ABSTRACT
The public diplomacy concept reflects an increasingly salient aspect of diplomatic practice. It encompasses a range of communication interventions intended to facilitate influence, understanding, and relation-building between states and foreign publics. The spread of new and social media technologies has also prompted new attention to the potential of publics as crucial and politically effective agents necessary to achieve policy ends. Public diplomacy is thus increasingly mediated through technological platforms. Public diplomacy’s role in managing conflicts and in conducting mediated war, however, suggests further attention to how such media platforms (from broadcasting to social media) shape its purpose and relation to concepts such as strategic communication and information operations. In practice, public diplomacy programs reflect a balance of competing imperatives, to advocate as much as to build relations of understanding. What sort of constitutive role does media technology play in reconciling or perpetuating this inherent conceptual tension in the changing strategies and practices of public diplomacy?
