IR 4173 Digital Diplomacy and Strategic Communication

Statecraft in the platform era, how governments, IOs, and non-state actors compete over narratives when reach is mediated by algorithms, bots, and synthetic media rather than press conferences. You'll work through case studies and a research paper analyzing campaigns, mis/disinformation episodes, and crisis responses, with a midterm and final testing your grasp of the conceptual machinery (public diplomacy, strategic communication, platform governance, evaluation metrics). Sitting on top of the IR theory and foreign policy core, it's where students learn to read diplomacy as a contested information environment, useful before any career touching foreign ministries, think tanks, or comms-heavy NGOs.