Abstract
Moving beyond the laurels garnered at Cairo in 2009 as well as the many missteps experienced over the last decade requires that the 2013 White House and State Department reexamine its reliance on short-term measures and symbolic gestures. This includes administering a bold set of practicable alternatives to enhance direct engagement with global Islamic communities. Neither the “Obama effect” or Pandith’s short-term presence have proven capable of shoring up long-term support. Recent uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa reaffirm this study’s argument that collective grassroots level engagement with global Islamic leadership must soon become a national security priority. These and other developments in the near future will drive US government officials to move beyond employing antiquated one-way transmission models of communication that stop short of reaching the core of Islamic society. This chapter proposes that the US Department of State consider the many worthwhile suggestions that call for the establishment of a new corps of religio-cultural specialists to pursue collective engagement. A dialogue-based “new public diplomacy” requires that we grasp several noteworthy recommendations, which serve as a starting point to initiate a new beginning, which takes seriously state/nonstate actor engagement at the grassroots level. In making this case, this chapter considers Douglas Johnston’s Religion Attaché model to determine the value and limitations of this new specialist as a valuable component in the State Department’s public diplomacy strategy to engage Muslim audiences.
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Notes
See Kenneth M. Pollack, The Arab awakening: America and the Transformation of the Middle East (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2011);
see also John R. Bradley, After the Arab Spring: How the Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Philip M. Seib, Real-time Diplomacy: Politics and Power in the Social Media Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Michele Penner Angrist, “Morning in Tunisia: The Frustrations of the Arab World Boil Over”, in The New Arab Revolt: What Happened, What it Means, and What Comes Next, ed. Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2011), 76–77.
Steven A. Cook, “The U.S.-Egyptian Breakup Washington,” in The New Arab Revolt: What Happened, What it Means, and What Comes Next, ed. Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2011), 87.
Tariq Ramadan makes a unique case on the many voices that shape the principles that define the Arab Spring. This is a defining argument that deserves consideration as US policymakers move forward to engage the Islamic Street. See Tariq Ramadan, Islam and the Arab Awakening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Edward N. Luttwak, “The Missing Dimension,” in Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, ed. Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1994).
Douglas Johnston, Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24–25; See Douglas M. Johnston, “The Case for a Religion Attache,” Foreign Service Journal (February 2002).
Douglas Johnston, Religion, Terror, and Error: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), 88.
Douglas M. Johnston, Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumpeting Realpolitik (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), 24–25.
Arguably, Johnston’s “Religion Attaché” proposal to improve US relations with predominantly religious audiences is the most undervalued post-9/11 recommendation. In working toward restoring relations with these audiences, he recommends that the State Department’s bureaucratic framework might be upgraded in size to accommodate the activity of this new actor via four structural alternatives. Option one “Under this option, a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Religion (DASR) would be assigned to each of the six regional assistant secretaries serving under the Under Secretary for Political Affairs (whose title would be changed to ‘Under Secretary for Political and Religious Affairs’).” Option two “Another alternative, one that would further enhance the consideration of religious imperatives in State Department calculations, would e to establish an Assistant Secretary for Religious Affairs (ASRA) under the Under Secretary for Political and Religious Affairs.” Option three “A third alternative for incorporating religious consideration in DOS decision-making would be to tie them specifically to the public diplomacy function.” Option four “Yet another structural arrangement that might have merit would be to elevate and expand the scope of the existing Office of International Religious Freedom (OIRF) within the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to a stand alone bureau responsible for the oversight of all aspects of religious influence in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.” Douglas M. Johnston, Jr., Religion, Terror, and Error: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement (Colorado: Praeger Publishing, 2011), 219–225.
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© 2012 Darrell Ezell
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Ezell, D. (2012). Considering a Corps of Specialists. In: Beyond Cairo. Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137048493_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137048493_8
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