Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy

"This book has made important contributions to at least two debates. The first concerns museums as political actors. The second contribution is to the debate about cultural diplomacy. For a long time, scholars and practitioners presumed that the state is the main agent of cultural diplomacy. However, many are increasingly acknowledging, or at least exploring the possibility, that non-state actors participate in cultural diplomacy alongside states. The book advances this debate by theorizing the specific conditions under which museums might be considered to function as (cultural) diplomats. Overall, the great strength of this book is Grincheva’s effort to drill deeper to theorize the various phenomena that are emerging from the work of the modern museum in the current moment. She draws nuanced and thought-provoking conclusions about this. Grincheva indicates that one of her goals is to provide a fresh perspective and she certainly does. I look forward to teaching a class on diplomacy so I can assign this very informative book."

~Patricia Goff, Associate Professor and Chair, Political Science and North American Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University

"The main contribution of the book is that it expands museum studies scholarship to cultural diplomacy while elaborating several cases demonstrating a shift in museums’ international activities from a political endeavor to a more autonomous pursuit of institutional missions. It can be useful for scholars and educators of new museology, as well as museum or cultural diplomacy professionals. On the whole, the book is very well structured, insightful and inspiring. Thus, skeptic voices, who might worry about the topic of Coca-colonization, neo-imperialism and McGuggenheim can be assured, the book is not a repetition of controversial issues. Instead it opens the discussion on new phenomena, taking the reader to most different parts of the world with its several international examples illustrating the main arguments."

~Kinga Hamvai, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

" Dr Grincheva makes two central claims in this book. First, museums in the 21stcentury have evolved from publicly and privately funded repositories of cultural heritage to become actors in the economic sector of culture. Second, this transforms how we think about cultural diplomacy. Museums with global reach are now independent, non-government diplomatic actors engaged in diplomatic activities without support from national governments. She opens with an examination of the way states have partnered with museums to promote national cultures and support geopolitical interests. She then turns to the way the Guggenheim Foundation is changing this model with its strategies of museum franchising and global corporatization. Her reasoning is grounded in analysis of arguments academics and practitioners make on the merits and limitations of the Guggenheim model, examination of cultural diplomacy as "a contested academic field," and deeply researched case studies of Russia’s Hermitage Museum and China’s K11 Art Foundation. Grincheva’s book is a more complete statement of ideas she advanced in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s special issue on non-state diplomacy. Scholars recently have done convincing work in developing conceptual frameworks for a polylateral diplomacy domain in which non-state actors function as independent diplomatic actors. Their standing as diplomacy practitioners turns not on sovereignty or association with governance actors, but on assessments of their contributions to diplomacy-based outcomes perceived as legitimate in the eyes of global publics. Grincheva’s work is a useful contribution to case studies and practitioner-oriented research needed to support these theoretical arguments. "

~Professor Bruce Gregory, George Washington University, United States of America