I am glad to report that I will participate in a virtual research summit entitled “Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice” organized by the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI) on September 24th and 25th, 2020.
The summit is comprised of a public opening event and three closed sessions. The sessions are designed to foster dialogic, generative discussions amongst the sessions’ participants. Each session will include moderators and participants. Other summit attendees will form an audience who can watch these sessions and also engage through questions and comments. The sessions are not intended to host conference-style presentations, rather the emphasis is on engagement.
Schedule
This virtual summit will take the form of three related sessions and an opening event:
Opening Event: Beyond Projection: Toward a Critical Cultural Diplomacy
Thursday, September 24, 2020
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EST
Even a cursory glance at the day’s events provides ample evidence that we are living in an increasingly adversarial moment—a world of global terrorism and refugee crises, culture wars and pandemic politics; coloniality, inequality, climate emergency and cultural insecurity. The post-war “rules-based order” is in disorder—buckling in the face of the polarizing forces of racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. Kicking off the summit, this panel looks at diplomacy as a set of behaviours, dispositions and attitudes within a broader spectrum of cultural relations and imagines a new “critical diplomacy.” Are non-state actors, including non-governmental and non-profit organizations, cultural institutions and activist groups the new diplomats of the 21st century? What role do states have to play in this new landscape? How can the diversity of players in this new networked environment come together to address global challenges and conduct more effective transcultural relations?
Session 1: The ‘Culture’ in Cultural Diplomacy
Thursday, September 24, 2020
Time: 1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST
This first session addresses the concept of “culture” and seeks to expand the understanding of “culture” that currently dominates the study and practice of Cultural Diplomacy. The session looks beyond disciplinary orthodoxies in political science, policy studies and international relations, and explores critical understandings of culture and cultural diplomacy that are informed by the methodologies and approaches espoused by practitioners and academics in the cultural fields. At its base, the session deals with the myth of culture’s neutrality, foregrounding the ways in which cultural workers are always already involved in the politics of culture as well as in the operationalization of diplomacy through their global engagement. We ask panelists and audience members to consider the various ways culture is defined by those academics and practitioners who make it their object of study and practice. Challenging the essentialized link between nation-states and “their” cultures, we ask what “culture” looks like when considered beyond Western elite/hegemonic cultural expression and when not tethered to states and embedded in national/nationalist contexts. How can a “critical cultural diplomacy” truly engage with intersectionality, the idea of culture as way(s) of life and their expressions, and with different, often competing, systems of meaning and value? How is the “culture” in cultural diplomacy problematized by ontological positions that are not indebted to the nature-culture divide of Western modernity? And finally, we ask how intercultural relations based on an expansive mutual empathy and understanding of difference can reframe the fundamental problems of our times.
Session 2: Beyond State Centrism: Addressing the Limits of Diplomacy
Date: Friday September 24, 2020
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. EST
Building on the first session’s problematization and expansion of the “culture in cultural diplomacy,” this session aims to interrogate the Western epistemological basis of diplomacy and thus move away from conceptualizations of cultural diplomacy as, exclusively, an institutionalized practice of the “international” system of states and of its professional diplomats and policy-makers. In this session, we ask participants to assess the implications of the state-centric interpretations of cultural diplomacy offered by academics and practitioners on the “diplomatic side.” We ask participants to imagine the difficult yet crucial paradigm shift away from a world dominated by nation-state-driven cultural diplomacy to a broader understanding of the diplomatic landscape that is reflective of the cultural and ideological diversity of the world we live in, and its interconnectedness and global reach that extend well beyond those envisioned in existing diplomatic practice and study. Questions to be discussed include: what is missing in studies and practices that geo-politically situate nation states as the privileged focal points of diplomacy, if not its only actors? What is problematic in state-centric models of behaviour and analysis that deny or underestimate the complexity of culture? Does focus on the “club of states” and its practice of cultural diplomacy simply re-inscribe and reinforce the Western-hegemonic power of the Cold War club and of its rules of engagement? The session asks participants to address the possibilities of thinking through a critical (cultural) diplomacy, and to draw innovative connections between spheres of global social relations that are usually not considered together (diplomacy and human security, diplomacy and cultural industries, diplomacy and multiculturality, diplomacy and diversity, diplomacy and mutual understanding). Recognizing that these various spheres are, at base, Western constructions, we ask participants to assess the ways in which policy from the outset is culturally-informed and how diplomacy itself is and always has been a cultural practice.
Session 3: The Cultural Relations Approach to Network Diplomacy
Date: Friday September 24, 2020
Time: 1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST
In recent years the practice of diplomacy has shifted. The building and management of global relations is no longer the work of the hegemonic Cold War club of nation-states. The 2020 pandemic, Trump era politics and the new “culture wars” clearly show that the previous “rules-based order” no longer applies. State-based diplomacy now coexists with and as a part of network (and networked) diplomacy. In the global era, patterns of engagement are being established by a myriad of newly-empowered actors including anti-racist activists, scientists, artists, educators, administrators, entrepreneurs, cultural institutions, Indigenous communities, diasporas, cities, NGOs and NPOs, philanthropists, and others whose power is cultural as well as political. The complex civil society networks of power constructed by these “new diplomats” work both with and against statist diplomacy to engage with the critical challenges of the day—conflict, disease, environmental degradation among them. This network approach has empowered museum diplomacy, city diplomacy, citizen diplomacy, diaspora diplomacy, Indigenous
diplomacies and queer diplomacy, to just mention a few of the new cultural relations’ perspectives that contest the most traditional state-centric conceptualizations of diplomacy. Simply put, the metaphoric game of chess still played by the club of states and articulated through national foreign policies and in trans-national governance takes place within and alongside civil society networks of cultural relations and power.
Following the first two sessions and their focus on the primacy of culture and cultural analysis, this session examines how a cultural relations approach informs both the study and practice of contemporary network diplomacy. What does network diplomacy look like in practice and what are good examples of it? How can practitioners of a “critical cultural diplomacy” harness and deploy network diplomatic practices? What would be considered a successful practice of network diplomacy? How can the web of network diplomatic actors engage more effectively with the chessboard of nation states and vice versa in order to define and address the fundamental challenges of our times?
- Click here for the Spanish version of the summit program
- Click here for the French version of the summit program
- Click here for “The Cultural Relations Approach to Diplomacy: Practice, Players, Policy” Project Statement
* This research summit is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.