Global Geopolitics, Heritage Diplomacy & Transnational Cultural Flows

Grincheva, N. (2020). Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age. Routledge.
ISBN 9780815369998, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351251006

Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age explores online museums as sites of contemporary cultural diplomacy.

Building on scholarship that highlights how museums can constitute and regulate citizens, construct national communities, and project messages across borders, the book explores the political powers of museums in their online spaces. Demonstrating that digital media allow museums to reach far beyond their physical locations, Grincheva investigates whether online audiences are given the tools to co-curate museums and their collections to establish new pathways for international cultural relations, exchange and, potentially, diplomacy. Evaluating the online capacities of museums to exert cultural impacts, the book illuminates how online museum narratives shape audience perceptions and redefine their cultural attitudes and identities.

Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age will be of interest to academics and students teaching or taking courses on museums and heritage, communication and media, cultural studies, cultural diplomacy, international relations and digital humanities. It will also be useful to practitioners around the world who want to learn more about the effect digital museum experiences have on international audiences.

Grincheva, N., & Kelley, R. (Eds.) (2019). Non-Western Non-state Diplomacy. Special Issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 14(3). Brill | Nijhoff.
Online ISSN: 1871-191X, Print ISSN: 1871-1901,

In Non-Western Non-state Diplomacy, published as a guest-edited special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, Natalia Grincheva and Robert Kelley present a critical intervention in diplomatic studies. The issue challenges two dominant academic biases: the tendency to evaluate diplomatic practices worldwide through a Western-centric lens and the assumption that non-state diplomatic agency requires Western-style democratic structures to achieve legitimacy.

The volume frameworks a “post-globalist” approach that decentralizes traditional, state-centric models to examine how non-state actors—ranging from domestic NGOs and diaspora groups to private cultural organizations—exercise international influence in non-Western contexts like China, Russia, and Turkey. The volume conceptualizes two primary operational modes: cooperative diplomacy, where hybrid or autonomous non-state structures navigate and thrive alongside authoritarian regimes; and adversarial diplomacy, where non-state actors actively challenge state narratives by engaging directly with foreign publics. By unpacking how unique socio-political histories, global information flows, and emerging technologies shape these non-Western actors, Grincheva and Kelley establish a more pluralistic, epistemologically inclusive framework for understanding global governance and contemporary international relations.

Grincheva, N. and Williams, P. (Eds.) (Forthcoming) Mapping the Korean Wave: Disciplinary Approaches to Hallyu Studies. London: Routledge.

Mapping the Korean Wave: Disciplinary Approaches to Hallyu Studies provides a timely, transformative intervention in global media scholarship by examining how diverse epistemic systems shape our understanding of South Korea’s cultural rise. While existing literature often analyzes the Korean Wave through isolated thematic or regional lenses, this volume adopts an explicit multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological framework.

It convenes perspectives across the humanities and social sciences—from econometrics and political science to ethnography and computational data analysis—to interrogate Hallyu’s multi-scalar impact across macro geopolitical strategies, meso-level fan practices, and micro-level identity formation. Critically, the volume compels contributors to reflect on the distinct theoretical affordances, methodological tools, and implicit biases inherent in their respective fields. By showcasing innovative frameworks, including mixed methods and computational data storytelling, the collection addresses structural gaps and historical myopia in current scholarship. Rather than treating Hallyu merely as a research object, the volume foregrounds interpretive paradigms to model disciplinary synthesis and epistemological self-awareness. Aligned with Routledge's “Internationalizing Media Studies” series, this volume marks the academic maturation of Hallyu Studies, offering a reflexive, globally engaged roadmap for decoding transnational cultural flows in the 21st-century mediascape.