The Return of Media Diplomacy, Examples from Kosovo
Hasan Saliu, Gazmend Abrashi
Abstract
Media diplomacy during this century has been abandoned by scholars. This happened because after the Cold War states focused on campaigns to promote themselves to foreign audiences. However, the geopolitical clashes over Kosovo and the war in Ukraine resumed the activities that take place in media diplomacy. For this reason, the paper aims to analyze Kosovo's media diplomacy in these key moments: before and after the declaration of independence and now in the time of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Several global media such as CNN, Al Jazeera, Reuters, The New York Times etc. that have given space to Kosovo’s political actors and important global politicians such as US president Bush, have been monitored and these messages have been analysed using the frame method. The paper concludes that with in the case of Kosovo has restored the concept of media diplomacy because only this concept can explain these international communications and not the concept of public diplomacy, so much used in the studies of the last two decades. Also, media diplomacy today establishes communications between countries that do not have diplomatic relations and even hostile ones.
Keywords
communication, diplomacy, media diplomacy, public diplomacy, international communication.
