500彩票网

This book, which considers the concept, meaning and the contemporary origin and justifications of Strategic Communications, is one of the first academic works on Strategic Communications available in the Japanese language. Couched largely in the discipline of International Relations and strategy, it explores a constructivist foundation of the concept and approach to Strategic Communications, whose policy, as the book argues, needs to be anchored in the democratic values and ideals of fundamental freedoms. As such, this book’s foremost contribution is to advance consideration of the link between Strategic Communications and values.
 
Further, Strategic Communications clarifies the relationship among related government communications activities – public diplomacy, counter-disinformation and resilience, among many others, as responses to related issues and disturbances in the contemporary information environment.
 
With Strategic Communications conceptualized as existing at the cross section of the spectrum between persuasion and coercion on the one hand and authority (or power) and legitimacy on the other (following Dr. N. Bolt’s approach as defined in NATO Strategic Communications Terminology Working Group’s report no. 3), the book explains the fundamental importance of sustaining legitimacy and accountability for democratic government communications, again bringing attention to the value foundation of Strategic Communications as a praxis. The book also adds to the above a category of ‘engagement’, giving space for more ambiguous sets of activities that attempt to invest in building inter-governmental relationships.
 
Another of the book’s central contributions is that it sheds light on the most prominent issues in geopolitics of the twenty-first century through the lens of Strategic Communications. (Hence a limitation of this book is in its omission of geoecology from the discussion, although geoeconomics is partially dealt with in various sections that deals with the idea of ‘influences’.)
 
The book’s most important policy-relevant contribution is its association of Strategic Communications with the developing idea and construction of the “Indo-Pacific”, an idea which the author later developed in an academic study (Chiyuki Aoi, ‘the Indo-Pacific, Geopolitics and Strategic Communications: Construction of the Indo-Pacific," Defence Strategic Communications Vol. 14 (Spring 2024).
 
As such, the book establishes a much-needed discursive bridge between Japan (located in the Indo-Pacific) and the Western world and beyond, laying common conceptual/linguistic ground for interpretations of policy. It is perhaps for this reason that the book has had extended readership predominantly in Japan’s policy community to date, well beyond academia.
 

(Written by AOI Chiyuki, Professor, Graduate School of Public Policy / 2024)