bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shakespeare, Race, and Feminist Critique
Authors: Howard Jean E.
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses the relationship of feminism and critical race studies in early modern scholarship by taking Shakespeare’s Othello and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen as case studies. Arguing that race and gender are interconnected systems of social difference, the chapter makes the case for an intersectional criticism alert to the many ways early modern race was conceptualized and to how early modern gender distinctions were affected by class and sexuality as well as by race. If, in Othello, race is primarily conceived within a Black/white binary, in The Two Noble Kinsmen it is best defined by distinctions between those of one’s kind and kin and those who are not. The chapter identifies the aggregation of traits and capacities that allows some characters to be recognized as of one kind, while excluding and negating others. For both plays, a feminist lens reveals the relational connections between categories of difference and the contradictions and multiplier effects stemming from their imbrication.
Shakespeare and Mixed Race
Authors: Grady Kyle
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers how early modern English routines of exceptionalizing racial mixing distort more accurate understandings of how mixedness often factored in the period. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus offers key examples of such routines, representing procreative racial mixing as a novel and foreboding matter. But mixedness did not reliably factor in the period as anywhere near as ostensibly consequential as it does in Titus. Shakespeare’s early tragedy demonstrates instead the extent to which the topic could be instrumentalized. While mixedness was rendered urgent in some instances, it was frequently downplayed or rendered immaterial in others, depending, in part, on the exigencies of developing racist practice and ideology. As this chapter contends, such deemphasis is key to representations of racial Blackness on the early modern English stage.
‘Let fair humanity abhor the deed’
Authors: Mendoza Kirsten N.
Published: January 2024

The root word ‘human’ appears approximately forty-seven times in twenty-two works from Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus and poetry. Generally, Shakespeare incorporates the term ‘human’ to denote two issues: (1) inclusion or exclusion from a particular group and (2) the treatment and behaviours that members of a specific community or kind are expected to share and reciprocate towards one another. Writing more than 300 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was codified in 1948, Shakespeare presented being human as inextricably bound to questions of belonging and to processes of exclusion as well as to the principles and ideologies that are expected to guide interactions among people. Through analysing Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece and his plays The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, and The Comedy of Errors, this chapter analyses how Shakespeare’s works advocated for an expansion of the rights and protections of specific disenfranchised individuals. His corpus reveals that a call to recognize a shared humanity is a call for reciprocity that acknowledges the self-possession and self-determination of others—two concepts that have been integral to the understanding of basic human rights. However, Shakespeare’s works also evince the threat to privilege that such calls for recognition entails, since attending to human rights requires the circumscription of power and the limitation of privilege. Shakespeare, then, participates simultaneously in the expansion for rights, protections, and privileges as well as in the discursive production of justifications for racial prejudice and the differential treatment among people.
Shakespeare, Race, and Disability
Authors: Dhar Amrita
Published: January 2024

The critical and imaginative points of departure for this chapter reside in the questions: How did Othello come to be in Venice? What did he leave behind, and what did he learn on his way? Did he ever arrive? Did he belong? And where is he now? This chapter discusses Othello through critical and creative voices in postcolonial studies, migration studies, premodern critical race studies, and disability studies to examine the mutually informing forces of colonialism, empire-making, disability-making, and race-making that operate in the play. It reads selected moments in Shakespeare’s play, and engages with Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona, to ultimately suggest possible pasts, presents, and futures for Othello and his transgeographical families.
Shakespeare and Race
Authors: Della Gatta Carla
Published: January 2024

The Oral Histories Project is a series of interviews with fourteen actors, directors, producers, and playwrights. Portions from each interview are grouped together by topic, placing the interviewees in a conversation-style format. The artists are from different countries whose experiences vary greatly in the making of Shakespeare. Interviews focused on the nuanced ways that Shakespeare and race intersect, from various definitions of race to actor training and language/accent work to changes in characterization due to concept settings or casting choices, changes in theme, pacing, and style due to a racially focused setting for a Shakespeare play, or anything else pertaining to the experience of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) artists working on Shakespeare. The Oral Histories models how theatre-making is a form of criticism and it serves as a model for scholarship that centres artists.
Editing Shakespeare and Race
Authors: Adams Brandi K.
Published: January 2024

Through an examination of a very early instance of the word ‘editor’ that occurs in William Prynne’s anti-theatrical tract Histrio-mastix (1633), this chapter considers carefully the history and implications of editing Shakespeare plays in which early modern conceptions of race—a subject matter that has been a significant area of study for the last forty years—have largely been marginalized or ignored. This tendency may be the result of an editorial aversion to considering race as a significant factor in the performance, printing, and publication of Shakespeare’s plays, or an investment in the seemingly neutral, scientific language and rhetoric of influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors W.W. Greg, R.B. McKerrow, A.W. Pollard, and other practitioners of New Bibliography. These particular white, male, early editors of Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) seemed to operate under the premise that they were able to edit in a neutral, objective way that could produce the clearest uncontroversial text possible for literary scholars and other readers. Their work also obfuscated a reality: that the editing of early modern plays is not a neutral endeavour and that the choices editors make both affect and shape social, political, and even racial histories. By employing the work of premodern critical race scholars, this chapter attempts to trace a history that connects the antiblackness connected to the first use of the term ‘editor’, to consider the importance of race in contemporary editorial practices.
Translation at the Intersections of Shakespeare and Race
Authors: Modenessi Alfredo Michel
Published: January 2024

Shakespeare’s works make hard, ever-accruing demands on translators because the multiple energies at work in their complex design change and expand unceasingly, together with Shakespeare itself, with societies and cultures, and with translation. Chief among the translator’s tasks, then, is to tackle those demands head-on for stage artists to do right by their art and their publics. The intersections of ‘race’ with Shakespeare, and the presence thereby of racism and kindred forms of prejudiced differentiation in his works—and in critical literature—pose a major challenge. What should a thorough translator do about it? What has been done? Translational choices have been and will be made according to specific reasons and circumstances. What are they? How do they relate to text, to stage, to people? This chapter explores artefacts, objects, and events where Shakespeare and race meet and pull translation towards answers to their conflictive intersections.
An Interview with Artist Fred Wilson, 30 July 2021
Authors: Erickson Peter , Corrin Lisa Graziose
Published: January 2024

This contribution consists of an edited conversation between the Black artist, Fred Wilson; literary scholar, Peter Erickson; and art historian/curator, Lisa Graziose Corrin. The conversation focuses on Wilson’s ongoing engagement with Shakespeare’s play, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Wilson’s interest in Othello began in 2003, when he represented the United States in the distinguished international exhibition, the Venice Biennale. The title of his Biennale installation, Speak of Me as I Am, evokes the tragic final speech uttered by Othello, just before he kills himself. Shakespeare’s play has continued to be a rich source of inspiration for his reflections on race and representation for nearly twenty years. A brief introduction by Erickson argues for the value of cross-historical, contemporary re-visionings of Shakespeare’s work by contemporary writers and artists for expanding understanding of his work and amplifying its relevance to the present.
Shakespeare and Race on Screen
Authors: Sen Amrita
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the plural and often contradictory ways in which race travels in Shakespeare adaptations in Indian cinema. The role of race, and racialized characters in Shakespeare, has come under renewed focus in recent years, as has the growing field of Global Shakespeares. The question remains: how does race figure in screen adaptations of the Bard outside of Anglo-American contexts, particularly in the Indian subcontinent? This chapter will turn to Ajoy Kar’s Bengali film Saptapadi (1961), Jayaraaj’s Malayalam film Kaliyattam (1997), and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Bollywood movie Omkara (2006) to show how race in Othello translated into caste in post-independence India. On the other hand, neither race nor caste seem to play any obvious role in Bornila Chatterjee’s The Hungry (2017). An adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Chatterjee’s film erases the multi-racial and imperial setting of the play, and the figure of Aaron the Moor becomes effectively indistinguishable from the other characters.
Teaching Shakespeare and Race in Communities of Colour
Authors: Espinosa Ruben
Published: January 2024

While Shakespeare’s iconic status often results in views that take his value as a given, on the US-Mexico border it is imperative that this understood currency is scrutinized without reservation. Because the issue of linguistic identity is so often fraught for Chicanxs in the United States, Shakespeare’s language is often seen as both a marker of that which one ought to aspire to, engage, and apprehend and that which is altogether inaccessible. Through experience teaching at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), the author does not seek to make students appreciate Shakespeare’s language for the legacy it has already left, but rather invite them to consider how their view of Shakespeare—how their apprehension of what his works and his words have to offer—stands to redefine the legacy he leaves in their border community.
‘Reading’ Shakespeare as Political Activism
Authors: Hall Kim F.
Published: January 2024

The popular Black Shakespeare performers of the nineteenth century were known as Shakespeare ‘readers’. Barred from the dominant stage, these actors performed a fragmented Shakespeare often interspersed with popular Black poetry, their own writings, and music. This chapter uses ‘reader’ as a point of departure for identifying ‘Shakespearean’ performers, writers, and intellectuals in three case studies from nodal points of Black freedom struggle. These moments—in Brazil, South Africa, and the USA—bring to the fore questions of race and Black freedom while creating spaces for unlearning and developing various literacies. They also provide ways of addressing the role of pleasure in institution building and social transformation. It is suggested that Shakespeare has played an important (if fragmentary and variable) role in forging political subjects and communities of action.
‘In her prophetic fury’
Authors: Mehdizadeh Nedda
Published: January 2024

This chapter advocates for a student-centred and culturally responsive approach to studying Shakespeare which can encourage students to become active participants in producing knowledge about his works. By empowering students to engage with Shakespeare’s world from their own perspectives, educators can affirm the subject positions from which students’ ideas are born while guiding them through engaged instruction on critical modes of intervention. The chapter focuses discussion on a course unit that pairs Othello with Djanet Sears’s play Harlem Duet (1997) and argues that a close study of Sears’s play alongside Othello enhances students’ interpretation of early modern racial formation and the long-lasting effects of racism. By examining Harlem Duet, an adaptation that is a critical intervention in Shakepeare’s racial politics, students deepen their critical thinking skills about race, racial formation, and racism in Shakespeare’s time as well as their own.
Trans Studies at the Crossroad
Authors: Joubin Alexa Alice
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that race and gender are social practices that evolve over time, in each other’s presence, and in different social spaces. To correct the early modern studies’ tendency to privilege narrative texts, this chapter uses global and performance studies methods—as critical tools that are designed to capture transformative cultural practices—to highlight embodied significations of transness. The chapter concludes with a reflection on pedagogical implications of multidisciplinarity. Providing critical tools to understand atypical bodies, trans studies solidifies critical race studies’ support of minority life experiences. Critical race methods, with their attention to the social production of hierarchies, can also help trans studies address its often-unacknowledged whiteness.
Casting Shakespeare Today
Authors: Della Gatta Carla
Published: January 2024

This chapter expands widely-used casting categories such as ‘colour blind’ and ‘colour-concept’ from four categories (as quoted in Thompson) to nine categories. It also addresses the rationale for removing ‘colour’ as the primary focus of casting decisions and provides new terminology that shifts away from ableist language (such as problematic usage of ‘blind’). The chapter puts forward terms such as ‘Nondeliberate Identity Casting’ as ‘Identity Conscious Casting’ instead. Citing diverse artists and casting scholars throughout, this chapter is the culmination of more than a decade of research and practice in the theatre. The chapter closes with a critical analysis of the factors that inform questions of dramaturgy, ethics, authenticity, and positionality in casting practices. The new and expanded vocabulary about casting is necessary for a wider conversation about staging and the aesthetic considerations and ethical practices of theatre-making.
Shakespeare and Critical Race Theory
Authors: Chakravarty Urvashi
Published: January 2024

This chapter begins by tracing some of the key arguments and developments in critical race theory, with a particular focus on its provenance in legal studies, its systemic analysis of the operations of race and race-making, its interventions into an understanding of whiteness as property, its theory of interest convergence, and its emphasis on intersectionality. The chapter then turns to the critical directions in Shakespeare studies which have originated in and have been influenced by critical race theory. The third and final part of this chapter suggests that thinking with critical race theory as a methodology unfolds new ways of understanding the operations of systemic racial inequity in The Merchant of Venice, in particular its fiction of equal protection and its framework of interest convergence, and the chapter ends with a brief reading of the operations of whiteness in Measure for Measure.
The Oral Histories
Authors: Della Gatta Carla
Published: January 2024

Each of the artists were asked about how they identify, how others identify them, and about the very language we use to discuss identity—which differs across countries and generations. These conversations revealed that the complexity of identity cannot be reduced to any one factor including race—and that gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, immigration patterns, and more, are intricately tied to any conversation about race. Identity involves multiple histories—political, economic, familial, personal, etc., extending through time to one’s recent personal history. As many of the artists note, the language for identity has changed during their lifetimes, and this both informs and reflects their own self-identification. The artists reveal the insufficiency of language to capture one’s identity and the ongoing struggle this produces professionally and onstage.
The Oral Histories
Authors: Della Gatta Carla
Published: January 2024

For theatre artists, the space and origin of where language is located in the body has as much to do with actor training as it does with identity. The artists had much to say about the location of sound, and how varied experiences in the conservatory or classroom were in dialogue with their own corporeal knowledge and experience. The conversation about finding rhythm in the body shifted between musicality, breath, movement, and the body as tool for storytelling. Shakespeare’s poetry is a music on its own, and the path to embodying those sounds is both destination and practice for work with other playwrights.
The Oral Histories
Authors: Della Gatta Carla
Published: January 2024

The processes for directing and performing Shakespeare vary widely, but all of the artists continuously circled back to two primary elements: language and collaboration. The approaches to Shakespearean language referenced in this chapter run the gamut from folio technique, to dramaturgical research, to Method acting, to political-social analysis. Each approach serves the artist in their craft. With collaboration, the approaches run the gamut as well, and in each case, the work of collaboration reflects the importance of a diversity of artists and a diversity of processes in approaching art-making in order to create new meaning from Shakespeare’s plays. The artists share their approaches for linguistic translation and for artistic translation for the stage.
The Oral Histories
Authors: Della Gatta Carla
Published: January 2024

The artists spoke about their connections to Shakespeare throughout our conversations. This chapter closes with some of their comments that expose the range of relationships: discovering the depth of characters, how we conceptualize and portray emotions and identities, how Shakespearean acting informs their work as artists more widely, the engagement with Shakespeare’s language and stories, and what the plays open up for us about how we make choices, tell stories, and communicate. Each artist articulates strategies and/or objectives for engaging with Shakespeare’s plays. They also discuss where Shakespearean stories and their training techniques for Shakespeare manifest in contemporary plays and media.
Shakespeare, Race, and Adaptation
Authors: Green MacDonald Joyce
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines blackface minstrelsy as an example of race’s function in Shakespearean adaptation in the Atlantic world. Rooted in popular culture as it drew on the high culture resources of Shakespeare but far from being mere entertainment, minstrelsy remade him into an instrument for naturalizing social, linguistic, and especially racial hierarchies. Black performers’ and theatre makers’ own work with Shakespeare forms a second strand in the history of race and adaptation, as they moved towards achieving onstage representation independent of the minstrel tradition and the principles of white supremacy that it performed for public consumption. Through its development of black cultural institutions and the solicitation of black audiences, this second aspect of the relationship between Shakespeare, race, and adaptation points to the creative and performance potential freed when a range of makers can define their own relationship to the Shakespearean text.
Shakespeare, Race, and Movement
Authors: Oh Elisa
Published: January 2024

This chapter posits that early modern racial formations in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth appear in patterns of repeated physical motion such as travel routes, religious rituals, and service. Kinetic paradigms that carry culturally specific meanings can create and maintain ideologies of human alterity that are used to naturalize unjust social hierarchies. The witches’ repetitively traced movement trajectories connect them to other early modern discourses of racialization like geohumoralism, conversion, and perpetual enslavement. Three ‘choreographies’ construct the witches as somatically and spiritually different from other humans: (1) the choreography of ‘strange’ foreign travel encompasses the witches’ interventions in James I’s Stuart dynasty as well as English maritime trade with their colonial consumption of African and Asian bodies; (2) the choreography of their circle dancing comprises religious rituals of satanic conversion in grotesque parodies of Catholic sacramental liturgies; and (3) the choreography of a subordinate subject’s service to a master entraps the witches and Macbeth himself with hubris and damnation.
‘Rac’d all over their Bodies’
Authors: Grier Miles P.
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that the English developed an identity as a bookish people in innumerable quotidian acts, including meditations on the tattoo in travel narrative and stage practices of blacking. Travel writers such as William Towerson and Aphra Behn translated the autochthonous tattoos of Africans into figurative clothing, thus sewing a marker of European social status into the skin. This figurative work both robbed Black Africans of authority as makers of signs and created the possibility that African skin, even without tattoos, could serve as a status marker. To illustrate the unfolding of this cultural work, the chapter discusses the mixed practice of the lost Oxford masque Mr. Moore’s Revels, which employs blackface and clothing as overlapping techniques for blacking up. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the distinct fates of convicts in Titus Andronicus and Henry V to suggest the potentially redeemable European identity that emerges in relation to an African body seen as tattooed with a permanent convict’s mark.
Introduction
Authors: Bjola Corneliu , Manor Ilan
Published: January 2024

The chapter explores the impact of technological disruption on diplomacy, highlighting its capacity for both destruction and creation. It explains that while new technologies can create new economic and social opportunities, they also disrupt traditional ways of working and collaborating, leading to resistance against them. The chapter also differentiates between the terms ‘digitization’ and ‘digital diplomacy’, with digitization referring to the technical aspect of adopting digital technologies in diplomatic work and digital diplomacy encompassing a broader perspective of the role of digital technology in diplomacy. The chapter then discusses the ‘grammar rules’ that control the logic of interaction in the digital space, such as visual simplicity, emotional framing, computational personalization, and engagement hybridization. The chapter argues that, similarly to how grammar rules govern verbal communication, these mechanisms govern digital communication. They have challenged ministries of foreign affairs and international organizations (MFAs and IOs) to adapt so they can maintain their ability to meaningfully influence policy outcomes in the international arena. Drawing on the theory of the social construction of technology, the chapter explains why MFAs and IOs respond differently to the pressure of digital disruption. It concludes with a discussion of five patterns of disruption of diplomacy under the impact of digital technologies (from below, from above, from aside, through diffusion, and through crisis) and how the contributions to this volume analytically illuminate each category.
Digital Cultural Diplomacy
Authors: Grincheva Natalia
Published: January 2024

The chapter identifies and describes major transformations of cultural diplomacy in the conditions of increasing digitalization and platformization to propose a new typology of cultural diplomacy actors. Focusing on the roles they play in the global digital space and the power they can accumulate to exert impact, the chapter explores cultural diplomacy actors from the perspective of their involvement in the processes of digital cross-cultural communications. It argues that traditional government actors of cultural diplomacy in the digital realm increasingly become more dependent on cultural institutions and communities who serve as key cultural content providers. Furthermore, their activities in the digital domain are shaped by interfaces, digital capabilities, and algorithms of dominant communication platforms, designed by transnational corporations as main digital infrastructure builders. Finally, they operate in a very dynamic communication space populated by various opinion makers, including individual influencers, who accumulate a significant diplomatic power to shape global discourses. Providing provocative illustrations to describe major functions of each actor, the chapter exposes a highly saturated, heterogeneous, and complex nature of global cross-cultural communications that requires a more nuanced actors’ typology to help its deeper analysis.
Digital Propaganda and Diplomacy
Authors: Surowiec-Capell Paweł
Published: January 2024

This chapter delves into the connection between digital propaganda and diplomacy, examining the political implications and epistemic position of propaganda in academic discourses on media and communication. While propaganda is often seen as a neutral term in the analysis of persuasive communication, it takes on a different meaning in the realm of international politics as it is often used by diplomatic actors with partisan foreign policy goals. With the rise of digitalization, propaganda has undergone a re-invention in hybrid media landscapes, making it a crucial topic to explore in the field of diplomacy. The chapter assesses the episteme of digital propaganda in relation to other related concepts, such as digital diplomacy, disinformation, and misinformation. It also examines the relationships between diplomatic actors and the roles and activities they undertake in digital propaganda, using case studies such as Russia’s intervention in the 2016 US presidential elections and EU membership referendum in the UK and the ‘LGBT-free zones’ in Poland. Theoretical approaches to digital propaganda are also discussed, from classical models to their adaptations to current media landscapes. The chapter concludes by highlighting emerging trends that are affecting the use and impact of digital propaganda in diplomacy.
The Digital Hybridization of Ministries of Foreign Affairs
Authors: Bjola Corneliu , Kļaviņš Didzis
Published: January 2024

Drawing on assemblage theory, the chapter advances a novel theory of digital hybridization to explain the transformative impact of digital technology on the practice of diplomacy. We define digital hybridization as an ordering process by which new structures with a distinct internal logic (digital assemblages) are formed through the co-junction and co-evolution of digital and diplomatic components that ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs) combine in pursuit of their foreign policy objectives. After comparing the digital experience of six Nordic and Baltic MFAs, we have found evidence to distinguish between three different models of digital assemblages: the compact (Sweden and Denmark), the mosaic (Finland and Lithuania), and the canvas (Latvia and Estonia). The chapter contributes to the study of digital diplomacy by providing an account of how digital hybridization occurs, what happens as a result, and how digital diplomatic assemblages evolve.
Digital Diplomatic Cultures
Authors: Wiseman Geoffrey
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the novel idea of ‘digital diplomatic cultures’, examining how digital technologies are impacting diplomacy in different forms and regions. It argues that current research often overstates the impact of digitalization on diplomacy and understates the variations within different types of diplomacy. The chapter examines the impact of digital technologies on four main types of diplomacy: bilateral (relations between two states), multilateral (relations between three or more states), polylateral (relations between states and non-state actors), and omnilateral (relations between non-state actors). It finds that bilateral diplomacy is the most resistant to digital practices, while trends in the European Union suggest that multilateralism is developing a stronger digitally oriented culture. In state–non-state diplomacy, a digital-driven polylateral culture is emerging at the United Nations and in tech-savvy countries. With respect to the fourth type of diplomacy—omnilateralism—the chapter explores the potential for a neo-Kantian global community to emerge through the growth of transnational interactions between organized non-state actors and individuals communicating via digital means. Overall, the chapter suggests that all four dimensions of diplomacy are developing their own unique blend of analogue and digital practices, resulting in a wide variety of digital diplomatic cultures.
The Digital Adaptation of International Bureaucracies
Authors: Ecker-Ehrhardt Matthias
Published: January 2024

International organizations’ bureaucracies are important facilitators and authorities of global governance that increasingly use digital means of communication—such as websites, email, social media, or mobile apps—to address their audiences directly. How do they deal with the opportunities and challenges of such ‘digital diplomacy’? What are the consequences of digital diplomacy regarding the content communicated by international bureaucracies and beyond? This chapter attempts to demonstrate the significance of recent research for providing conclusive answers to these questions as well as to demonstrate the need for further exploration. It first illustrates the current practices of international bureaucracies’ digital diplomacy by focusing on social media such as X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook in a quantitative perspective, illustrated with recent examples of their use. Second it discusses motivational factors and conducive conditions that help to explain why international bureaucracies have turned to, and increasingly employ, means of digital diplomacy. While the first and second parts of the chapter focus mainly on the opportunities of digital diplomacy, the third part goes full circle by turning to a couple of its challenges—organized hypocrisy, pluralization, acceleration, selectivity, personalization, and polarization—of which little is yet known, but that deserve more attention by scholars, practitioners, and stakeholders of global governance alike.
Digital Diplomatic Representation
Authors: Engtoft Meldgaard Anne Marie , Fletcher Tom
Published: January 2024

In today’s digital age, diplomacy and the role of diplomats have undergone significant changes. The use of digital technologies has had a profound impact on the practice of diplomacy, leading to the increasing digitization of the field. This chapter offers an in-depth examination of these changes through the perspectives of two practitioners who have had to adapt to the digital age. It also delves into the relationship between online and offline diplomacy, as diplomats are now tasked with creating offline normative frameworks for the use of advanced technologies such as AI. Additionally, the chapter explores the new diplomatic role of tech companies, who design and own the platforms through which diplomacy is practiced. The rapid and wide-ranging developments in the digital realm have thrown many tenets of the existing international order into question, calling for states and international organizations to come up with answers. The updating of diplomacy for the digital age is an exciting and urgent agenda, one that requires patience, insight, and compromise—in other words, diplomacy.
The European Union and Digital Diplomacy
Authors: Zaiotti Ruben
Published: January 2024

The chapter examines the main features and trends characterizing the European Union’s (EU) efforts in the digital diplomacy domain. The EU, like other national and international political entities, has recently embraced social media and other digital technologies as a way to engage with foreign audiences and raise its global profile. Because of its unique nature—a hybrid and unfinished political entity mixing intergovernmental and supranational features—the EU’s foray into digital diplomacy faces numerous challenges, from its communication strategy’s internal (i.e. within the EU) bias, to the lack of coordination among the various stakeholders involved, the competition with member states, to the ‘communication deficit’ that still besets the organization. As a ‘normative power’ with less historical baggage and a more positive reputation (at least outside Europe) than its member states, the EU has nonetheless the potential to be successful and effective in projecting its ‘soft power’ through digital channels. The regional organization has made some strides in this regard, but it has not fully exploited the opportunities that ‘going digital’ entails. The chapter elaborates on the challenges and opportunities in European Union digital diplomacy by providing empirical examples of EU efforts in this domain (the 2017 ‘European Way’ (EAAS 2017) social media campaign and the EU’s communication strategy during the Iran nuclear deal negotiations) and linking them to theoretical debates in the fields of international relations and communication.
Nato’s Digital Diplomacy
Authors: Wright Katharine A. M.
Published: January 2024

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was initially slow to adapt to the digital age in diplomacy. However, in recent years, the alliance has taken a range of approaches to expand its presence and become more involved in shaping, engaging, and innovating digital diplomatic narratives. The use of digital diplomacy has the potential to increase scrutiny and interest in NATO, as well as allowing for direct engagement with consumers without intermediaries. The alliance has utilized various social media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, and has hosted digital dialogues on a variety of topics since the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, NATO has launched digital diplomacy campaigns such as ‘Return to Hope’, which focuses on Afghanistan, and ‘#WeAreNATO’ and ‘#StrongerTogether’, in addition to partnering with celebrity Angelina Jolie. The reach of some of these initiatives brings to the fore the gendered nature of NATO’s digital footprint and the importance of visuals, but this contrasts with the approach NATO took to digital diplomacy following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This chapter compares the effectiveness of NATO’s digital diplomacy during normal circumstances to its response during crisis situations, where significant silences limit its efficacy in response to hybrid warfare.
Digital Diplomacy During Wars and Conflicts
Authors: Yarchi Moran
Published: January 2024

The proliferation of digital communication platforms, particularly social media, has brought about both opportunities and challenges for the field of diplomacy and public diplomacy. The utilization of digital diplomacy in times of conflict and war has become particularly salient, as the image component has assumed a vital role in contemporary conflicts. This chapter explores the use of digital platforms as a component of the ‘Image War’ and how official diplomatic efforts employ various platforms and messaging strategies to shape perceptions and influence different audiences. It traces the evolution of digital diplomacy, from the American response to the 9/11 attacks to more recent examples such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on TikTok and the Ukrainian Image Front in the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. The chapter also examines civic initiatives, both organized and unstructured, that operate within the digital sphere and social media, enabling individuals to participate in civic diplomacy. The messages propagated by both governments and individuals increasingly constitute a part of the battle over perceptions in the international arena.
Digital Diplomacy and Cyber Defence
Authors: Kello Lucas
Published: January 2024

Having emerged only two decades ago, the field of digital diplomacy and cyber defence is new relative to other aspects of statecraft. Governments did not prioritize cyber issues in foreign policy or national security until 2007, when Russian actors launched cyberattacks against Estonia’s financial and governmental systems. The attacks gave rise to the first international cyber crisis, elevating digital diplomacy and cyber defence to the top of international security agendas. Although today cyber ambassadors and policy officials are a common sight in the halls of diplomacy, they have achieved few notable accomplishments there. The only international treaty that specifically governs interstate cyber conduct is the Council of Europe’s ‘Cybercrime Convention’, but its scope does not cover strategic cyber activity. Laws and norms of responsible state conduct have been proposed but not widely adopted. Meanwhile, cyber threats to economic infrastructures, governmental systems, democratic elections, and public health data continue to grow in number and severity. This chapter traces the appearance, growth, and evolution of cyber issues in the world of diplomacy and international relations, examines divergent national perspectives on cyber defence priorities, explores successes and failures in institutional attempts to regulate interstate cyber conduct, analyses the enduring challenges that impede meaningful diplomatic agreement, reviews the emergence of nontraditional players in the security realm, and discusses possible pathways to achieve greater cooperation.
Digital Nuclear Diplomacy
Authors: Crilley Rhys
Published: January 2024

Despite the continued centrality of nuclear weapons in international affairs—especially at the dawn of a dangerous new nuclear age—there is little attention given to how digital communication technologies have impacted nuclear diplomacy and what this means for the world. This chapter addresses this gap by drawing together scholarship on the intersections of digital diplomacy and nuclear politics to outline and examine the issue of digital nuclear diplomacy, where digital communication technologies have had the effect of changing central aspects of diplomacy around nuclear weapons, crisis, arms control, and disarmament. The chapter first provides a brief history of nuclear diplomacy and the important role of communication technologies in this area. It then introduces the concept of digital nuclear diplomacy, before exploring several case studies of digital nuclear diplomacy, ranging from accidentally published nonsensical tweets sent by US Strategic Command, to how the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons uses Instagram, via how internet users share memes to critique Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates that nuclear diplomacy in the digital age involves multiple actors, novel technologies, visual media, and the use of humour that all impact nuclear signalling, crisis stability, conflict escalation, and the communication of nuclear issues in important ways. Because of these developments, the chapter articulates a need for multiple, interdisciplinary, and critical perspectives as we move into an uncertain future where digital nuclear diplomacy may shape the future of life, and death, on planet earth.
Aboriginal Australian Spirituality and Economy
Authors: Grieves Williams Victoria
Published: January 2024

Aboriginal Australian spirituality offers an exciting glimpse of human societies in the Holocene that is of immense value in a world that is dealing with extreme climatic events and the death of modernity. This spirituality focusses humans as intrinsic to the natural world, moving with the rhythms of the Universe, in concert with all things on Earth. In this way an entirely different consciousness prevails, one of humility and deep, affectionate interconnectedness to all living and inanimate things, and of gratitude for life itself. Landforms and constellations, the resting sites of the ancestral heroes who shaped all of creation out of chaos, hold the paradigms for human behaviour. Access to their stories is cause for ceremony, celebration, and renewal, while following in their paths. The land also holds increase sites for ‘spiritual propagation’ that has no equivalence with agriculture but springs from proximity to the sacred. The bounty of the natural world is shared in formal, preordained ways amongst relations. This is the basis of the shared subsistence economy of the hunter gatherer in a spiritual dimension often glossed as the Dreaming.
Religion and Non-Capitalist Market Analysis
Authors: Duchrow Ulrich
Published: January 2024

Around the eighth century bce, markets started to influence daily life with money, private property, and wage labour/mercenaries in Eurasia. At the same time, religions and philosophies of what is called the Axial Age emerged in the different regions/cultures (Daoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism in India, Zoroastrism in Persia, pre- and post-Socratic philosophies and tragedies in Greece, prophets and Torah in Judah, and Christianity and Islam in later subsequent contexts). All these religions/philosophies responded to the social, psychological, and mental implications and consequences of the market economy. In each of the periods of the capitalist market, there were specific philosophical and religious responses to problems related to political hegemony and justice. Starting in the 1960s, liberation theologies/philosophies have been emerging in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, using the critical traditions of the Axial Age in order to reject the capitalist market economy and civilization while working for alternatives—in conflict with assimilated religious majorities.
Religion and Economic Cooperation and Competition
Authors: Botos Katalin
Published: January 2024

The chapter discusses the role of cooperation and competition in the economic teachings of different world religions. Cooperation is important because goods and services are produced by different networks in various parts of the world. Competition must be fair as well. Religious beliefs where Big Gods attend to the actors in the market are the best guarantee of fair behaviour. Confucianism is based on traditions; in Buddhism, the belief of rebirth influences fair market behaviour. Monotheistic religions are based on an Almighty God. Christian social thought, especially the Catholic papal social encyclicals present clear guidelines for actors in the market, both as regards competition and cooperation. In Judaism, tzeddakah, and, in Islam, the zakat are characteristic features of moral conduct. Both are obligatory actions of solidarity strengthening cooperation in society. Competition is encouraged by most of these religions, even as they acknowledge a role for state supervision in controlling it.
Religion and Basic Goods Provision
Authors: Reinert Kenneth A.
Published: January 2024

The basic goods approach is a type of economic ethics that begins with the concept of human needs and focuses on the fulfilment of these needs through the provision of basic goods and services. This chapter uses the lens of common values to assess the extent to which the religious ethical traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam support a policy focus on basic goods provision. It also considers the relationship of the religious ethics of basic goods provision to the secular tradition of moral minimalism. Finally, the chapter considers some current practical applications of the religious ethics of basic goods provision for policies in the areas of economic globalization, development policy, and humanitarian assistance. The considerations of the chapter suggest that a common ethics of basic goods provision does exist across Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam.
Religion and Development Work
Authors: Clarke Matthew
Published: January 2024

More than eight out of ten people self-identify as holding religious beliefs. The majority of these people are located in the Global South. Since the middle of the last century, the international community has focused on addressing poverty and improving living standards of the most vulnerable, most often through international aid. This ‘development project’ has involved national and local governments as well as multilateral and non-state actors. Religious beliefs and practices undoubtedly affect this response, both institutionally and personally. Each of the world’s major religions includes precepts, laws, and practices related to development and poverty as currently understood. Sacred teachings from these religions speak directly to issues concerning equality, poverty, charity (including zakat (poor-due), compassion, and justice. They do so from their specific context and history. This chapter will consider how four religions, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism (Sarvodaya Movement), and Hinduism understand development work. It highlights, with examples, key intersections between religious teachings and development policy and practices.
Religion and Sociology of Wealth Accumulation
Authors: Holleman Anna , Keister Lisa A.
Published: January 2024

Most religious groups have well-developed teachings regarding economic morality. In this chapter, we address how religious orthodoxy, or right belief, and orthopraxy, or right action, intersect in the case of economic morality. We propose that the manifestation of this interaction is shaped by social location, including race, socio-economic status, class, gender, sexuality, and organizational affiliation. We present three case studies that illustrate the diverse ways that religious traditions construct and live out economic morality: White Conservative Protestants (CPs), the New Religious Movements (NRMs) of the Counterculture, and the contemporary Prosperity Gospel movement. These cases provide three examples of the nuanced ways that religious economic ethics and social location intersect and show that this intersection varies across types of social location.
Religion and Ecological Economic Ethics
Authors: Melcher Sarah J.
Published: January 2024

This chapter investigates selected religious and ethical insights from the perspective of ecological economics. In the interest of space, the chapter focuses on discernments from four world religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Hinduism section includes a discussion of the thought of M.K. Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita. The Judaism section discussions the way Jews have brought forward concepts from the Torah, Talmud, and rabbinic writings. The section on Christianity includes a discussion of the thought of J. Moltmann and others on ecology. The Islamic section draws on the work of S.H. Nasr and others who draw out the positions of the Quran and other Islamic sources relevant to environmental issues. These insights encourage readers to value all of nature and to perceive humanity as interconnected with and dependent upon nature. The religious insights examined here suggest ways to restructure economic systems so that nature is protected and nurtured.