Abstract
International organisations (IOs) are increasingly going public by pursuing proactive public communication. How is this trend changing the terms under which global public debates on international issues take place? The article argues that IO public communication may have highly problematic repercussions for public discourse, because it tends to prioritise some voices, while marginalising others. I discuss a problematic prioritisation/marginalisation of voices in relation to three logics of public communication. First, as public information, public communication privileges organisational leaders by heralding their official narrative of goals, internal processes and outside action. Second, as governance, it strategically sides with norm entrepreneurs and orchestrates advocacy campaigns. Third, as self-legitimation, it seeks to construct symbolically procedural fairness and inclusiveness. Based on these logics, public communication may play a questionable role in marginalising critics of IO policies and procedures while facilitating public (mis)perceptions of its democratic credentials and the depoliticisation of institutional inequalities. My argument is illustrated by the results obtained from a combined reconstructive and quantitative text analysis of the United Nations’ communications in the Arms Trade Treaty process.
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Notes
From the vantage point of established concepts on the organisation of public communication, my focus is arguably on ‘public relations’ as ‘the management of communication between an organisation and its publics’ (Grunig and Hunt 1984, pp. 6–8). However, that term is less appealing than ‘public communication’ because public relations tend to be associated with normative expectations of professionalism and ‘excellence’. Similarly, communication scholars and practitioners have suggested the use of terms like ‘public diplomacy’ (L’Etang 2009; Altman and Shore 2014), ‘information policy’ (Brüggemann 2008), ‘transparency’ (Grigorescu 2007) or ‘development communication’ (Servaes 2007) in order to focus on specific aspects or qualities, all of which arguably fall under my deliberately more comprehensive understanding of IO ‘public communication’ as defined above.
Biased reporting may also have positive effects from a normative viewpoint. For example, by over-representing certain voices, IO public communication might in some way compensate for their public marginalisation, thus substantially fostering democratic inclusiveness. However, my argument is not about the overall inclusiveness of public debates (or discourses) but about the inclusiveness of public communication in terms of fair reporting of internal voices.
However, IO public communication according to this line of reasoning can, in ideal-typical terms, be expected to facilitate public inclusion of voices only to the extent that the internal policy process has been inclusive itself with regard to relevant stakeholders (in terms of groups affected by respective policies, see Karlsson 2008; Brühl 2010). I thank one reviewer for making me aware of this limitation and for shedding light on the importance of institutional inclusiveness.
A milestone in this campaign was the ‘Million Faces’ petition, successfully organised by activists and handed over to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2006. This event received substantial media attention and had significant impact on national governments’ understanding of the issue in subsequent years (Holtom and Wezeman 2007).
This reassurance has been articulated by various affiliates, including Argentina’s ambassador to the UN, who chaired the preparatory process for the negotiations, Roberto Garcia Moritan (UN press conference on 9 July, 2010), and representatives from Amnesty International, the World Council of Churches, and on various occasions the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs (see, e.g. United Nations Department of Public Information 2013e).
Iran, Syria and North Korea reportedly prevented the adoption of the ATT because ‘it was flawed and failed to ban weapons sales to rebel groups’ (Reuters, 28 March, 2013).
The US administration supported this move, because it believed that the negotiated treaty text no longer undermined US constitutional rights (Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Countryman, Reuters, 28 March, 2013).
This reflects a conditional shift in the US position under the Obama administration towards supporting a strong ATT (US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to Reuters, 14 October, 2009). The US administration held this position right up to the very end of negotiations, in order to be able to ‘block any treaty that undermined the U.S. constitutional right to bear arms’ (Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Countryman, Reuters, 28 March, 2013). Important to note, however, is that support for the consensus rule went far beyond the US administration, including two other permanent members of the Security Council, China and Russia, and India and Indonesia representing the Non-Aligned Movement.
E.g. Lebanon and Iran (United Nations Department of Public Information 2013d).
Note that respective claims made in the following are descriptive (i.e. not causal) as I do not provide any independent observations of communication models (and by implication, underlying motives) and communication practices. Expectations about privileged reporting of specific voices are derived from alternative models, therefore, observing matching patterns of reporting suggests that the respective model has indeed been at work in the ATT case. However, the empirical link between the models and selectivities itself is assumed and not empirically tested.
UN Radio can be accessed and livestreamed by listeners directly online, or picked up, free of charge, in rebroadcasts by other media organisations worldwide. See, in this regard, http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/information-for-broadcasters/.
I chose a simple random sample (over its alternative, namely stratified random sampling) for two principal reasons. First, stratified random sample is usually deemed more efficient where researchers are interested in parameters of subgroups. However, this is not my concern here. Second, the estimation of standard errors is more complex for stratified random samples compared to simple random samples, adding a significant number of new parameters for a limited amount of information contained in the data. The sample was drawn using www.random.org.
This included material from campaigners and diplomats commenting on the major disputes during negotiations—e.g. Amnesty International (2013) and Oxfam International (2013); as well as parts of the academic literature on the ATT negotiations—e.g. Holtom and Wezeman (2007), Bromley et al. (2012) and Clapham et al. (2016).
Coding included information on whether the preference was articulated as an absolute evaluation in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or as a relative call for ‘more’ or ‘less’ vis-à-vis the negotiated agreement at a specific point in time.
UNDPI output was ultimately processed by two coders using Atlas.ti-software. Intercoder reliability was tested using a random sample of 50 documents (25 documents of meetings coverage, 15 files of UNDPI News, 5 files each of UN Radio and 5 files of UNifeed transcripts). Krippendorff’s Alpha was estimated using the online tool CAT (see http://cat.texifter.com for details on computational issues and Lombard et al. 2002 for a general discussion of intercoder reliability in this context). The estimated Alpha is 0.83 for the correct identification of ATT-related statements, and ranges from 0.82 to 0.91 for the identification of actors. Respective values for the correct categorising of policy stances range from 0.72 to 0.95.
Note that the coding of actor categories was intentionally based on their role as ascribed by UNDPI. This is based on the assumption that strategic reporting of UNDPI may include the selective ascription of actors’ roles.
Phase 1 includes early calls for a treaty and the ATT working group process up to the end of 2009; phase 2 covers the four sessions of the Preparatory Committee held between 2010 and April 2012; phase 3 is dominated by the first ATT conference in 2012; phase 4 covers the second ATT conference and the subsequent vote in the UN General Assembly; and phase 5 ends with the First Conference of States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty late-August 2015.
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Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was funded by the German Research Foundation (‘The Communicated IO’, EC 323/1-2). Essential research assistance by Sarah Klosterkamp, Stefan Wiechmann, Flora Wild, Manuel Hofmann, Mary Kelley-Bibra and Roisin Cronin is gratefully acknowledged. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft Kongress 2015, Duisburg-Essen; the International Studies Association Annual Convention 2016, Atlanta; the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Session of Workshops 2016, Pisa; and the European Consortium for Political Research General Conference 2016, Prague. I wish to give special thanks to Alejandro Esguerra, Magda Müller, Bernd Schlipphak, Ada Boté, Lisa Delmuth, Maja Granitz, Thomas Risse, Simon Koschut, Ingo Peters, Sabrina Zajak, Antonia Witt, Brian Rathbun and both reviewers for very helpful comments.
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Ecker-Ehrhardt, M. IO public communication and discursive inclusion: how the UN reported the Arms Trade Treaty process to a global audience. J Int Relat Dev 23, 385–413 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-018-0143-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-018-0143-3