The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts (Bloomsbury Studies in Political Communication). This item is unavailable.The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts (Bloomsbury Studies in Political Communication)

The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts provides a comparative assessment of public diplomacy and strategic communication initiatives, in order to portray how Joseph Nye? s notion of ? soft power? has translated into context-specific strategies of international influence. The book examines four cases ? Japan, Venezuela, China, and the United States ? to illuminate the particular significance of culture, foreign publics, and communication technologies for the foreign policy ambitions of each country. The book explores the notion of soft power as set of theoretical arguments about power, and as a reflection of how each country perceives what is an increasingly necessary perspective on international relations in an age of ubiquitous global communication flows and encroaching networks of non-state actors. Soft power is discussed a means by which public diplomacy is justified and in the process, reflects arguments for how each state sees what is possible through soft power. Through an interpretive analysis of policy discourse, public diplomacy initiatives and related programs of strategic influence ? soft power in each case represents a localized formation of assumptions about the requirements of persuasion, the relevance of foreign audiences to state goals,

Craig Hayden is assistant professor of international communication at the School of International Service at American University. He has taught at the University of Virginia’s Department of Media Studies and at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. Craig was named a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in 2009. He blogs at the International Media Argument Project (www.intermap.org).