Emotion and Public Diplomacy: Dispositions in International Communications, Dialogue, and Persuasion

Abstract

States use public diplomacy (PD) to transmit information, ideas, and values that support their interests. Despite the centrality of emotion to early academic accounts of propaganda, emotion has not yet been addressed in contemporary PD studies, even in the context of the field's recent engagement with relational communication models. This oversight leaves the current scholarship on PD with an underspecified account of what PD actually does when it works—when it influences and persuades—because emotion is involved in these functions. At the same time, investigating these questions shows that PD practices deserve greater attention in debates within International Relations (IR) about language, power, and persuasion. Drawing on theories of emotion within constructivist IR and political theory, this article reviews two key functions of PD and asks how they engage public emotions. I show that emotions are present in argument, reasoning, and persuasion—particularly in the context of discourse about values. I then show how emotional expression reflects cultural difference, thereby influencing cross-cultural dialogue, and how emotion constitutes collective identities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 83 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.