Reputational Security and Other New Priorities: Rethinking Soft Power for 2030
“Reputational Security and Other New Priorities: Rethinking Soft Power for 2030“
Speaker: Cull, N. (University of Southern California)
Date: 4 June 2019
Speaker Session Preview
SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Nicholas Cull (University of Southern California) as a part of its SMA Future of Global Competition & Conflict Speaker Series. To begin, Dr. Cull highlighted a variety of foreign dangers presented when looking out towards 2030. He first explained that, although Russia is presently an irritant and a disrupter, it is not a long-term threat. Rather, China should be the US’s main concern—it has developed a strategy in pursuit of its long-term goals. In addition, Dr. Cull stated that an Indo/Pakistan War is a very real and long-term foreign danger. However, an even larger danger is an international failure to cooperate. Dr. Cull argued that the appropriate way forward is to bring great powers to the table to work on cooperative solutions, while not forgetting the importance of global public opinion, which Dr. Cull deemed as a great power in and of itself. He then discussed a series of issues within current public diplomacy: 1) Failure to listen; 2) Failure to cooperate (and explain what one is doing); 3) Public diplomacy is currently in favor of domestic consumption rather than foreign consumption; 4) Mismatch of identify and transnational realities; and 5) Public diplomacy is more than just “ads” or positive branding for countries. Furthermore, Dr. Cull contended that reputation is a part of security and should not be overlooked. Building soft power is not just for powerful countries, but for vulnerable ones as well. Countries that have a “good” reputation can reap benefits, even if it is not necessarily “strong” or “rich,” according to Dr. Cull.
Speaker Session Audio File
To access a recording of this session, please email Ms. Nicole Omundson (nomundson@nsiteam.com).
Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy and Director of the Master’s Program in Public Diplomacy at USC. His research and teaching focus on the role of public engagement in foreign policy. An acknowledged pioneer in Public Diplomacy teaching and research and its best-known historian, he is the author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge, 2008); The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001 (Palgrave, 2012) and the recently published Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age (Polity, 2019). He and his research were featured in the Peabody award-winning documentary film Jazz Ambassadors (PBS/BBC 2018). His first book was Selling War (Oxford, 1995), a study of British information work in the United States before Pearl Harbor. He has published numerous articles, chapters and edited collections on the theme of public diplomacy and media history. He is an active media historian who has been part of the movement to include film especially within the mainstream of historical sources. His film work includes (with James Chapman) Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2009) and Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2013). He is currently writing a history of the international campaign against Apartheid in South Africa.
Nick Cull has lectured widely around the world, frequently as a guest of diplomatic academies or foreign ministries/public diplomacy agencies including those of the UK, Armenia, Canada, Chile, China, India, Korea, Mexico, South Africa and Switzerland. He has worked with the EU and NATO. He is a regular guest speaker at the Foreign Service Institute of the United States, and has spoken regularly at the US Naval Post Graduate School and US Defense Information School. He has worked as a consultant for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Royal Dutch Foreign Ministry and Japan Foundation among others.
He took both his BA and PhD at the University of Leeds. While a graduate student, he studied at Princeton in the U.S. as a Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York. From 1997 to 2005, he was Professor of American Studies and founding Director of the Centre for American Studies in the Department of History at Leicester. In the spring of 2019 he was a visiting fellow of the Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism and Green Templeton College and the University of Oxford. He is outgoing President of the International Association for Media and History and a board member of the Public Diplomacy Council.
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