Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8882-1326

Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Political science, Media and socio-cultural communication, Social sciences, Interdisciplinary

Publication Details

African Journal of Economics, Politics and Social Studies

Open access:

https://zenodo.org/record/7292897#.Y2jZknbP02w

Abstract

Scholars over the years have delved into the discourse of states’ foreign publics engagement in achieving their foreign policy objectives. This analysis is done generally with the western perspective of public diplomacy with recent Asian scholarship evolving. As a result, this study aims to reflect on public diplomacy from an African perspective. Therefore, it analyses how African governments have engaged their foreign publics (foreign governments and their citizens) to attract foreign aid, tourism, and investments in their nation-building and development trajectory. The article explores African public diplomacy mechanisms such as diasporas, nation branding, cultural diplomacy, and many others. It also digests into some challenges confronting African governments in their public diplomacy campaigns, like lack of research, human and financial resources, and coherent foreign policy documents. The article’s findings demonstrate that although Africa generally has rich public diplomacy resources, these are not adequately harnessed in most African states’ foreign policy. This situation has led to poor foreign policy implementation by most African governments. The study contributes to public diplomacy scholarship in general and African public diplomacy in particular, which scholars have underexplored. It concludes that scholars should delve into the exegesis of the rich African public diplomacy currencies.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.15804/ajepss.2022.1.01

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