Transnational, Trans-Sectarian Engagement: A
Revised Approach to
U.S. Public Diplomacy toward Lebanon
A
Doctoral Dissertation
by
Deborah Lee Trent
The
George Washington University
Columbian
College of Arts and Sciences
Washington,
D.C.
31
August 2012
Abstract
Broadly, public
diplomacy is governmental engagement directly with global publics in pursuit of
national interests. Public diplomacy engagement involves outreach, listening,
informing, explaining, collaboration, and persuasion. Specific to this dissertation,
the U.S. government pursues public diplomacy for the additional purpose of
strengthening relationships with global publics. This dissertation employs
organizational sensemaking theory and process (Weick, 1995; 2001) to explore
the mutual interests that foster, and the divergent interests that impede,
credible public diplomacy with the Lebanese and Lebanese American publics. The
scholarly and practitioner literatures framing the dissertation are: networked
cross-sector governance; collaborative citizen engagement, relational public
diplomacy; and government-diaspora relations.
The two central
research questions of this dissertation are 1) How do U.S. public diplomacy personnel,
relevant Congressional committee staff, Lebanese Americans in U.S. civil
society, and Lebanese stakeholders make sense of the challenges of public
diplomacy toward Lebanon? 2) How would these stakeholders like to change the
way U.S. public diplomacy policy and programs are administered?
Analyzing the
organizational sensemaking narratives generated in 77 personal interviews and
27 meeting observations of key stakeholders across government and civil society
in the U.S. and Lebanon has generated three main findings. 1) The U.S.
designation of the Lebanese political party and militia, Hizbullah, as a foreign
terrorist organization precludes U.S. public diplomacy outreach to key Lebanese
audiences and discourages engagement and collaboration among key Lebanese
American citizens. 2) Despite these divergent interests between the two
governments, significant mutual interests exist between the two nations. They
can be strengthened by: diversifying outreach among the religious sects in
Lebanon and the diaspora; and, further exploiting cross-cultural
social-relational processes, traditional public and cultural diplomacy
approaches, more recent social media networking tools, and collaborative
management of engagement through public-private partnership. 3) Engaging
collaboratively with diasporans informs and facilitates outreach with the Lebanese
public, fostering new political space for mediating conflict and pursuing
mutually beneficial cultural and socioeconomic projects.
This dissertation
contributes to the scholarship and practice of public diplomacy and
government-citizen relations a new country study that explores the increasingly
important domain of networked, transnational, cross-sector governance. It
proposes a transnational, trans-sectarian approach for U.S. public diplomatists
to strengthen collaborative engagement among the people of the U.S. and
Lebanon. This approach seeks to mitigate the primary problem of credibility of
U.S. policy toward Lebanon and limited public diplomacy engagement with the
Lebanese and the diaspora. Overall, the dissertation informs
government-to-government and government-to-people diplomacy in the broader
Middle East, where sectarian conflict, civil society uprisings, and lack of a
Palestinian state are major challenges.
