in 2019 and 2020, while 222 appeared in 2021. The thematic analysis of abstracts also indicated that almost half of the research is based on the historical analysis of cases, sometimes dating back even to 6-7th centuries. These insights not only convincingly demonstrate a growing interest in the field of CD, but also show the development and maturing of this academic field of research.

Graph 1. Timeline of cultural diplomacy publications per year according to the type (book, book chapter, article). Created by the author.

Second, I mapped geo-data pertaining to CD scholars’ university affiliations to identify areas on the global map where CD literature is produced. Graph 2 shows the results of this mapping, demonstrating a high density of publications on CD originating in such countries as the U.S.A, UK, and Australia with lesser but still significant outputs coming from Russia, Canada and China as well as from a few European countries. These results are not surprising, though, considering that this research was focused on literature published only in English language. Acknowledging that cultural diplomacy as a research subject might be extensively covered beyond the anglophone world, this article works with the methodological limitation of a strict focus on scholarship produced in English. It is important to note that English remains the dominant language in international academic research, and it is the only one that guarantees a wider global visibility and readership (Altbach 2015; Bocanegra-Valle 2014; Bolton and Kuteeva 2012). Hence, the focus of this research is mainly on the scholarship that has entered the global academic discourse and most likely shares research findings that go beyond national academic debates.

Graph 2. Geographic distribution of cultural diplomacy scholarship by the country of authors’ affiliation. Created by the author.

Third, I mapped the scholarship’s geo coverage of CD cases (Graph 3) by parsing 1663 abstracts to count frequencies of direct references to different countries. While this mapping also demonstrates that academic scholarship more often refers to cases of CD in the most powerful Western countries like the U.S.A or UK, it also reveals that top countries that invite academic research on CD include China, Japan, and Russia. More importantly, this map documents a much wider geography of scholarly research of cases representing a high diversity of social, cultural, linguistic, and political contexts across continents, including Antarctica.

Graph 3. Cultural diplomacy scholarship geographic coverage. Created by the author.

The next section in the article ‘Geography of CD Research’ explores further important details of this mapping exercise to identify missing gaps in the current scholarship to propose some focus areas for improvement.

Finally, content analysis of all abstracts helped to identify two broader thematic areas with many key subtopics of CD research, which the article further explores in greater detail in the following two sections. The section ‘Old and new research topics’ identifies the research agenda for CD in the future by comparing what exact areas of CD have been previously explored by scholars and what new topics are currently emerging, opening new horizons for analysing CD from new angles. ‘Actors and tools’ section offers an analysis of previous scholarship, identifying to what extent academics explored the mechanics of CD including such important questions as its actorness and various communication tools from traditional human-to-human contact to digital media and new mixed realities technologies. The article starts a conversation on CD as an independent subfield of academic research that most recently has gained a wider and stronger attention and reached a higher stage of scholarly maturity, supported through a growing international body of dedicated work.

Geography of CD research

As Graph 3 demonstrates, four major countries, such as the U.S.A, UK, China, and Russia have always attracted a significant amount of attention from academics in exploring cases of CD across decades (Major and Mitter 2012; Tromly 2015; Mori 2011; Richmond 2020; Wang and Hallquist 2011; Zhang and Zhu 2020). However, this geography of coverage is not surprising, considering that CD as practice was born in the times of the Cold War that put in opposition two major ideological systems such as capitalism, spearheaded by the U.S.A and its close ally, the UK, and communism, promoted by Soviet Russia and China. As Clarke (2020) earlier observed, ‘the overwhelming bulk of research in the field of cultural diplomacy has concentrated on the two Cold War superpowers, with a particular emphasis on the United States.’ Interestingly, though, the very first article on CD, as identified in the Scopus database, was devoted to the study of Chinese Communist foreign policy, discussing Peking’s ‘people’s diplomacy’ and cultural activities as powerful tools of influence which allowed China to strengthen its position not only in Asia, but also in the Middle East, Africa and even Latin America (Dai 1959). Later on, Ratliff (1969) also explored Chinese cultural exchanges with Latin American countries which aimed to promote anti-US sentiment in defiance of the USSR’s turn toward coexistence.

The complexities of international relations in the context of the Cold War explain why CD as field of scholarly research attracted such a strong attention as a unique and exclusive means of establishing a meaningful dialogue across two oppositional ideological camps. Described in many historical works or memoirs written from both sides of the Iron Curtain, cultural, artistic, and educational exchanges conducted by governments of four countries offered a reach material for conceptualising CD in the past decades (Prevots 1999; Richmond 2003). However, as Clarke (2020) noted this overwhelming bulk of the scholarship focusing exclusively on the rivalry among ‘Cold War superpowers has drawn attention away from other varieties of cultural diplomacy in the “Third World” or “Global South.”’ He stressed the important role of a few more recent publications (Margarit 2019; Gardner and Green 2013) which rather focus on countries of the Non-Aligned Movement which employed CD activities to establish a dialogue between nations of the ‘Global South’ to illuminate new insights into Cold War cultural diplomacy going beyond an ideological bipolarity (Clarke 2020).

Mikkonen, Scott-Smith and Parkkinen (2018) also noted that a focused attention on the US versus ISSR ideological battles, in fact, downplayed attention toward cooperative and multilateral developments in CD during the Cold War era happening in Europe. Most Cold War studies mainly showed European countries ‘either as victims or passive recipients in the US-Soviet rivalry’ with no motivations and aims of their own in CD landscape (1). Their own edited volume significantly expanded the geography of the Cold War studies, bringing East–West interactions happening within Europe to the forefront. These explorations were instrumental to reveal that, Finland, for instance tried to stay neutral in international politics, while France was most active in cultural exchanges with the USSR than any other country among NATO allies (Mikkonen, Scott-Smith and Parkkinen 2018). Furthermore, this focused historical research documented the earlier intervention of private players, including artists, administrators, educators, and other individuals, in the CD activities who acted with varying degrees of autonomy from state authorities. This finding is important because the public nature of CD or it’s wide actorness received a focused research attention only most recently. This phenomenon is usually associated with the paradigm shift from ‘club’ to ‘network’ diplomacies, instigated by a rapid development of new communication technologies in the 21^st century (Heine 2015). This scholarship indicates that historical research back to the Cold War era with a completely different geographical focus could be a rewarding exercise. It could help identify new actors of CD, hidden cultural cooperative movements and counter-movements as well as explore overlooked implications of the Cold War diplomacies, existing beyond the US–Russia struggle for global ideological domination.

Going back to the geography of existing CD research, the mapping of Scopus scholarship reveals that even contemporary cases mainly focus on of four countries, the U.S.A and UK, on the one hand, versus Russia and China, on the other. In the complex global geopolitical climate of transition from unipolarity to a more multipolar distribution of global power, Russia, with its ambivalent and conflicted place in the world, and China, as a growing dominant economic power with its assertive global expansion policy, keep top positions on the focused countries list (Valenza 2022; Bethwaite and Kangas 2019). The situation with a few dominating countries inviting the majority of CD research enquiry signals the need to address these geographical gaps in the scholarship to develop a much more diverse picture covering different parts of the world.

This agenda becomes even more critical in the conditions when the geographical coverage of the majority of countries from the developing world or the Global South is based on their analysis as predominantly target areas and subjects to CD activities of more powerful countries. For example, Luke (2012) explores Honduras as a critical platform for United States heritage diplomacy under the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Cultural Heritage Center, who ‘enabled the successful re-entry of United States CD in Honduras in the last decade’ (110). In a similar manner, Kulkova (2021) investigates the Russia’s humanitarian assistance, cultural initiatives, civil society interactions, and inter-religious dialogue in the past decade as a ‘soft power’ tool in Russian foreign policy in North and East Africa. Similarly, Walsh and Varnava (2018) in the historical research focusses on art, music, photography, propaganda, and education at the end of the pax Britannica exposing new complexities to the UK relationships and new means of influence on different countries ‘from Singapore to Australia, Cyprus to Ireland, India to Iraq and around the rest of the British imperial world’ (3).

However, as Clarke (2020) indicated in the multipolar world of the 21st century, there is ‘a considerable divergence in the priorities, approaches, and discursive framing of cultural diplomacy, depending on the perceived needs of the states in question.’ Indeed, the analysis of the existing scholarship proves that there is emerging research that investigates diplomatic practices of developing countries from a more actionable position, identifying, and sizing the power of these states in their cultural assets that are activated through diplomatic initiatives. This literature discusses rich culture, languages, heritage, and traditions of developing countries as a powerful resource to articulate and promote national identity, combat colonialism, develop regional alliances or build peace in conflicting areas. A good example is the historical enquiry of Pasler (2021) into the legacy of the World Festival of Negro Arts, developed in 1966 in Senegal. Uniting forty-five nations, the festival served as a platform for cross-cultural dialogue among contrasting musical traditions and practices to recover African pre-colonial heritage, strengthen liberation from the colonial past and to promote inter-African alliances and mutual cooperation. In a similar manner, Sotomayor (2018) conducted extensive archival research in Puerto Rico to uncover a story of people struggling to dismantle their periphery cultural image as a colonial state by securing national Olympic representation in the 1930s. Examining how the Olympic movement developed in Puerto Rico, the book illuminated the powerful role of culture and sport in diplomatic processes of building international representation and strengthening a political legitimacy on the global stage.

In a more recent account of CD activities initiated by newly emerged economic powers with colonial legacies, Molho (2020) conducted a comparative analysis of Qatar and Singapore. He focused on both small states’ ambitious CD strategies, based on the establishment of world-class cultural and educational institutions, and on their integration into regional and global cultural networks. This work discussed the roles of national curators, as key cultural gatekeepers, in representing countries on the world stage and putting them on the world art map. This emerging research, especially in relation to most countries in the Southeast Asia, Pacific, or Africa, invites further academic enquiry and a more focused and nuanced analysis of the dynamics of CD activities initiated by countries that rarely if never appear in the academic scholarship.

Moreover, diversifying the geography of the CD scholarship coverage should go beyond a mere putting developing countries on the research map. A few recent articles expose another level of geographical complexity, which has not yet received a required attention from international scholars. While regional multilateral diplomacies on the macro level, like European Union CD (Bennett 2020; Carta and Higgott 2019) or the Association of South-East Nations ASEAN CD (Ocón 2021; Ma 2015; Otmazgin 2012) are adequately researched, explorations of CD as a tool of expressing cultural identities of marginalized communities, indigenous people, subregions and contested territories still invite further investigations. As Ang, Raj Isar, and Mar (2015) earlier observed, considering increasing ‘interactions between trans-national cultural connections and cultural practice within nations, this phenomenon should be an important concern’ for CD studies (365).

For instance, Kichuk and Shevchuk (2020) explores cultural people-to-people diplomacy of Budzhak, the Ukrainian region, bordering on Romania and Moldova, and uniting diaspora of the Albanian, Bulgarian, Gagauze, German, Greek, Jew, Polish, Romanian and Russian minorities. In this case, CD activities in preservation and promotion of local languages and cultural traditions (rituals and beliefs, art and song, folk crafts) aims to strengthen the ethnic consciousness of the region. More importantly, though, it helps gain mutual understanding in interethnic relations to ‘promote intercultural dialogue and tolerance as necessary prerequisites for living in multicultural society’ (221). From a contrasting perspective, Huang (2021) explores how minority ethnic or indigenous culture and heritage can become a powerful tool in the hands of a state leveraging its regional power and identify. This research exposes how Taiwan mobilized its prehistory Austronesian linguistic heritage and indigenous culture ‘to reposition itself in the Asia-Pacific’ by establishing cross-border exchange and partnerships among indigenous communities in Taiwan and the Austronesian peoples (72). The article reveals the extraterritorial role of indigenous heritage that can be strategically mobilized as a tool of CD to strengthen a small and contested state’s position in a wider region.

Both articles open a conversation on more nuanced CD that exists beyond a traditional bilateral setting in the international relations context. It exposes a high cultural diversity of countries from within, challenging their national status quo. In a highly globalized world with more diverse multicultural populations residing in different countries, ‘internal’ CD directed towards domestic populations should become a research priority. As a tool to mitigate cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstanding, CD as a research focus area can offer a required academic perspective to explore further new cultural geographies on the subregional levels. This research could help investigate the power dynamics of relationships established with diaspora communities (Thussu 2020), indigenous people (Giguère 2018) and other marginalized cultural groups or minorities, who could play an important role in countries’ representations on the international arena. Clarke (2020) also noted that CD future studies should concern emerging discursive constructions of the policy field causing paradigm shifts in CD practices that have been re-negotiated by a range of new actors. While he stressed that this kind of work requires investigation of ‘specific national contexts and (increasingly) international contexts,’ this article argues for an inclusion of sub-regional, sub-national, trans-national and local micro-contexts in the CD research agenda.

Old and new research topics

Considering a very complex notion of ‘Culture’ which encompasses a wide range of phenomena, from the high arts to peoples’ customs, values, and traditions (Eagleton 2000), CD has always included a wide range of activities, from language teaching programs abroad to arts diplomacy. Clarke (2020), for instance, identified ‘specific key areas of policy, such as “arts diplomacy,” “language diplomacy” (Chaubet 2004), or “exchange diplomacy” (Bettie 2019).’ Cull (2019) also classified several so-called genres of CD, first including the ‘Arts Diplomacy,’ that works through such forms as music, fine art, theatre, or dance. Art has always been an expression of national cultures and traditions, playing a foundational role in establishing bridges across borders and bringing people together for a meaningful dialogue to nurture mutual trust and understanding (Schneider 2010). The analysis of the existing corpora of articles on CD demonstrated that arts diplomacy continues to be the leading research focus of most of the published scholarship with lesser attention given to research on educational exchanges (Lialiouti 2017; Bean 2015; Carruthers 2005; Francisco 2009) and language programs remaining a minority. The scholarship on arts diplomacy is indeed very diverse, encompassing a wide variety of research works which focus on (1) museum diplomacy and traveling exhibitions of visual arts, from legendary exports of Abstract Expressionism art to Soviet Russia (Cockcroft 1985; Krenn 2005) to more recent exhibitions (Kong 2021; Harker 2020), (2) heritage diplomacy (Lähdesmäki 2021; Chalcraft 2021; Scott 2019; Winter 2015), (3) ballet and performance arts diplomacy (Searcy 2020; Welch 2017), (4) arts festivals (Dines 2020; Ocón 2021; Zhu 2018) and (5) music tours (Liu 2021; Herrera 2020), from the Cold War jazz diplomacy (Saito 2021; Pickhan and Ritter 2016) to more recent rap and hip hop diplomacy (Katz 2019).

However, one of the most important criticisms of traditional CD was its focus on high arts as opposed to popular culture, significantly limiting the scope and diversity of audiences that can be targeted by these activities (Hurlburt and Ivey 2007). Goff (2020) observed that in the past, CD research was usually concerned with high culture, including visual arts, literature, and classical music. Schneider (2003) was among the first scholars who argued that ‘popular culture is the greatest untapped resource in the cultural diplomacy arsenal’ (14). Addressing this criticism, in the past several decades CD scholarship shifted its attention to more subtle channels of diplomatic influence and embraced the role of pop and subcultures in delivery ideological messages to foreign publics and engaging people across borders. A classic example is the historical research on the Voice of America broadcasting network, operating from the beginning of the Second World War, that globally disseminated American pop culture and music beyond the Iron Curtain and established the US position as the global leader of the dominant transnational popular and emerging youth culture (Clarke 2020).

The body of current scholarship that focuses on different forms and genres of culture, encompasses numerous case studies which gave rise to a whole range of different diplomacies, named according to their media channel of delivery, such as film diplomacy from the US Hollywood (Chung 2018; Shaw 2012; Frazier 2021), to Indian Bollywood (Thussu 2016), Japanese manga and anime diplomacy (Lam 2007), TV shows diplomacy (Wang 2011), circus diplomacy (Sölter 2015), yoga diplomacy (Gautam and Droogan 2017; Mahapatra 2016), acrobatics diplomacy (Kuo and Kuo 2021) or gastrodiplomacy of different countries (Demir and Hyeonjin 2019), to name but a few. In many cases, though, these new forms of pop culture diplomacy have been explored from the position of state initiated or commissioned activities. A good example would be an extensive coverage of the Korean Wave phenomenon, driven by the government efforts in their ambition to globally spread K-dramas and K-pop music, amplified by a strategic use of the digital technologies and social media (Kim and Kim 2011; Lee and Nornes 2015).

More recently, emerging scholarship has opened new avenues for exploring more democratic art practices like non-traditional, ad-hoc forms which in some cases produce viral effects in the global communication space bypassing governmental control. For instance, cultural memes have become an important diplomacy medium through which people call for political changes and instigate activism (Cull 2016; Mazumdar 2021). Frazer and Carlson (2017), for example, explored memes produced by Australian Aboriginal activist group Blackfulla Revolution (BFR) who employed meme culture to advocate for anti-colonial politics. Their analysis revealed that in this case memes served as a diplomatic narrative to challenge the wide-spread national myth of ‘peaceful’ British settlement and gave voice to indigenous peoples.

DeTurk (2015) documented an interesting case of graffiti art as a form of CD of an independent British artist. The research focused on Banksy’s street art in the Palestinian territories, in Cairo during and after the revolution of 2011 and in Tunisia in the form of Djerbahood campaign. It exposed a unique political role of graffiti art ‘in liberating the voices of the people of this region during times of revolution and change’ (DeTurk 2015, 24). These works significantly modernize the research on CD demonstrating its need to move along with a rapid development of human cultures and artistic practices of contemporary societies. The future research should embrace new emerging forms of digital and new media arts, cyborg art and art robotics, online multiplayer games, metaverse worlds and Artificial Intelligence (AI) arts to explore new artistic mediums of the future which transform, automate but complicate, diversify, and challenge CD.

Furthermore, the analysis of the CD scholarship revealed that there are new topics which are steadily emerging on the research agenda. These topics evolve on the intersections between cultural practices and important issues of global resonance and significance. The climate change crisis as a catalyst for CD initiatives, for instance, is explored in several works. Some of them focus on climate diplomacy as a tool for consensus-building and establishing regional (Nagabhatla et al. 2021) or transnational alliances (Strachová 2021), others look at cases where climate diplomacy takes a form of humanitarian aid and educational cultural activities of powerful country leaders, like the U.S.A, in the developing regions (Copeland 2009). Other issues attracting diplomacy scholars include disability activism (Galmarini 2021), lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans (LGBT) global rights advocacy (Stephenson 2020) or transnational feminism movements as a part of CD activities (D. R. Wang, Hajjar, and Cole 2019; Frazier 2017; Rossetti 2015).

All these new diplomacies are the result of expanded global human, monetary, technological and cultural flows (Appadurai 1996), or in Scholte’s (2008) words ‘transplanetary […] connections between people’ which led to ‘reductions in barriers to transworld social contacts’ and more intense human engagements on physical, legal, cultural and psychological levels (1499). These trends set up a new agenda for CD that increasingly moves away from governments mobilization of artists, institutions and educators to project national cultures to world-wide humanitarian concerns communicated more by a private sector in a more congested informational landscape (Goff 2020). Increasingly, new research on CD signals that despite a recent raise of populistic and nationalistic politics across countries, reinforcing human divisions and eroding global collaboration (May and Maissen 2021), there is a room for a ‘humanity-centered public diplomacy’ (Zaharna 2022), which definitely acquired a special significance during the global outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic (Idowu and Ogunnubi 2022; McDonald 2020; Hesse and Rafferty 2020). The future research should focus more on these cosmopolitan (Villanueva 2010) or transnational (Chalcraft 2021; Fickers, Balbi, and Oldenbourg 2020) CD manifestations and their implications. It will help reveal the power dynamics and complex relationships between the global and the local phenomena and explore their implications for transnational communications, piece building and establishing channels for mutually beneficial collaborations.

Another important area for research that is currently underexplored in the context of CD scholarship is language programs. This is quite surprising, considering that teaching national languages abroad has traditionally remained the core activity of the most prominent and the oldest CD institutions, such as the Goethe Institute, British Council, Dante Alighieri Society, Alliance Française and others. Since the 1870s, these institutions, opened in many foreign countries, have developed rich cultural programming and resources for international audiences, facilitating language education (Paschalidis 2009). Remaining central to the diplomatic agenda of many western countries (Arcos 2021), teaching languages has become a priority activity of much younger CD institutions of other countries with growing global cultural promotion ambitions (Popovic, Jenne, and Medzihorsky 2020). These trends are reflected in emerging literature which explores language programs and their implications, developed for instance, by the Chinese Confucius Institute (Wang 2021), Russkiy Mir Foundation of Russia (Audinet 2017), Balassi Institute’s Hungarian Culture and Language Studies (Kantek, Veljanova, and Onnudottir 2021), among others.

Beyond a mere exchange of information, languages have a very important function in transmitting cultural messages and representing national identities. They have always been understood as a vehicle for spreading cultural and political influence. ‘Language offers a particularly dramatic illustration, as with the linguistic quilt the French and the British stitched across Africa’ (Singer 1998, 19). The influence of English language, for instance, is well researched as a lingua franca diplomatic tool to communicate effectively with the world (Niyazova and Niyazova 2021; Kachru 2020), as a means to unite highly diverse linguistic communities in multicultural societies (Prokhorova et al. 2019; Alimi 2015), or as a vehicle of cultural imperialism (Anwar 2021). However, literature on diplomacy operating through teaching and promotion of other languages remain quite modest, except for works exploring French and Spanish languages, which perpetuate the colonial legacies of France and Spain in the world history (Castro 2012; Díaz Rodríguez 2021).

There are a few works, published most recently exploring the power of language translations to open borders for mutually beneficial collaborations and establishment of international ties, which also stress a political role of language education in the power dynamics between targeted and targeting countries. For example, Walravens (2020) conducted a historical analysis of epistolary writings dating back to the 7^th century to explore how Arabic correspondence influenced communications between South Asian countries and the rulers in the Red Sea region. These historical accounts of the power of languages in diplomacy, in fact, expands the research agenda offering new focus issues for a more nuanced analysis.

For example, Frențiu et al. (2020) explored translations of Japanese literature into the Romanian language to analyze the diplomatic ‘ambience’ between the two countries in the 20^th century where language played a unique role in shaping foreign policy agenda of both countries. Verschik (2019) investigated the influence of translations of Yiddish literature into Lithuanian language in 1935–1940 as a vehicle of CD aiming to promote Jewish cultures as well as to document ‘a new Jewish identity (being Jewish via Lithuanian)’ (4). These publications offer convincing evidence that there are a lot of unresearched terrains in the diplomatic function of languages and there are important issues that are needed to be addressed in the future to uncover the role of national, minority, ethnic languages, and dialects in diplomacy between and within countries. With the increasing number of endangered languages (Campbell and Belew 2020), and the growing number of mixed languages, like Franglais or Spanglish, known as a ‘translingual imagination’ phenomenon (Kellman 2000), the scholarship should pay more attention to linguistic impacts in the CD processes. A more nuanced understanding of how language mixes or extinct languages affect human cultures and traditions as well as how these languages are excluded from or included in contemporary cultural practices or artistic expressions will advance the research on CD that currently has no meaningful engagements with these topics.

Actors and tools

CD scholarship has always offered a space to discuss different roles, functions, and positions of key CD actors from large intergovernmental organizations like UNESCO (Kozymka 2016) to state-sponsored prominent public arts institutions such, as museums (Sylvester 2009) or performance arts centers (McDaniel 2014) to individual artists (Warburton 2017; Cull 2019) and even media celebrities (Cooper and Frechette 2008). However, traditionally, CD has been defined as a government-led cultural or artistic exchange activity with a strong foreign policy agenda and objectives (Clarke 2014). In the recent decade, though, CD has significantly expanded its meaning (Melissen 2005). Specifically, a new stream of diplomacy scholarship places the key emphasis not necessarily on diplomatic actors such as governments, but on the desirable outcomes of diplomatic activities (Goff 2013). Stressing mutual understanding, respect, peace, and stability between countries as fundamental purposes of CD, the latter understanding of this concept emphasizes the role of non-state actors in achieving these goals (Kelley 2014). While there is no doubt that nation-states are still the primary actors in the international political arena, in the past few decades the world stage has become a more saturated heterogenous platform that accommodates a wide range of actors, operating horizontally through transnational communication networks on both local and global levels (Rosenau 2003). These conditions increasingly marginalise the government-driven cultural diplomacy that now operates in a more complex ‘web of intersecting cultural relations being spun incessantly by myriad small and large players between nation-states and across the globe’ (Ang et al. 2015, 372).

While there are some examples brought up in academic scholarship to illuminate the role of private actors in cultural diplomacy (Cull 2019), there is still scarce research solely focusing on new CD actors who operate on the world stage bypassing government control. There are only a few recent publications that go beyond than merely exposing the potent of non-state actors to outperform government authorities in implementing diplomatic work across borders to question and analyze the very nature and mechanics of this work. For instance, looking at major museums as key cultural gatekeepers and traditional ‘cultural ambassadors,’ the book Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy explored cultural franchising and global corporatization as enablers of new economic powers of museums to go global without support of their nation states (Grincheva 2019). The book analyzes these global expansion strategies across museums around the world to reveal that even in more authoritarian political regimes, like Russia or China, alternative avenues of museum diplomacy are rapidly emerging. They open possibilities for a new non-state CD that no longer depends on government commissions to serve immediate geo-political interests. This book, though, is only a first step to explore diplomatic implications of complex networks developed by cultural organizations, increasingly operating on the global stage tapping on the power of their own institutional brands in the conditions of neoliberal globalization (Goff 2017).

Furthermore, this book offers an insightful conversation on various forms of existence, modes of operations and power of non-state diplomacy going beyond the context of Western democracies. While non-Western countries occasionally provide an empirical platform for explorations of non-state forms of public diplomacy (Attias 2012; Hall 2012), current academic literature heavily concentrates on cases of Western democracies. The dominant stream in diplomatic scholarship specifically stresses those democratic systems allow an increasing acceleration of political and economic instruments for a progressive development of non-state diplomacy. The challenging regulative and legislative climates in less-democratic societies, though, are believed to have a low potential to accommodate the political or economic autonomy of non-state initiatives because of lack of ‘democratic legitimacy’ or ‘internal democracy’ (Riordan 2008). Expanding existing typologies of non-state diplomacy happening beyond the Western contexts, most recent scholarship identified new trends in both cooperative diplomacy (Li, Chen, and Hanson 2019; Zaharna 2007, 2019) and adversarial diplomacy (Popkova 2019; Uysal 2019), taking place beyond the Western democracies. This research, though, requires further expansion to investigate cases of CD implemented by a wide range of new players on the global arena from multiple geographic perspectives.

For example, one of the important areas of non-state diplomacy that invites more focused academic enquiry is corporate CD. Diplomacy scholarship argued that transnational corporations are the most powerful among non-state actors (Ataman 2003; Spiro 2013). Economic power allows corporations to leverage their interests by directly bargaining with national governments for favorable policies, either through promises of new investment or threats of withdrawal (Nye 2004). To make their brands more appealing in the eyes of global consumers, corporations invest considerable resources in supporting cultural and social causes, facilitating ‘bidirectional processes to engage publics’ (Grunig, Grunig, and Dozier 2002). Nevertheless, these cases of corporate CD remain underexplored in the current scholarship with some researchers looking at corporate diplomacy as a vehicle of cultural imperialism (Bell 2016) and some as a new form of national cultural promotion and expansion (Bier and White 2020). There are also a few works that identify and describe diplomatic implications of corporate social responsibility strategies which are closely aligned with cultural values of targeted countries (Egea, Concepción Parra-Meroño, and Wandosell 2020; White, Vanc, and Coman 2011) or deployed within an interstate framework of diplomatic efforts (Plets 2016).

Corporate diplomacy should certainly take an important part on the CD agenda also because the increasing digitalization (Peters 2016) and platformization processes (Jin 2017) significantly redefine the conduct of global communications. Global multinational corporations, like Google or Facebook, play a unique role in shaping CD infrastructures for international cultural communications, exchanges, and cultural broadcasting, which are no longer solely determined by national governments (Cooper 2008; Aslan et al. 2021; Lee 2018). Digital platforms, including social networks and instant communication providers are powerful governing systems that control public communications, mediate economic, political, and cultural transactions among multiple actors and become important surveillance machines which track and record users’ data with an immense economic and political value (Lane 2020; Sadowski 2020). Platforms’ algorithms govern the news, opinions, and friends, creating the social world of people. They are powerful enough to accelerate cultural and political fragmentation of society, in many cases exacerbating the differences between cultural communities and negatively impacting digital diplomatic initiatives (Riordan 2019).

Despite the growing number of focused research works on digital diplomacy (Bjola and Pamment 2019; Bjola and Holmes 2015), digital CD remains largely underexplored (Clarke 2014). There are a few works which investigate cultural and political implications of digital archiving technologies (Thylstrup 2019) and analyze cultural heritage digital platforms, such as Google Arts and Culture or Europeana, from the politico-economic perspective (Valtysson 2020) or as a new force of cultural colonialism (Kizhner et al. 2021). Nevertheless, more research is required to situate these activities in the framework of CD that consistently moves into the world of digital and virtual communications, with these trends being significantly amplified by the global pandemic crisis (Grincheva 2022b). New modes of global communications are rapidly evolving and already include metaverse technologies, not to mention Virtual or Augmented Reality tools, widening CD possibilities in the 21st century. However, there is no a dedicated research yet that would focus on the implications, opportunities, limitations and risks of using these cutting edge technologies in CD.

With the unfolding process of urbanisation and increased datafication (Van Dijck 2013) of contemporary society, such topic as the use of big data in diplomacy (Grincheva 2022a; Kersel and Hill 2020) or even ‘smart city’ diplomacy also gets traction (Mursitama and Lee 2018). This emerging scholarship signals that the research agenda of CD should engage closer with these rising social and technological issues which affect the focus, forms of delivery and nature of contemporary diplomacy. Furthermore, it is important to explore if digitalisation of diplomacy supports or at least permits to maintain the same level of cross-cultural relationships, based on human-to-human communications.

The digital environment does not necessarily offer the climate of trust and privacy in conversations and online encounters across borders that have strict limitations. While diplomatic exchanges have traditionally been based on long-lasting personal connections promoting ‘international goodwill and understanding’ (Mulcahy 1999, 22), a lack of physical contact between participants in digital settings prevents the development of deeper personal relationships. Only a few of the most recent research works have addressed this question to reveal that, in fact, digital contacts can be very productive in exposing online participants to new cultural knowledge. They can unearth cross-cultural stereotypes, stimulate interest in other people’s cultures and traditions and even generate cross-cultural curiosity leading to personal engagements across countries (Grincheva 2020).

Nevertheless, future research should continue this line of work to contribute to the current academic scholarship that pays scarce attention to these issues. Future studies should particularly focus on the fundamental component of CD such as building long-term international cultural relations to conceptualize digital relationships and examine cross-cultural trust, credibility, and reputation management in online environments. Along with explorations of impact assessment in the context of online CD a new scholarship on digital cultural relations will need to fundamentally advance the current understanding of CD tools of implementation and channels of delivery.

Conclusion

This article is evidence that the research on CD is rapidly progressing with time, incorporating new thematic areas for exploration as well as covering wider cultural and political geographies. In fact, the analysis of the CD scholarship within the last six decades clearly indicates that that academic enquiry of CD tends to respond to the development of new cultural and artistic practices, the advancements of technologies, and to social, cultural, and political transformations taking place in local and global contexts. The article suggests further trajectories for the development of CD research so it could more proactively shape an academic enquiry focusing on different diplomatic channels, modes of operation, structures, actors, meanings, and implications.

First, it advocates for more nuanced geographies of explorations, going beyond a macro coverage of regional CD and a nation state or country focus. It should scrutinize cases on micro levels from CD of contested territories to marginalized and indigenous communities who acquired stronger powers of political representation in the age of digital globalization. Second, the article identifies new emerging hybrid transnational diplomacies which not only operate through cultural practices or artistic expressions between countries, but also increasingly embrace social and political issues of global significance. For instance, LGBT or feminist movements, climate change or disability activism become important part of contemporary cultures shared across countries and societies which offer interesting avenues for implementing CD activities.

Lastly, this research on CD scholarship reveals existing gaps in understanding emerging CD actors, or old actors of diplomacy, like traditional cultural institutions, but in their new roles. Across countries, major cultural institutions, empowered to be novel models for global expansion and capitalizing on their global brands, increasingly operate in the international market economy reinforcing the heterogeneity of CD actorness and governance. Furthermore, the last section stressed significant impacts of such processes as datafication, platformization, and digitalization of our society. They invite further research on new CD channels urging to investigate their direct opportunities for involved stakeholders as well as limitations in targeting digital audiences. Considering that the essence of CD is a creation of a ‘shared zone’ or a meta-space for human contacts and exchanges of cultures, ideas and beliefs, there is still a limited understanding how the digital environment can accommodate the development of mutual trust and long-terms relationships. CD scholarship will need to prioritize the exploration if these questions are on its future research agenda.

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Notes on contributors

Natalia Grincheva

Natalia Grincheva is an internationally recognized expert in innovative forms and global trends in contemporary museology, digital diplomacy, and international cultural relations. She received many prestigious international academic awards, including Fulbright (2007–2009), Quebec Fund (2011–2013), Australian Endeavour (2012–2013) and SOROS research grant (2013–2014). In 2020, she was awarded a Fellowship for her visiting research residency at the Digital Diplomacy Research Center at the University of Oxford. Her publication profile includes over 40 research articles, book chapters and reports published in prominent academic outlets. Her most recent publications are two monographs: Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age (Routledge: 2020) and Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy (Routledge: 2019). She is currently working on a new co-authored monograph, Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming 2023). Dr Grincheva’s professional engagements include her dedicated work for the International Fund for Cultural Diversity at UNESCO (2011) and International Federation of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity (2011–2015), her research industry placement at ACMI X creative hub at the Australian Center for the Moving Image (2017–2019) as well as service for the international Cultural Research Network (CRN) (2018–2020).