Making new friends? Relational public diplomacy as a foreign policy instrument

The purpose of this study is to situate relational public diplomacy in the larger picture of international affairs. Contemporary public diplomacy practice proclaims to be spending more resources on establishing relations than disseminating messages. However, scholarly works within the field of public diplomacy tend to reflect the old information-based enactment of public diplomacy. There is thus a need to articulate the causal mechanism through which these new relational public diplomacy projects have an impact on international relations. The research starts with surveying the literature to categorize the existing debates on the relationship between public diplomacy and international relations and proposes an analytical framework composed of six pathways of connection explaining the impact of public diplomacy projects on foreign affairs. Through this analytical framework, the research systematically examines the logics of practice - or how public diplomacy practitioners see their own work - in selected successful episodes of relational public diplomacy from three diverse practitioner countries: the United States of America, Sweden, and Turkey. The in-case analysis is followed by a structured-focus comparison and a causal mechanism through which relational public diplomacy projects contribute to the achievement of foreign policy is described. The findings argue that relational public diplomacy projects are designed to utilize the soft power assets of the countries to change the relationship dynamics between practitioner countries and foreign publics, to introduce new topics of debates within target audiences, to influence the coverage of existing debates, and to alter the perception of the practitioner country's interests. This research contributes to the theory-building efforts by organizing the debates in the literature, presenting a six-concept based analytical framework to study public diplomacy projects, and proposing a causal link between relational public diplomacy and foreign policy. Apart from its theoretical value, the causal mechanism can also be used to design as well as effectively assess and evaluate relational public diplomacy projects.