Museums are increasingly recognized as significant actors in public and cultural diplomacy. This essay examines the international and global webs of relations that museums are steeped in and approaches the global work of museums as a diplomatic activity. In so doing, it recognizes the agency of museums and their diplomatic potential.
The essay analyzes the ways in which the recognition of museums as diplomatic actors speaks to the reshaping of the diplomatic landscape that has widened and leveled the playing field for an increasing number of actors. Museums have become one of myriad actors in the “network” of diplomatic actors that have added to the diplomacy exercised by the “club” of the nation-states. With the resurgence of academic interest in cultural diplomacy, there has been an attendant growth in interest in the role of museums in cultural diplomacy. This essay studies the international work and internationalization of museum work, the ways in which this work is better understood as bridging the local and the global than purely understood as international, and establishes a theoretical framework for museum diplomacy within the context of the “new diplomacy.” It is hoped that this work will contribute to better understanding the international/global work of museums and realizing museum diplomacy as a practice in its own right, which can occasionally, and at times deliberately, be aligned with foreign policy priorities of nation-states, but one that is deeply rooted in the principles, values and interests of the museums themselves.
Museum Diplomacy: Parsing the Global Engagement of Museums was originally published in CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy, a series of papers published by the Center on Public Diplomacy (CPD) at the University of Southern California, in 2021.
Dr. Sascha Priewe held a CPD Research Fellowship from 2019 to 2021.
