Introduction

When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited India in February 2018, his first official state visit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was noticeably absent. After landing in New Delhi, Trudeau and his family were received by a junior minister for agriculture. This was very unusual, not least because Modi is well known for his penchant for personally greeting and then tweeting selfies of visiting dignitaries to his many Twitter followers. It was to be six days before the two leaders officially met, during a constructed photo opportunity at Rashtrapati Bhawan. While Trudeau spent nearly one week travelling around India and tweeting about his experiences as part of his well-established public diplomacy strategy, Modi’s absence — both in real life and on social media — signalled that simmering tensions between Canada and India remained over sanctuary offered by Canada to Sikh separatists. Although this visit was ‘ironically […] meant to mend fences with India, given that India has made clear its disapproval of Trudeau’s appeasement of Sikh separatists’,¹ India used the visit as an opportunity to convey its dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. A global audience was witness to this highly staged and visible diplomatic snub, which illustrates the increasing complexities of public diplomacy that will only increase over the next decade.

With the rise of social media, scholars and practitioners alike have suggested that digital diplomacy is the transformed or ‘new’ public diplomacy, with conventional diplomatic practices challenged or fundamentally altered by information and communications technology (ICT), as the above example demonstrates.² There is now a far greater focus on how political leaders and diplomats use social media as part of their public diplomacy strategies. Instead of a separate cultivated image of state identity that is broadcast to foreign publics via a one-way messaging system, social media seemingly promote interaction between these two levels of actors, potentially changing the flow of information and contributing to a better understanding of the needs and desires of both domestic and foreign publics.³ Conventional diplomacy, too, is subject to such transformations in interaction and communication that these digital tools allow. From providing an alternative communication platform when official meetings between diplomatic counterparts are difficult, managing the circulation of information across international and domestic audience levels, to facilitating transnational discourse on key policy issues between state and non-state stakeholders, a wide variety of ways exist through which digital tools are informing diplomatic practice.⁴ Digital technologies can, at times, necessitate diplomacy occurring in full view of a global audience, shifting status-quo power arrangements between states broadcasting messages of persuasion and the publics receiving these messages.

Given this shift in communication dynamics, questions arise here about the power of social media. Why might Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms be understood as having shifted public diplomacy interaction potentially even more than technological advances such as the telegram, radio and television? I suggest that to understand the emerging changes in public diplomacy practice, we must pay greater attention to the role of emotions in facilitating these transformations. Social media platforms enable emotions that can work towards the development of trust between actors, or undermine previously stable diplomatic relationships. Why is this important? Work in psychology and journalism and communication studies demonstrates how emotional contagion — the idea that emotions can spread from one person to another, leading one to act ‘in synchrony with others’ — infiltrates relationships on social media, particularly Twitter networks.⁵ The lack of physical contact between users is not an inhibitor to understanding emotional expression.⁶ Instead, social media facilitate technologically mediated forms of emotional contagion.⁷ Sharing a common social identity makes such emotional contagion online even more likely.⁸ Yet research on digital diplomacy overlooks the emotional context of this phenomenon, particularly with regard to the interrelationship between emotions and identity, with some studies going so far as to illustrate how Twitter use is not an appropriate strategy when nations are involved in conflict, because effective diplomacy ‘needs to be more “calm”’.⁹

This article provides an initial foray into questions about public diplomacy, social media, emotion and identity. I am not offering a sustained empirical examination of the interactions of these four powerful elements; in such a short piece, it would be impossible to do so. What I seek to establish is how emotion has a role to play in digital diplomacy. We cannot fully understand digital diplomacy without considering the power of emotion in cultivating an identity that underlies public diplomacy. Greater insights into the attraction and pull of current and future disinformation campaigns — as one of the most significant challenges facing public diplomacy — can be found through this focus on emotion.

The article is structured as follows: first, it examines current approaches to emotion and identity in public diplomacy. Emotions matter in world politics, and important insights can be used to understand how this influences public diplomacy and the identity politics imbued in this practice. Second, the article illustrates how emotions are also implicated in practices relating to digital diplomacy as the ‘new’ public diplomacy. Social media form another key platform through which states can ascertain emotional dynamics projected by their others, and cultivate successful public diplomacy. Third, it explores how digital tools make public diplomacy both easier and harder, in light of increasing levels of digital disinformation. These are emerging yet significant problems facing public diplomacy over the next decade, which are connected to emotional dispositions that make citizens more susceptible to such campaigns.

Emotion, Identity and Public Diplomacy

The purpose of this section is to examine the literature on emotion and identity in public diplomacy, illustrating how these links provide important insights into understanding public diplomacy. While early work on public diplomacy acknowledges the important affective component of propaganda as an influencing mechanism, there nevertheless remains a need to understand how identity and emotion overlap, particularly in light of emerging digital trends in public diplomacy.

Public diplomacy is foremost about building and managing relationships. As a tool of foreign policy, it is centred on diplomatic engagement with other publics. It is an important aspect of the development of a state’s international reputation, used to persuade and influence foreign publics according to the particular agenda of that state. This creation of sympathetic relations is enacted through public diplomacy initiatives that influence foreign publics to be more attuned to, or supportive of, the interests and values held by the state in question, which are in turn defined by the identity of that state.¹⁰ Thus, the power of public diplomacy lies not in its potential material or coercive possibilities, but in how the transmission of ideas, values and interests underpinning state identity are communicated.¹¹ The attraction of these ideas — what Joseph Nye has classed as ‘soft power’ — becomes a social mechanism though which foreign publics are persuaded to support particular policies that further enable better cooperation between two states.¹² As Nye maintains, effective soft power is the situation whereby ‘one country gets other countries to want what it wants […] in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants’.¹³ Thus, the legitimacy of foreign policies and the commensurate moral authority they wield correlate strongly with the ‘ability to get preferred outcomes through co-optive means of agenda-setting, persuasion and attraction’.¹⁴

Such acts of persuasion are imbued with identity politics: states employ public diplomacy strategies not only to convince others of a particular policy agenda, but also to persuade them that the identity related to those policies has moral worth and should be recognised in their dealings with others. Public diplomacy, therefore, is a ‘sub-phenomenon of foreign policy’ that forms an inherent part of the constitution and performance of state identity.¹⁵ Yet in comparison to foreign policy discourses of fear and ‘otherness’, public diplomacy has long been conceptualised within the context of propaganda, wherein convincing foreign publics of a state’s identity and its connected policies follows the logic of winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the other population.¹⁶

An important part of public diplomacy strategies is the crossover of audiences between domestic and foreign publics. While aimed at foreign publics, envisioning a complete separation from the domestic public misunderstands global interconnectedness. Public diplomacy strategies aimed at foreign publics cannot operate in isolation from the domestic constituencies that the public diplomacy seeks to sustain. Thus, public diplomacy strategies often engage with the domestic population as a way forward for building or enhancing aspects of state identity internationally.¹⁷ Consider the Israeli public diplomacy campaign ‘Presenting Israel’, which used videos and associated social media platforms to mock stereotypes of Israel and Israelis, mobilising ‘ordinary Israeli citizens to engage in peer-to-peer public diplomacy when travelling abroad’.¹⁸ Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alexei Tsinovoi demonstrate that while the campaign was highly contested both within Israel and internationally, it was nevertheless successful and provided a popular domestic focal point for Israeli discourse about state identity politics.¹⁹

Here we can see the important role that emotion plays not only in the implementation of public diplomacy strategies that aim to allow states to get what they want, but also in terms of identity and belonging. Scholars are increasingly recognising the importance of emotion in world politics.²⁰ In particular, the attractive and persuasive features of soft power that are intertwined with public diplomacy are by their very nature emotional dimensions of power.²¹ For instance, Philip Seib suggests that public diplomacy is an essential resource precisely because it can reduce enmity between two actors. Although Seib is discussing the role of public diplomacy within counter-terrorism, the point regarding animosity nevertheless reflects the centrality of emotion to shaping the preferences of others and legitimising an actor’s point of view.²² In an increasingly networked world, this legitimisation is conferred by foreign publics’ ‘acceptance of actors’ authority and participat[ion] in the diffusion of communicative power’.²³ Such approval also confers legitimacy on the desired identity that states wish to have recognised by other states and their publics. As public diplomacy is socially and politically constructed through language, we can gain insight into how a state perceives of its interests, precisely because of the interrelation between policy-making and identity.

Yet how might we best conceptualise the role of emotion in public diplomacy? Sarah Ellen Graham argues persuasively that emotion ‘shapes the context of communication in global politics’, and thus we must be attuned to how this is mobilised.²⁴ The clearest way forward is by analysing representations employed by states to signify ideational aspects that they wish to have legitimised or taken to be alluring to foreign publics. Taking Craig Hayden’s cue regarding the cultivation of qualities of attraction that are communicated through mechanisms of soft power, we can understand that ‘attraction is not persuasion per se, but resultant from representation acts that symbolize shared worlds’.²⁵ How states employ representations to communicate information, including ideas, values and the emotions connected to them, signifies which interests they want supported and the policies they desire to have legitimised.

Social media are thus party to similar representational dynamics that shape public diplomacy and legitimise, or in some cases undermine, state engagement with foreign publics. States engage in public diplomacy using social media to frame representations of identity through emotion. A question arises as to whether digital diplomacy is in fact introducing an alternative to conventional public diplomacy.

Digital Diplomacy and Emotion

This section examines the emerging trend of digital diplomacy, illustrating how social media form another key platform through which states can ascertain emotional dynamics projected by their ‘others’. If digital diplomacy is both textual and visual, the combined aesthetics of this practice allow for powerful representations of state identity that attract and persuade foreign publics towards desired state ends. Yet the same factors that can cultivate a successful public diplomacy strategy can also be used to undermine state identity and connected interests.

Digital diplomacy is a ‘strategy of managing change through digital tools and virtual collaboration’.²⁶ Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram greatly enhance the communicative outreach of public diplomacy strategies, resulting in publics being currently much more informed about foreign policy-making through these online networks. Diplomacy now occurs within a highly mediatised environment: domestic and foreign publics alike can easily discuss policy decision-making because of this speed and diversity of social media.²⁷ This ‘communications revolution’ has also positioned public opinion as an even more significant factor for policy-making, largely because of this global audience and its corresponding never-seen-before levels of scrutiny.²⁸

The power of social media as part of digital diplomacy therefore arises from the way in which this technology challenges conventional diplomatic practices. For instance, political leaders and policy-makers frequently use Twitter and Facebook alongside formal assemblies, social gatherings and unofficial meetings to broadcast policies as part of a wider attempt to convince foreign audiences about the resoluteness of such decisions. There are two unique aspects of social media that have augmented this change: the public nature of social media posts allows a global public to witness exchanges between political leaders and diplomats, and the speed of social media communication means that there is both much less time to absorb information and a need to respond equally quickly to ensure message dominance.

A curious issue arises here in terms of the scope of public diplomacy initiatives. Public diplomacy is conventionally understood as ‘state-based communication aimed at influencing well-connected individuals and organizations that are capable of impacting upon a foreign government’s policy choices’.²⁹ Yet the broadening of communication technologies has seen the development of approaches to public diplomacy that are much more inclusive of ‘public expectations of openness and engagement’.³⁰ Public diplomacy strategies utilise social media technologies to facilitate the spread of knowledge about state identity, which in turn furthers state interest.³¹ However, whereas previous public diplomacy efforts targeted specific foreign audiences, digital diplomacy strategies cannot be contained to a specific state group, by virtue of the openness of social media. Digital diplomacy allows for parallel strategies that target both foreign and domestic audiences, much in the same way that conventional public diplomacy aims to do. Yet what results is far greater amplification of public diplomacy, wherein the ‘contribution of social media publics to the attention paid to a particular object (person, message, idea) by elevating other actors’ (citizens, journalists, media platforms) perceptions of the object’s worthiness or significance’.³² Other actors, such as non-governmental organisations, civil-society groups and private companies are therefore more visible as public diplomacy actors than in previous years. The ongoing dispute over the Falkland Islands is a good example of the power of citizen-based public diplomacy. The Falkland Islands government and civil-society groups have harnessed social media in creative practices to command the attention of the international community — particularly the United Kingdom and Argentina — with flash rallies coordinated via Facebook and Twitter counteracting perceived misrepresentations of the Falkland Islands, and videos countermanding dominant Argentinian narratives of history, ‘brought alive’ and circulated to a global audience via social media platforms.³³

The mediatisation of diplomacy is thus enabled through a hybrid media system — namely the interconnection between social media and traditional news media — that amplifies public diplomacy messages.³⁴ Social media posts, particularly those from Twitter, increasingly form the basis of current news stories. What results is a phenomenon whereby news reports about a particular tweet or Facebook post attain far wider attention, allowing the event or issue to be discussed online and offline by a global public and attract a larger audience. In doing so, this attraction has the possibility of challenging or complicating status-quo diplomatic relations, particularly in terms of representations of identity signifying a strengthening or worsening of relations between states. Even more importantly, this globalised social media–broadcast-media network is instrumental in not just the representation of state identity, but also potentially in inciting emotions related to it. This is a significant issue, as digital diplomacy practices involve a shift from conventional ‘monologic’ broadcast mechanisms to ‘dialogic’ communication emphasizing online interaction between diplomatic actors and their audiences.³⁵

If text-based social media posts are imbued with emotional resonance, images employed within the digitisation of public diplomacy necessarily add an additional layer of emotional complexity to digital diplomacy. Diplomacy also relies on aesthetics, not just verbal or textual communication. The performance of diplomacy throughout history has been a deeply visual practice, which is evident in the ways in which diplomats dress, greet each other, and cultivate mementos or records of such meetings.³⁶ Yet the increasing digitisation of diplomacy affords greater opportunities for the use of visuals as part of successful public diplomacy strategies.³⁷

One example of the intersection between aesthetics, digitisation and identity in the expansion of opportunities for public diplomacy is exemplified in the highly mediatised official greeting between New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Queen Elizabeth in London as part of the Commonwealth Summit in April 2018. Ardern represented Maori culture at the highest level of government by wearing a korowai, a cloak of woven feathers, over her evening dress. In one of the most circulated social media images of her outfit, Ardern walks alongside her partner; the length and colours of the cloak are in full view against a background of red carpet and footmen. This image is particularly powerful for two reasons: first, for Ardern to

wear something that is so intrinsically of this place here, and for her to wear it at the event knowing that she would be photographed from every angle, [is a] real acknowledgement of her relationship with the Maori people and with New Zealand.³⁸

Second, the photo was taken during the latter stages of Ardern’s pregnancy, which is immediately visible in the photograph and challenges gendered expectations of women’s roles in the public sphere during this time. Both elements combine to make a powerful visual statement of New Zealand identity — as a nation respectful of its indigenous heritage, while seeking greater domestic social equality — within the formal structure of the governance of empire. The hybridity of the image — a Twitter ‘moment’ with thousands of likes and retweets that was also circulated via online news media — represented distinct positions on both culture and gender in a very public way.

Overall, digital diplomacy is a highly emotional exercise. Texts and images shared on social media are powerful not only because of the emotions they evoke, but also because they frame representations of identity. The pervasive presence of the smartphone and the connected ease through which social media allow public statements, and photographs or memes, to be posted and shared means that individuals have an incredibly broad audience. Yet herein lies a growing concern for the future of public diplomacy: the role of digital disinformation in the targeting of foreign and domestic publics alike, which social media certainly facilitates.

The Future of Public Diplomacy

We can see how the intersubjective cultivation of emotion and identity is imbued within digital diplomacy in different ways. Yet what might this mean for the future of public diplomacy? The pervasive use of social media platforms has introduced additional complexity to public diplomacy in the form of destabilising effects caused by digital disinformation.

‘Fake news’ thrives within the digital sphere, and is increasingly difficult to counter. Although digital disinformation — the use of false information as a deliberate act of deception, to purposefully confuse or mislead — circulates primarily online, the wider public is nonetheless exposed to this false information by virtue of the hybrid media system.³⁹ As W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston have demonstrated, digital disinformation is further facilitated through the use of film that simulates a documentary format, which is easily disseminated across old and new media. This, in part, contributes to ‘an “amplifier effect” for stories that would be dismissed as absurd in earlier eras of more effective press gatekeeping’.⁴⁰

Such disinformation campaigns blur the boundaries between propaganda and ‘active measures’, such that we can understand them as ‘digital warfare’.⁴¹ Much like the propaganda warfare of the Cold War, the purpose of digital disinformation campaigns is to target perceived weaknesses in both political alliances and the stability of state identity. For example, citizens of Western liberal democracies are becoming increasingly mistrustful of some of the key institutions that define the social and civil structures of their states, namely the press and political institutions.⁴² Russian disinformation campaigns in the United States have deliberately targeted these institutions to exploit purposefully existing political divisions in order to undermine national unity.⁴³ Similar strategies have been employed against various European states as part of a concerted effort to undermine European political and strategic unity.⁴⁴ In combination with these attempts to exploit weaknesses in national and regional unity, Russian digital disinformation campaigns also champion pro-Kremlin ideas and values.

Digital disinformation also relies on the omnipresence of images shared on social media. There is an important disjuncture between curated representations of reality and the idea that ‘photographs are really experience captured’.⁴⁵ How the image is produced is at least as important as how it is interpreted and made meaningful by those viewing it, yet it is this interpretation that ‘contains values that inevitably have as much to do with the values of the interpreter than the content of the image itself’.⁴⁶ Social media images are shared so widely and so quickly that the truthfulness of the circulated visuals is often accepted without further consideration, particularly between users sharing similar political affiliations or positions. A well-known example of disinformation using social-media images are the fake pictures of sharks in the flooded streets of New York and New Jersey following Hurricane Sandy in 2012.⁴⁷ A more recent example with far more obvious political motivations was the circulation of a doctored photograph showing Florida school-shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez tearing up the US Constitution, when the original image taken for Teen Vogue showed her ripping a gun-target poster in half.

What makes digital disinformation so problematic is the relationship between emotion and identity in these online spaces. Even when digital disinformation is revealed, citizens who believed the story or curated event was truthful in the first instance may still believe it when it is exposed as a falsehood. On the one hand, this is generally reflective of political homophily or ‘echo-chamber’ reasoning, wherein online networks largely consist of followers with similar political attitudes, identity values or beliefs, and there is a ‘backfire effect’ when misperceptions are corrected.⁴⁸ On the other hand, disinformation can also feel true, particularly if its purpose is to manipulate aspects of state identity and perceived weaknesses in national unity — feeling can then manifest as belief as ‘people use emotion as evidence’.⁴⁹ For example, when the extent of the Russian disinformation operation and its links to the Trump campaign were revealed in early 2018, followed by the revelations of Cambridge Analytica’s activities on Facebook, Trump’s support base remained largely unswayed and continued to perceive him as more truthful than the established political elites.⁵⁰

Here we can see the relevance of an important but overlooked aspect of digital disinformation: the role of the general public in enabling the spread of such false information, thereby further amplifying its effects. In examining the digital information warfare surrounding the Ukraine crisis and the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines passenger plane MH17 in 2014, Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Mareike Hartmann and Rebecca Adler-Nissen highlight how social media have allowed citizens to move from ‘passive audiences to active curators of information’.⁵¹ Popular examples of disinformation are often traceable to members of the public or civil-society groups inadvertently creating or sharing false information online.⁵² The specific reasons why this occurs are unclear, but this study nonetheless demonstrates that states and state-sponsored groups are not the only key players in spreading disinformation online.

Digital diplomacy allows for powerful representations of state identity that attract and persuade foreign publics towards desired state ends. Yet the same factors that can cultivate a successful public diplomacy strategy can also be used to undermine state interests. Perceptions of truth rely on emotional dispositions, and strategic cultivations of disinformation online can contribute to falsehoods being understood as a true reflection of events.

Conclusion

Digital diplomacy as the ‘new’ public diplomacy will arguably be a permanent feature of world politics. States will continue to employ social media to pursue their national interests, albeit in full view of a global audience. An important facet of understanding the power of social media in public diplomacy is the role of emotion in digital diplomacy strategies: social media statements can incite strong reactions that have the potential to undermine heretofore positive diplomatic relations, or provide communicative openings that move towards ameliorating crises. Even more so, the spread of digital disinformation online presents political leaders and diplomats with additional complications that cannot be addressed without considering emotions and their role in cultivating state identity. Paying greater attention to the interaction of social media, emotion and identity provides insight into the increasing importance of digital diplomacy and the future challenges that lie ahead.