Beacon No. 69: Look How We Could Listen

TWO INEXPENSIVE WAYS FOR THE U.S. TO HEAR OTHER COUNTRIES' CITIZENS.


Karen Hughes has finished her "listening tour" of three Middle Eastern countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Foreign reviews of this tightly paced trot have varied widely (see John Brown's September 28-29 Public Diplomacy Review) for a lengthy round-up of trip coverage) but major U.S. press outlets have generally been positive.

Hughes' trip, unintentionally modeled on Hillary Clinton's pre-Senate listening tour of New York State, allowed her to be seen listening to a variety of Middle Eastern audiences if not actually to the general public, a fine first step in public diplomacy.

That said, public diplomacy involves persuading foreign citizens that their concerns really are being heard or at least considered, which raises the question of how to attention to the opinions of the great mass of people in the Middle East. Specifically, how could the U.S tailor programs that would not only allow Middle Eastern publics to be heard by U.S. citizens and policymakers, but also hear themselves being heard?

Two possible avenues show up in today's news: Citycapsula in Bogotá and StoryCorps in the U.S.

The L.A. Times' Henry Chu describes Citycapsula in his lede:

She was a young woman with a message, and she wanted the whole city to hear it.

So on a recent afternoon, she marched over to one of Bogotá's busiest street corners, stood before a flimsy-looking cardboard kiosk, punched a green button and addressed the video camera that whirred to life.

"To all publicists: I've had it up to here with seeing butts and breasts. There are more intelligent ways to market a product," she said, her voice full of exasperation. "If you have daughters, sisters, whatever, please think….

"Women, respect yourselves! We have something called a brain, which lasts longer than this and this," she declared, clutching her chest and backside. Then, satisfied with her diatribe, she plunged back into the teeming sidewalk traffic.

That same week, a middle-aged man with a harried look stepped up to the kiosk and delivered a different sort of plea.

"I want to tell all the mothers-in-law of the world, you're very much loved by us sons-in-law," he said a little nervously, with one particular mother-in-law clearly in mind. "But sometimes you're too intense, and you don't support the couple enough…. I love you very much, but you've got to change."

Both appeals were broadcast on television a few days later, beamed into living rooms across this bustling capital of 7 million people. The clips formed part of the hit show "Citycapsula," a weekly compilation of footage of ordinary residents who stop at one of several camera-loaded kiosks around the city and opt to put a few moments of their lives on film.

The Citycapsula method has the virtue of being a quick and cheap way to produce television, and if I've discovered one thing about living among Los Angeles TV producers for the past 16 months, budget rules.

Then there's StoryCorps, which does nearly the same thing with audio clips:

StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others' stories in sound.

We're here to help you interview your grandmother, your uncle, the lady who's worked at the luncheonette down the block for as long as you can remember—anyone whose story you want to hear and preserve.

To start, we're building soundproof recording booths across the country, called StoryBooths. You can use these StoryBooths to record broadcast-quality interviews with the help of a trained facilitator. Our first StoryBooths opened in New York City's Grand Central Terminal on October 23, 2003. We also have two traveling recording studios, called MobileBooths, which embarked on cross-country tours on May 19, 2005.

We've tried to make the experience as simple as possible: We help you figure out what questions to ask. We handle all the technical aspects of the recording. At the end of the hour-long session, you get a copy of your interview on CD. And thanks to the generous contributions of our supporters, we ask for only a $10 suggested donation.

Since we want to make sure your story lives on for generations to come, we'll also add your interview to the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which we hope will become nothing less than an oral history of America.

Slightly pricier, more formal, and more narrative-driven to be sure, but if StoryCorps lasts awhile—and heart-warming pieces like the one on NPR's Morning Edition this morning indicate it will—it could provide an interesting take on the American mood (or another country's mood) at given moment in history.

The StoryCorps or Citycapsula templates could easily be adopted to facilitate U.S. public diplomacy abroad. Recording and archiving technology at U.S. cultural centers overseas combined with dissemination via existing U.S. international broadcasting could give foreign publics input into the U.S. policy process—and potentially create ratings hits in other countries.

Look, people might say, the Americans are showcasing ... us!

Beacon No. 68: Not Necessarily the News

WHO NEEDS BIN LADEN WHEN ANYONE CAN PRODUCE A "VOICE OF THE CALIPHATE" VIDEO?


The front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a throwaway item about "Voice of the Caliphate," a weekly news roundup that al-Qa'ida has started broadcasting on the Internet. A quick Google search leads to www.memri.org, which has the first "Caliphate" broadcast archived and roughly translated.

A muscular, ski-masked anchorman sits at a desk before a rifle and what I take to be a Qur'an. He discusses last week's top news stories: the 'liberation' of Gaza, Zarqawi's 'defense' of Sunni interests in Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina's devastation, which is revealed as God's punishment of New Orleans homosexuals. (Hurricane Rita is mentioned briefly as having occurred in North Carolina.)

The anchor's appearances are interspersed with footage from the various places under discussion to create a sense of immediacy, and each segment is punctuated by computer graphics and a melodramatic voice proclaiming the "Voice of the Caliphate" (صوت ألخلافة), complete with Space Age studio reverb. The anchor's voice is calm and businesslike, mimicking the delivery of legitimate newscasters everywhere.

Is "Voice" actually from al-Qa'ida? It's impossible to tell; nearly anyone could have produced this video using found footage, a digital camera, some cheap software and an assault rifle.

But if it's from an al-Qa'ida-related group, it marks a further move away from the use of mainstream media to broadcast propaganda. Why risk sending a bin Laden video from his Karachi apartment all the way to al-Jazeera's offices in Doha? Al-Qa'ida leadership might have concluded that it's safer, cheaper and more efficient to create entire news broadcasts and disseminate them for free on the Internet; let download-happy Muslim kids do the rest.

If I wanted to counter the propaganda impact of "Voice of the Caliphate," I'd start producing parodies of it as soon as I knew its format, regular features, announcer, et cetera—certainly before it became wildly popular. Mocking "Voice's" over-serious style and message might be an effective antidote to The Al-Qa'ida Channel.

Beacon No. 67: Walking a Mile in Their Abaya

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES GETS AN EARFUL IN JIDDAH.


Karen Hughes spoke on September 27 to an all-women audience at a university in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. Whereas audience participation at her Egypt stops went pretty well according to plan—mild, respectful, friendly comments given and received—some in the Jidda audience questioned the very underpinnings of the under secretary's "listening tour" in the Middle East.

Ms. Hughes ... is on her first trip to the Middle East. She seemed clearly taken aback as the women [in the audience] told her that just because they were not allowed to vote or drive that did not mean they were treated unfairly or imprisoned in their own homes.

"We're not in any way barred from talking to the other sex," said Dr. Nada Jambi, a public health professor. "It's not an absolute wall."

The audience, composed of elite women in one of the Arabian Peninsula's more liberal cities, made several similar points, according to the Times' Steven R. Weisman. To her credit, Ms. Hughes "appeared to have left a favorable impression" by assuring the audience that she would "be glad to go back to the United States and talk about the Arab women I've met."

While the people planning the under secretary's events may have been mortified—Weisman notes that Karen Hughes "is considered one of the administration's most scripted and careful members"—I hope Ms. Hughes sees that this session is actually an excellent development for both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

Influential Saudi women may feel they have opened a channel to the Bush administration through a woman known worldwide to have the president's ear, while Ms. Hughes has experienced an audience that's not only not on the same page, but not even reading the same book. At the very least, despite a disconnection in Saudi and U.S. expectations going into the event, respectful disagreement took place rather than shouting.

The Jidda conversation was not so much about how the U.S. could better advocate its ideals and positions, but whether such advocacy is even considered necessary or good by the host country—and what happens after that.

The Importance of Being Continuous

“ONE HUNDRED SOLDIERS MAKE EGYPTIANS ANGRY; ONE WORKSHOP MAKES FRIENDS.”


Patricia H. Kushlis is joined by Patricia L. Sharpe in Monday's "Cultural Diplomacy Matters—and It Works" over at WhirledView. In a nutshell, the authors write that too much money is spent studying public diplomacy and not enough on doing it.

Regular readers of Beacon and WhirledView already know that U.S. cultural diplomacy programs abroad lack funding, but PHK and PLS touch on the all-important problem of continuity: Why do U.S. cultural programs start and stop so unpredictably, to the extent that other nations' diplomats view them as unreliable?

“The problem is sustainability,” according to a jaded Southeast Asian diplomat quoted in [an Associated Press] report. “During every international crisis, you open a library, and then, when the crisis passes, you close it down and disburse the books. When you close this library, don’t bother to distribute the books. We have plenty already.”

... It’s impossible to implement a serious cultural diplomacy program without continuity. According to an American diplomat in Cairo, “our cultural presence in this country no longer exists. The French Cultural Ministry can give you a monthly calendar. We can’t do anything because we don’t know when anything will happen....We’re not speaking to anyone anymore. People ask, Where’s your culture. Where are you?”

An excellent read as usual, with a link at the bottom to other WhirledView posts on public diplomacy.

Beacon No. 66: A "Metal Storm" in Turkish Minds

A SPECULATIVE NOVEL MAKES THE WORST OF U.S. INTENTIONS.


Ted Widmer of Washington College in Chestertown, Md. recently wrote about a book that Turkish 18-30 year olds are reading in droves: Metal Storm, a fictional account of a U.S. invasion of Turkey.

Why would the U.S. invade its historic ally and strategic partner? Turkey's supply of borax, of all things, which the U.S. needs more of in the year 2007 for "nuclear weapons and space technology":

G.I.'s overrun Turkey from their position in neighboring Iraq. The first phase of the invasion, Operation Metal Storm, resembles Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. The Americans have no difficulty taking over Turkey's primary cities, where they allow cultural vandalism. They fail to secure the countryside, however, and slowly their hubris begins to do them in.

Shades of Tom Clancy's 1994 Debt of Honor, where pride and an ambition to re-colonize North Asia for its resources drive corrupt Japanese leaders to attack U.S. forces in the Pacific.

Although it met with criticism for portraying Japan's leadership as sneaky, Debt of Honor struck a chord in a recessionary, pre-dotcom America that was suspicious of Japan's economic success, and receptive to messages of Japanese greed and hubris.

Metal Storm also has some grounding in Turkey's deeper fears: The U.S. has limited Turkey's ability to pursue Kurdish insurgents to their bases in Iraqi Kurdistan—a major step in Turkey's traditional area of influence. It may not take much more imagination, in Turkish readers' minds, to think the U.S. might want to end Turkey altogether:

... The United States attempts to partition Turkey between two historic rivals, Greece and Armenia, and allows a Kurdish state to come into being. Turkey responds with a creative solution straight out of a West Point seminar on worst-case scenarios. First, the Turks form a new alliance with China, Russia and Germany. Then, a brave Turkish secret agent named Gokan goes ballistic. In a shocking scene, he steals a poorly guarded nuclear weapon and takes out Washington. ... Presto, the crisis is over, catharsis achieved, and Turks can go to bed knowing the invader has been soundly and justly defeated.

Note where Turkey looks for help: Not at the E.U., which isn't exactly seen as the Anatolian republic's pal these days, but to the enemies (or at least competitors) of its fictional enemy and to Germany, where millions of Turkish-descended Germans live and thus already a major source of "help" in the form of remittances.

Widmer notes that Metal Storm is "said to be very popular with the Turkish military, and men aged 18 to 30." It would be unfortunate if this demographic came into adulthood misunderstanding U.S. intentions, but as Widmer points out, that road runs both ways:

The American ambassador to Turkey reportedly had to find scientists to prove that last winter's Asian tsunami was not caused by an American nuclear explosion. (Then again, ... "The West Wing" recently portrayed Turkey as a country where women are beheaded for having sex with their fiancés.)

Side cultural note: Hollywood celebrities, once highly in demand to do ad campaigns in Japan, are losing work to homegrown talent, according to "The Stars Realign in Japan" in today's L.A. Times:

"The mystique has faded," said Akihiko Sasamoto, who heads the Asian casting division of Hakuhodo, one of Japan's biggest advertising and marketing agencies. "You no longer have this distinction between foreign artists and Japanese artists. So we don't need to spend a big amount of money on a Hollywood star."

Fulla of Arabia

SYRIAN ENTREPRENEURS KNOCK BARBIE OFF MIDDLE EASTERN SHELVES.


Katherine Zoepf writes in today's Times about a doll that's increasingly popular among Middle Eastern girls: Fulla, whose creators say she's in line with Muslim values. This Barbie competitor wears either a black abaya or a white head scarf and full-length coat, and comes complete with prayer mat.

She's a big hit in the Middle East, having inspired (at least) a breakfast cereal, a bicycle, pool toys and a trademarked color, "Fulla pink."

This would be a pretty standard case of cultural adaptation—middle class and wealthy Middle Easterners want their daughters to have a doll they identify with, rather than one who is fully mall-enabled, and Syrian entrepreneurs have provided one—except that Barbie has been vanishing from store shelves in the region.

This raises a fistful of questions: Is the lack of Barbie because of formal or informal government intervention? Or is Mattel phasing out its Middle Eastern sales? Is a distaste for goods perceived as American at work? Or are toy distributors simply getting religion and looking for something to sell that's not in a bikini?

Exporting Education

SIX AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS PONY UP BIG MONEY FOR AFRICAN HIGHER ED.


In last Saturday's Times, Celia Dugger's "$200 Million Is Pledged for Higher Education in Africa" describes several U.S. foundations's decision to donate $200 million to the cause of higher education in Africa:

The investments will significantly increase Internet access for a group of African universities, finance scholarships for hundreds of young women and build programs to train agricultural scientists and public health managers, among other things.

Funds from brand-name American foundations like Carnegie, Ford, Hewlett, MacArthur, Mellon and Rockefeller will flow to schools in individual countries like Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda; but the real winner here may be the elusive idea of a pan-African identity, since the foundations' initiative is designed to increase international cooperation in technology while helping with decidedly individual concerns like hunger:

The new foundation money will help bring African universities into the digital age. By banding together with foundation support, the universities have been able to obtain many times the Internet bandwidth they had before at a third the rate paid by most institutions in Africa. Intelsat, the global satellite operator, is providing the bandwidth.

The money will also support training for professions essential to Africa's ability to produce more food and care for its sick. The partnership is investing in a five-year Ph.D. program at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa to train plant breeders. The hope is that these scientists will develop more productive, pest-resistant crop varieties that will help Africa feed its millions of hungry people.

The ongoing power of robber barons like Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller and industrialists like Ford and Hewlett to put their stamp on affairs continues to impress. That their foundations have been both structured and flexible enough to make 21st-century decisions about who to help and how continues to amaze.


(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the initial item.)

Prophet Motive

A FRENCH BURGER JOINT MAKES A RUN AT FRANCE'S 5 MILLION MUSLIMS.


In "The Market McDonald's Missed: The Muslim Burger," the Times' Craig R. Smith visits Clichy-Sus-Bois, France and a fast-food joint called Beurger King Muslim. BKM tries to combine Muslim concerns—specialized halaal (حلال) food preparation, cashiers who may wear veils, a cash register that says "peace be upon you" after each purchase—with a Western-style fast-food sensibility that the owners hope will pry French North Africans out of their kebab-shop ghetto.

At one level it's no different from McDonald's efforts to blend in with local markets (recall John Travolta's rhapsody about a European "Royale with Cheese" in the movie Pulp Fiction), but in this case the owners are French locals—and they're looking to export their idea: Morad Benhamida, Abdelmalik Khiter and Majib Mokkedem plan to franchise Beurger King Muslim and say they have 30 prospective franchisees lined up.

While Muslim-oriented restaurants will tend to have higher overhead than its Western-oriented counterparts—for instance, an outside agency certifies that the premises are halaal, and "bacon" for the burgers must come from turkey rather than pork—the soft power of a "by Muslims, for Muslims" brand may overcome any additional costs. BKM's flagship store in Clichy-Sus-Bois is already ringing up 800 transactions a day.

Beacon No. 65: Public Goods and Public Diplomacy

TWO RAND RESEARCHERS TAP MARTIN LUTHER KING AND NELSON MANDELA FOR HELP.


By far the most interesting thing I've read on public diplomacy lately is Charles Wolf, Jr. and Brian Rosen's 2004 paper "Public Diplomacy: How to Think About and Improve It." (Download the PDF here.)

Wolf and Rosen jump over misunderstandings of public diplomacy ("We need a rapid response team to counter bad press about America!") and nods to past glories of counterinsurgency ("The British did it in Malaya!") to a theory of public diplomacy grounded in what RAND does best: number-crunching.

Skip the beginning of the paper, unless you really want to read the ritual acknowledgements that America's poll numbers are down in the Middle East, that public diplomacy is tough to define, and that marketing soda pop isn't like marketing democracy. Turn to page eight, where the first number is three. That's how many groups Wolf and Rosen contend are out there waiting to be persuaded (or not) by public diplomacy efforts:

Potential opposition to U.S. policies can be divided into three discrete groups: those who accept that the values America seeks are goods; those who may believe that the values America seeks are not goods, but who nonetheless see them as a means to achieve other core goals (such as personal or family betterment; improvements in health, education, and skills; and the assurance of personal dignity) that are associated with the preceding values; and those who believe that the goals America seeks, as well as the associated core goals, are "bads" and would therefore reject the entire package.

This is where Wolf, an economist, and Rosen, an attorney at law, start rolling up their sleeves.

Those in the first category will be most receptive to the contention that U.S. policies are beneficial. Because they already believe that the values and policies [the U.S. seeks] are "goods," they need be convinced only that the policies really do engender those values. Convincing those in the second category requires the antecedent step of convincing the members that the values themselves are associated with goals that are valued by those in this category (e.g., opportunities for personal or family betterment, improvements in health and education, etc.).

These two categories compose what we have referred to as public diplomacy's "constituency." Those in the third category are presumed to be beyond persuasion; they compose public diplomacy's "adversary."

Thus, two tasks emerge. One is to convey and contend that U.S. policies are pursued because they seek to further values that are already accepted by the audience, including Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere. The second is to show that the values themselves have other derivative effects that are accepted as goods.

Already the authors moving away from a simplistic "welcome the first group, persuade the second and ignore the third" model. Since you're reading a RAND paper—by a lawyer and an economist, no less—you know more numbers are on the horizon, and the authors don't disappoint.

They discuss how two men who had little more than the power of speech at their disposal—Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela—expanded their constituencies and neutralized their adversaries. Wolf and Rosen break down a sample of the two civil rights giants' speeches and hunt for patterns in whether they called for peaceful or violent action, how positive or negative they were, and how they addressed or ignored their adversaries. Pages of tables follow, which are helpfully translated back to English:

King made substantially more positive than negative references. In contrast, before Mandela was in prison, his negative references always equaled or exceeded the positive ones. After imprisonment, his speeches were markedly different. In each of them, positive references substantially exceeded negative ones. ...

With few exceptions, King gave little attention to the adversary, averaging only one adversary reference per speech, or to the adversary's activities. This contrasts markedly with Mandela who, before prison, made an average of three or four references in each speech to the identified adversaries and their activities. However, after release from prison, Mandela's emphasis was sharply reversed; his attention focused instead on positive references and on the constituency, while rarely making negative references or even mentioning the adversary.

King realized he needed the assistance of white America, while Mandela realized that South African blacks needed help from the entire world. The two men tailored their messages accordingly, but King's example is particularly useful to the authors' idea of persuading the second type of "constituency" group—those who want the benefits of American ideals without wanting the ideals themselves.

... King did not speak merely of black civil rights for its own sake. He linked black civil rights as [sic] beneficial, indeed essential, for America as a whole. He portrayed attaining black rights as inextricably linked to fulfilling America's purpose and promise as a nation predicated on freedom and democracy.

Wolf and Rosen don't hesitate to link King's and Mandela's successes to the U.S. quest for a public-diplomacy strategy,

specifically for affecting positively the behavior and attitudes of those who believe that the values America seeks are "bads" but nonetheless desire core goals such as personal or family betterment with which these American values are linked. This group should be among the constituencies targeted by American public diplomacy. To enlist their support requires convincing them that U.S. goals, which this group may currently oppose, are inextricably linked to other goals—family and personal betterment and improvements in health, education, and opportunity—that this group favors.

The authors go on to make finer points about how messages should be framed to broaden the U.S. constituency and sideline its adversaries—but their central message remains one of linking readily understood material, personal and spiritual goods with more abstract and often poorly understood concepts that the U.S. advocates.

This is a more complex, granular form of "accentuating the positive" than the U.S. generally engages in, but one that is well within its reach with some additional investment in understanding how Wolf and Rosen's two constituency groups (and one adversary group) see both themselves and the United States.

Enter the "Bosnian"

A NOTE ON CROSS-CULTURAL HEROISM IN THE ADRIATIC.


Yesterday's Times ran a Reuters story tagged "Coming Together Over Bruce Lee", which the China Daily helpfully picked up. The Times' version went something like this:

The ethnically divided Bosnian city of Mostar has agreed to erect a new symbol of unity—a statue of the martial arts legend Bruce Lee ... beloved of the city's Muslims, Serbs and Croats alike. The statue, cast in bronze and showing the star in a fighting pose, will be designed by a local sculptor and put up in Mostar's central square in November. Mr. Lee's widow, Linda, will be invited to attend the ceremony. A civic group in the strife-ridden city developed the idea in 2003, and recently won a $6,250 donation from a German organization to finance the project. Veselin Gatalo, a member of the organizing group, said, "This will be a monument to universal justice that Mostar needs more than any other city I know."

It's difficult to tell from a distance whether Bruce Lee is a widely regarded hero in the southern Balkans or whether Veselin Gatalo belongs to a fringe group that just happened to get a permit for the statue. But as his quote implies, Mostar's citizens seem more concerned about having a neutral slate onto which they can project their yearning for justice.

From this perspective, Bruce Lee is the perfect man, and perhaps the only man, who could be memorialized so publicly in a divided city like Mostar. His Chinese ancestry removes him from the region's recent ethnically and religiously based fighting, while his 1973 death eliminates the chance that he will do anything that might taint his heroic image (see IMDB's entry on Enter the Dragon, or Wikipedia's take on Fist of Fury for example).