Deep dives into cultural power, digital diplomacy, and the changing global creative landscapes

Situated within the evolving theoretical discourse on non-state cultural diplomacy, this article examines the unique spatial politics of corporate-led cultural exchange in a non-democratic context through an analysis of China’s K11 Art Malls—hybrid “retail-oriented museums” that fuse contemporary art exhibitions with luxury shopping, dining, and entertainment. As the first study to systematically analyze the spatial dimensions of non-state cultural diplomacy within an authoritarian environment, it investigates how K11 utilizes its hybrid art-retail spaces to perform a strategically depoliticized form of international engagement. The article employs a three-dimensional framework—conceptualizing the mall as a paradoxical Agora, a site of glocal mediation, and a stage for performative depoliticization—to uncover the mechanisms through which commercial and diplomatic objectives are negotiated. Methodologically, it combines critical document analysis with semi-structured interviews of K11 stakeholders, artists, and curators, applying thematic analysis to decode the politics of space in this alternative diplomatic model. The findings reveal that K11’s commercialized, apolitical facade enables it to navigate state pressures and global markets while promoting a national cultural agenda. However, this same corporate logic constitutes its central paradox: by privileging spectacle and consumption, it systematically diminishes the potential for critical discourse and meaningful cross-cultural exchange, ultimately undermining the transformative capacity of the cultural diplomacy it purports to advance. The article concludes that K11’s spatial strategy represents a sophisticated, complementary extension of state soft power, one that simultaneously enables and limits the possibilities of non-state agency in authoritarian systems.

This article introduces Smart Cultural Data Intelligence, a framework integrating cultural data into smart city ecosystems for sustainable urban development. Addressing the gap in research on creative sector data's role and place in urban data ecology, it applies de Kerckhove's (1998) “Connected Intelligence” theoretical model to propose a three-pillar assessment framework for Smart Cultural Data Intelligence across urban policies, data infrastructure and governance. A Singapore case study, chosen for its dual smart and creative city agendas, employs triangulation methodology: policy analysis, governance mapping, and data infrastructure assessment. Findings reveal a policy disjuncture between Singapore's creative and smart city initiatives, limitations in public participation, and the need for robust, integrative data systems to enable cross-sector data sharing for sustainable urban planning. The Singapore case highlights challenges and opportunities in strategically positioning cultural data within a smart city context to recommend a unified policy framework with inclusive data governance and enhanced infrastructure to facilitate cross-sector collaboration. These recommendations emphasize a holistic approach balancing technology, people, and policies. The proposed intelligence evaluation framework is well placed to identify the best practices and challenges in cultural data integration to foster sustainable urban development across cities. The article contributes to the discourse on creative smart city nexus, advocating for nuanced investigation of collaboration barriers existing in urban data ecosystems on the policy, data infrastructure and governance levels.

This article is based on a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the academic literature on cultural diplomacy since its official inception during the midst of the Cold War, in 1959. It draws on mapping, chronology building, and thematic analysis of all scholarship published on cultural diplomacy in the Scopus database, the largest academic database in the world. The research explores how the discipline has evolved, what geographies and thematic areas it covered in the past, and what is the future of this discipline. These explorations start a conversation on cultural diplomacy as an independent academic discipline that most recently has gained a wider and stronger attention and reached a higher stage of scholarly maturity. This article is evidence that the research on CD is rapidly progressing with time, incorporating new thematic areas for exploration as well as covering wider cultural and political geographies. The research findings suggest further trajectories for the development of cultural diplomacy as an academic enquiry, focusing on different diplomatic channels, modes of operation, structures, actors, meanings, and implications.

Tracing transformations in the museum agency under the pressure of the pandemic crisis in 2020, the article conceptualizes museums as dynamic "contact zones" of heritage diplomacy. It explores two foundational components of a contact zone, such as building a social space for a cross-cultural encounter, negotiation and debate as well as offering a platform to address transnational concerns on the heritage decolonization agenda. Drawing on desk research, document analysis and semi-structured interviews with museum professionals, it analyses the case studies of the livestreaming bilateral museum diplomacy and metaverse live heritage pandemic diplomacy, followed by a discussion on the processes of museums decolonization that started to unfold in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. The research argues that the impact of the digitalization pressures did not only affect the ways, forms, and structures of cross-cultural communications in museums, but also moved them a bit forward in their decolonization processes.

The article interrogates if data visualization, despite its inherited subjectivity, can be used not only as a tool for data representation but also as a research platform to facilitate an iterative exploratory process to identify new themes, raise new questions, and generate new knowledge. It addresses this task by pursuing a twofold research goal. On the one hand, it confirms previous findings that have documented the political power of data visualization specifically in the field of scorecard diplomacy. It critically discusses Portland Soft Power 30 Index that measures soft power of selected countries on the annual basis to reveal how the scorecard diplomacy works through the ranking dashboard. On the other hand, the article reflects on the experience of designing a geo-visualization system that, by contrast, intended to overcome shortcomings of data visualization's politics to build a platform for an inductive academic research. It discusses a new deep mapping framework of soft power visualization that intended to address several critical problems of Portland's measurements and shares research insights from the project "Deep Mapping: Creating a Dynamic Web Application Museum Soft Power Map".

The article analyzes the case of museum diplomacy during the Covid-19 global outbreak to illustrate two important trends that were reinforced in the condition of the pandemic. First, it argues that digital innovations achieved by cultural institutions in their international communication in the conditions of mass closures and national lockdowns significantly accelerated and even further legitimized digital diplomacy. During the Covid-19 crisis, for instance, the volume of digital cultural production and its global consumption rate have dramatically increased, paving more reliable avenues for digital communication and even diplomacy. Second, the pandemics prompted cultural actors to take institutional initiatives and complement official cultural diplomacy exchanges, which due to the travel boundaries either temporarily ceased to exist or considerably slowed down.

Cultural diplomacy has traditionally been a strategic instrument of national governments to achieve foreign policy objectives. Nation states have supported the international missions of museums to promote national cultural ideas and values abroad to pursue strategic geopolitical interests. However, in the twenty-first century the complex process of neoliberal globalisation and political decentralisation have transformed traditional cultural diplomacy based on exclusively national projections. There are new forms, channels and narratives of cultural diplomacy that emerge with the appearance of new types of cultural institutions, such as franchise museums, like Guggenheim Bilbao, Hermitage Amsterdam or Louvre Abu Dhabi. This article explores the case of Louvre Abu Dhabi to exemplify the phenomenon of "glocal" museum diplomacy that rests on global ambitions of the local Abu Dhabi government and at the same time draws on national aspirations of France to strengthen its geopolitical presence and influence in the Middle East. The article identifies multiple museum narratives that transform museum diplomacy from a bilateral, state-initiated strategic activity into a multilateral and multidirectional endeavour engaging stakeholders and audiences on local, national and global levels.

The primary ambition of this special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy1 is to approach a certain segment of the diplomatic universe that has been heretofore overlooked, and yet one could argue it is also more than ever pertinent to the effort to understand geopolitical and cultural impacts on governance in contemporary diplomacy.2 The articles that form "Non-State Diplomacy from Non-Western Perspectives" are foremost joined by their challenge to two prevailing tendencies in diplomatic studies scholarship: first, the interpretation of non-Western practices through a predominantly Western lens; and, following from this, that diplomatic action in these contexts is largely confined to state institutions.

The article explores a series of blockbuster exhibitions of DreamWorks Animation developed by the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) in collaboration with one of the largest Hollywood producers. Curated by ACMI, this blockbuster exhibition was designed to provide a behind-the-scenes look into collaborative processes involved in DreamWorks animations. This exhibition travelled across the Asia-Pacific in 2015-2017 and was hosted by a number of museums, such as the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, and the National Taiwan Science and Education Centre in Taiwan. It displayed over 400 unique objects from the studio's archive "of rare and never before displayed material", such as drawings, models, maps, photographs, posters, and other artworks. The article explores the highly favourable reception to the DreamWorks Animation blockbuster in different cities in Asia. It employs a geo-visualization of Asian engagement with the blockbuster exhibit to reveal and explain local and global mechanisms of "attraction" power, generated by DreamWorks in different Asian countries. Contributing to the special issue, this article engages with two aspects of it: the form, cultural digital mapping; and the content, the nature of media pop culture exemplified through the traveling blockbuster.

The article proposes, justifies, and tests a new methodological framework to measure museum "soft power" by employing geo-visualization as a new method empowered by the rapid development of digital humanities. This research not only demystifies the buzz term of "soft power" that is frequently applied in relation to contemporary museums and their international cultural engagements but also develops an evaluation framework to assess museum capacities to exert global impacts. Specifically, the article draws on the academic scholarship outlining a plethora of approaches for "soft power" evaluation, including Resources, Outputs, Perceptions, and Networks evaluation models. It argues for a new integrative approach that can comprehensively combine different methods to construct a more advanced tool to measure museum "soft power". The article draws on preliminary results of developing a digital mapping system to assess museum soft power. It shares findings from the pilot project, Australian Center of the Moving Image (ACMI) on the Global Map, designed in collaboration with the ACMI in Melbourne.

This article explores the "GuggenTube" phenomenon, which was the result of a collaboration between Google and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to celebrate the five‐year anniversary of YouTube. It proposes a case study of the 2010 YouTube Play creative video contest, which featured worldwide user‐generated content to promote pop video culture in museums. Although it was implemented almost a decade ago, YouTube Play remains one of the few online museum projects with such a large global scope and outreach. The online platform attracted thousands of online participants and millions of followers from around the world. It engaged online audiences in numerous debates on the roles and responsibilities of contemporary museums as well as the meaning and function of art. Through digital ethnography, I will analyse the communicative space of YouTube Play, so as to understand the expectations of online users as to their museum experience in the age of digital interactivity. I will argue that the experimental nature of YouTube Play raised much concern among audiences and questioned its cultural value while involving online visitors in truth‐seeking conversations on contemporary arts. In addition, the facilitating role of YouTube Play, which posed important questions for deliberation and led to thought‐provoking dialogue among international online audiences, will be highlighted in the present article.

This study identifies, analyses and compares media content produced by Russian and Chinese TV channels surrounding the events of the fifth BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, in 2013. The study utilizes a comparative frame analysis to deconstruct and explain media messages communicated by Russian and Chinese media representing national identities of the countries through the BRICS summit diplomacy. The study discusses important questions with regard to the cultural, political and economic contexts that shape the perceptions of the roles and ambitions of Russia and China on the world stage. The major findings clearly demonstrate that Russian and Chinese media adopted different rhetorical frames to portray their national identities through the media coverage of the fifth BRICS summit. These positions imply an interior (in the case of China) or a straightforward (in the case of Russia) approach to communicate a form of "collective resistance" to the global arena, where the countries seek larger global recognition and appreciation.

This study aims to explore the influence of social media platforms employed by the internationally recognized museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, in the development and implementation of its famous online participatory project - the World Beach Project. The research looks at the behaviour, size and geographic distribution of international audiences present in various social media spaces of the V&A, particularly in relation to the project. The research intends to assess the influence of social media on the global audience by evaluating online audience engagement with the project through quantitative research, behavioural study and qualitative enquiry. The article consists of two major parts. The first section proposes and explains a theoretical model of online influence-understood in this project as international audience's engagement with and in the social media spaces of the museum. Drawing on traditional museum visitor studies research and emerging methodological approaches utilized in the online world, this part of the article tries to identify and explain the main metric components of the online audience's engagement. The second part of the article tests this model and provides detailed analysis of the online project explored in this study through its online outreach across different social media platforms.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and facilitated by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) through the Museums Connect program, Identities: Understanding Islam in a Cross-cultural Context is an exercise of community development and public inclusion from the perspective of cultural diplomacy. The 2009–10 project was a cooperative endeavor between the Museum of History and Holocaust Education (MHHE) at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA and the Ben M'sik Community Museum, Hassan II University, Casablanca, Morocco. Drawing on interviews conducted with the AAM managers and project participants, as well as relevant literature, the discussion considers the more important mechanisms of American museum missions and practices as means of achieving American foreign-policy objectives.

In this paper I would like to consider Foucault's critique of institutions as a form of political power by looking at museums, which claim to operate independently on a global scale and indeed seem to be driven exclusively by institutional logic and interests outside the control of their nation states. However, their international communication and global public relations activities have significant implications in international politics and contribute to the official governmental efforts in cultural diplomacy. For example, the Guggenheim museum revolutionized the professional world of museums with new corporate politics of “global” museum franchise, based on the late capitalism logic. Though the Guggenheim has remained quite controversial in the professional museum world in terms of programming, exhibitions, and audience development, it brought significant transformations to the historical development of museums agency around the world through introducing such new processes as corporatization and global expansionism.

Building on Tony Bennett's (1995) understanding of a museum as a "civic laboratory", this study advances this framework by researching a museum space in a virtual world. It shows that an online museum can be understood as a "placeless" space of a "civic laboratory" by analyzing visitor research methodologies that are utilized online. Through comparison of traditional museum-visitor research tools and methods with the ones that online museum spaces employ, this article seeks to demonstrate that the online museum environment is equipped with a plethora of tools that make it a laboratory-type research setting where visitor studies are conducted. The analysis reveals that the historical development of online museum-audience research has gone through methodological stages similar to those of traditional visitor research.

Drawing on the Virtual Museum of the Pacific case study, my research explores epistemological differences between Western and Indigenous Pacific cultural systems of understanding and conceptualization of cultural memory and identity. The article critically analyses the digital repatriation and preservation project "The Virtual Museum of the Pacific", developed by the Australian Museum in 2010. The main goal of this research is to identify and explain some major epistemological problems and cross-cultural misunderstandings which emerged as a result of an attempt to preserve in electronic format the largest ethnographic collection of Pacific cultures.

This study discusses several issues that museums face when utilizing social media in their international communication. This discussion is framed within the discourse of the new cultural diplomacy and this paper proposes a specific role for museums in cross-cultural diplomatic relations. This new model for contemporary museums as vehicles for a "trans-cultural encounter", or a "forum" is based on the shift within museum institutional structures across communication, educational and political dimensions. Drawing on empirical materials, this study identifies three specific ways in which museums can use social media in their international diplomatic endeavours. The first section discusses how social technology can aid museums in responding to issues and concerns originating from foreign communities. This is followed by a discussion of how social media can connect foreign audiences to the cultural content of museums through direct participation activities. Finally, social media can enhance cultural exchange among people from different cultural communities by bringing them together online for collaborative activities.

The study outlines the problematic framework of the emerging field of digital diplomacy in the social, cultural, and economic dimensions through a close reading of Stiegler's philosophical concept of the techno-culture. The research intends to raise important questions regarding international communications in a new light of phenomenology of collective individuation. Stiegler's philosophical conception of contemporary politics under the condition of globalized cultural and economic capitalism is one way to explain the dramatic changes in diplomatic relations taking place on the global arena at the beginning of the new century. Stiegler's techno-cultural project has significant implications for digital diplomacy as a practical discipline and can be successfully utilized to improve its future development based on the more productive engagement with social, economic, and political issues in a theoretical context. The study tries to deepen the understanding of the political and economic mechanisms in the international communication and diplomatic activities complicated and challenged with the advance of digital technologies in the global capitalism system.

The research explores the UK digital diplomacy through rhetorical lenses of the European discourse on cultural agenda. The paper utilizes frame analysis to investigate the nature and objectives of digital diplomacy in the political context of the UK. The study argues that the UK as a part of the European Community successfully employs in its diplomatic discourse five rhetorical policy frames developed and promoted by UNESCO and European Commission. These frames help the UK to identify its own diplomatic goals with the international priorities of cultural development and, as a result, aid the country to project its positive image to the outside world. These policy frames include: preservation of cultural heritage, access to creative content, protection of cultural diversity, strengthening intercultural dialogue, as well as fostering development and the creative economy. The study reveals that despite the interactive and participative potential of digital diplomacy to facilitate cross-cultural cooperation, the UK digital diplomacy hardly goes beyond traditional cultural promotion.

Within the last years, the U.S. government significantly cut funding for cultural and arts diplomacy. While arts exchanges constitute a core component of public diplomacy in many countries, recently, the U.S. arts diplomacy has not been carried out properly by the government, nor by private or public sectors. Although the international image of the U.S. has shattered, the public is reluctant to urge the government to take a lead in arts diplomacy again. A unique perception of arts in American society, prevalence of democratic and "free market" principles, and dominance of international cultural trade policy keep the debate about the governmental role in arts diplomacy in progress.