Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy

"Snow and Cull's handbook has yet provided the most comprehensive resources and insightful guidance for China's upgraded endeavor of public diplomacy under the strategic framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Compared with the first edition, the current volume has wisely integrated voices from the non-Western world, and has thereby constituted a truly crosscultural conversation of theories and practices between the West and the Rest, and reconstructed PD as a cutting-edge discipline in this post-West, post-order and post-truth era." — SHI Anbin, Ministry of Education Changjiang Endowment Professor of Global Media Communication, Tsinghua University

"This timely update not only brings public diplomacy into the age of cyber (in)security, but also fully explores the new landscape for public diplomacy after the United States has lost hegemony. The "Global Approaches to Public Diplomacy" section provides an especially useful survey of public diplomacy around the world harnessed for positive goals of engagement and mutual understanding, as well as more sinister goals of increasing power and dominion." — Cynthia Schneider, Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy, Georgetown University

Nancy Snow and Nicholas J. Cull, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, Second Edition, (Routledge, 2020). Snow (Kyoto University of Foreign Studies) and Cull (University of Southern California) have performed a great service in compiling the chapters in this welcome second edition of The Routledge Handbook. Compared to its 2009 predecessor, it is more comprehensive and global in scope. Its conceptual approaches and diplomatic actors are more diverse. Contributors are a broader range of older and younger voices, scholars, and practitioners. Following introductions by Snow and Cull, the Handbook’s 45 chapters (too many to list here) divide into six parts that examine core practices, contrasting assumptions and methods, cases that illustrate theoretical concepts, cases that portray country and regional differences, and chapters that explore ethical questions, digital technologies, and innovations in study and practice. Teachers will want to look for chapters to assign that support course topics. Given its content and heft (543 pages), the paperback and eBook editions are affordably priced. As with any compilation of this size, contributions vary in quality and depth. Readers will find arguments that are provocative and evidence based, claims that prompt disagreement and vigorous debate, and subject matter that calls for more research. The Handbook is aspirational and self-described as foundational. Its impressive range of ideas and approaches prompt two evergreen questions. Should we continue to treat public diplomacy as a separate field of diplomatic study and practice? And, given so much effort by so many in this volume and elsewhere, why is diplomacy so under-represented in IR and communications studies?