An Achilles Heel for Saudi Wahhabis?
by Mark Woodward* On September first the British on-line paper The Independent reported on alleged plans by the Saudi Arabian government to demolish the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb and move his body to an unmarked grave. The Prophet’s tomb is located in the mosque he...
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites #72
by Bruce Gregory* Roxanne Cabral, Peter Engelke, Katherine Brown, and Anne Terman Wedner, “Diplomacy for a Diffuse World,” Issue Brief, Atlantic Council, September 2014. Cabral (US Department of State and former Atlantic Council senior fellow), Engelke...
De-Romanticizing the Islamic State’s Vision of the Caliphate
CSC has released a new white paper entitled De-Romanticizing the Islamic State’s Vision of the Caliphate. The Executive Summary is below, and you can download the full PDF here. Executive Summary Calls for restoration of the Caliphate are a regular feature of...
ISIL Influence is Fueling Sectarianism in Indonesia
by Mark Woodward* [Editor's note: Yesterday there were news reports that an ISIL-inspired plot to bomb a Carlsberg brewery in Malaysia was foiled.] Iraq and Syria have become magnets for Indonesian jihadists in much the same way that Afghanistan was in the 1990s. Over...
Postdoc Position in Strategic Communication
The Center for Strategic Communication at Arizona State University has a postdoc position available for the 2014-2015 academic year. Required qualifications are a PhD awarded no earlier than 2012 in Communication, Media Studies, or a related field/discipline, and...
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites #70
by Bruce Gregory* J. Samuel Barkin, Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations Theory, (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Barkin (University of Florida) has written a book of primary interest to IR theorists. However, his insights, clear prose, and...
New White Paper: The Narrative Landscape of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
CSC has released a new white paper: The Narrative Landscape of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Executive Summary This report presents the results of an analysis of the narrative landscape produced in texts by and about al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) from 2007...
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites #69
by Bruce Gregory* Hisham Aidi, “America's Hip-Hop Foreign Policy,” The Atlantic, March 20, 2014. Aidi (Columbia University) examines changes in the musical genre hip-hop, its political and cultural dynamics, and its use by US and European governments as an instrument...
Recent Publications from CSC
Security vs. Liberty: The Discourse on Terrorism in the United States and Morocco and Its Societal Effects by Valentina Bartolucci, CSC Visiting Fellow Pre-press open access here. Abstract: This article first analyzes some of the main features of the political...
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites #67
by Bruce Gregory* Christopher Anzalone, “The Nairobi Attack and Al-Shabab's Media Strategy,” CTC Sentinel, October 2013, Vol. 6, Issue 10. Anzalone (McGill University) looks at al-Shabab's media strategy using micro-blogging on Twitter and audio statements by the...
CSC Welcomes Dr. Valentina Bartolucci
by Steven R. Corman The CSC extends a warm welcome to Dr. Valentina Bartolucci. She is a Fulbright Research Scholar resident here during the 2013-2014 academic year, studying public diplomacy as anti-terrorism. Dr. Bartolucci is an Associate Researcher at the...
Aftermath of a Buddhist Shrine Bombing in Indonesia
by Chris Lundry On Sunday evening, August 4, a small bomb detonated at the Ekayana Buddhist shrine in West Jakarta, Indonesia (story here). The blast injured three people and damaged the building, although if the second bomb found at the scene had detonated the toll...
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites #65
by Bruce Gregory* Michele Acuto, “World Politics by Other Means? London, City Diplomacy and the Olympics,” paper delivered at the International Studies Association, San Francisco, April 2013. Acuto (Program for the Future of Cities, University of Oxford) looks at how...
Return of a King: A Cautionary Narrative for Afghanistan
by Steven R. Corman Here is a quiz: In what South Asian war did a country invade to pursue its own interests, overthrow an existing government and establish a client regime, encounter effective resistance by local insurgents despite the superiority of its army, fight...
Narrating the Exit from Afghanistan E-book
by Steven R. Corman Narrating the Exit from Afghanistan is now available in a Kindle version. A description of the book is available here. There is also a brief review by Tom Wein, here. ...
Boston Bombings: Rumor, Conspiracy, Denial
By Chris Lundry It has been over a week since the grisly bombing at the Boston Marathon, and with one perpetrator killed and another captured, analysts are now searching for the “why” and “how” answers. How did a seemingly well-adjusted young man fall under the...
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites #64
by Bruce Gregory* Christina Archetti, Understanding Terrorism in the Age of Global Media: A Communication Approach, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In a book that challenges conventional approaches to understanding the role of the media in terrorism studies, Archetti...
Narrating the Exit from Afghanistan
by Steven R. Corman With the United States and NATO set to withdraw all or most forces from Afghanistan in 2014, a key question is: How do we want to be remembered for our efforts there? The current narrative of the Afghanistan war is a mess. Yet the narrative of the...
Narrative Landmines in Syria
by Steven R. Corman On Thursday, March 20, Small Wars Journal published Narrative Landmines: The Explosive Effects of Rumors in Syria and Around the World by Scott W. Ruston, Chris Lundry, Pauline Hope Cheong and Daniel Bernardi. Ruston and Lundry are Assistant...
The Difference between Story and Narrative
by Steven R. Corman A presentation by John Hagel, Chairman of Deloitte, at the recent SXSW conference has been getting a lot of play in the blogosphere. In it, Hagel advocates differentiating story from narrative. While he is right to draw the distinction and gets...