Turkey's Public Diplomacy Activities: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa
Project no. 842 · Status: Kapanmış · 2017
Summary
This work measures the short, medium and long term effectiveness of public diplomacy activities conducted by Turkey in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing upon the extant literature, the effectiveness of short term activities are scrutinized under “news management” section, medium term activities are analyzed under “strategic communication” section and finally long term activities are examined under “building relationships with key individuals” section. News management defines the ability of a country to manage news in international media about its policies and activities. Strategic communication defines the gathering of various messages sent by the activities, policies, culture, people, institutions and many other factors of a country. The aim of strategic communication is clustering various messages and making them more straightforward in order to make them more understandable by foreign audiences. Thanks to strategic communication, the messages become clearer and smaller, making it easy to deliver and fulfill the purpose. Building a relationship with key individuals defines the activities of a country with the aim of providing in-depth knowledge and positive opinions about itself to people of other countries. Those types of long term relationships are often carried out by the help of scholarships, meetings, excursions and education programmes. For public diplomacy practitioners, it is of utmost importance to acquire some feedback about their activities. In this project, the data were collected and analyzed with different methods for each public diplomacy component. The results of the analysis of public diplomacy activities of Turkey in sub-Saharan Africa shows that the effects are moderate in the short and medium-term, but the long-term impact was determined to be highly successful. Keywords: Public diplomacy, Turkish foreign policy, Sub-Saharan Africa, African opening, Soft Power.