This book has three modest goals. The frst is to offer a new conceptual framework for understanding and researching the infuence of digital technologies on the conduct of public diplomacy. This
framework is rooted in the term “the digitalization of public diplomacy”,
which relates to a long-term process in which digital technologies infuence the norms, values, and working routines of diplomatic institutions, as well as the metaphors and self-narratives that diplomats employ to
conceptualize their craft. Metaphors are crucial to the digitalization of
public diplomacy, for as Manor (2016) has argued, before diplomacy can
be practiced, it must be imagined. Moreover, this book argues that each
diplomatic institution is undergoing its own unique process of digitalization, which is infuenced by organizational, national and global factors.
The book’s second goal is to demonstrate that one cannot understand the digitalization of public diplomacy without frst characterizing the digital society. This is because public diplomacy is practiced by social
beings who belong to societies that have been fundamentally reshaped
by the advent of digital technologies. To understand the digitalization of
public diplomacy is thus to understand the norms and values celebrated
by the digital society, as well as its logic.
The book’s third goal, which stems from the previous two, is to signifcantly diversify the public diplomacy research corpus by examining the digitalization of public diplomacy in numerous MFAs from numerous world regions. By analyzing MFAs from around the globe, this book can demonstrate that digitalization is a unique process that advances at different paces and in different directions in various MFAs. This diverse
sample also demonstrates that while societies differ from one another, the norms, values, and logic of the digital society have begun to permeate MFAs irrespective of their geographic location. Lastly, this sample
offers an important contribution to the study of public diplomacy, which
tends to separate the “West from the rest” while paying attention mostly
to the activities of the USA and Western European countries. This book
therefore examines the digitalization of public diplomacy in the MFAs
of Botswana, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, India, Iran, Israel,
Kenya, Lithuania, Palestine, Poland, Russia, Rwanda, Sweden, Turkey,
the EU, the Netherlands, the UK, Uganda, and New Zealand.