Public Diplomacy

The term public diplomacy was introduced in 1965 by Edmund Gullion, a former dean at Tufts University in the United States, to underscore the influence of public attitudes on the formation and implementation of foreign policies. Public diplomacy is a two-way communication-based activity that aims to inform, persuade, and engage in dialogic exchange with foreign publics in an attempt to influence indirectly the decision-making systems of a targeted country and/or of an international organization. The emphasis that it places on the views of the public (the elite as well as other interested citizens) differentiates public diplomacy from its traditional counterpart.

Whereas traditional diplomacy is primarily concerned with government to government or diplomat to diplomat interactions, public diplomacy shifts the focus to a number of possible interactions ...