Abstract
This review focuses on galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) by giving precedence to the cultural diplomacy practices and the associated international relations practices of GLAMs. It examines four books that contribute to this theme in the academic literature. Published less than a decade before the writing of this review, these four works not only highlight the role of GLAMs in the field of cultural diplomacy but also offer a general overview, a synthesis, and a foundational framework for understanding how heritage institutions contribute to this practice. Each of the four works reviewed makes a distinctive contribution to the debate.
In Museum Diplomacy: How Cultural Institutions Shape Global Engagement (2023), Sarah Smith and Sascha Priewe invite us to consider museums from a global perspective, through the international networks they foster. The authors’ approach is informed by an outlook that regards museums as sites of diplomatic activity. For Smith and Priewe, “[museums are] powerful agents: arbiters of cultural significance, custodians of prized objects, and narrators of histories, communities and identities” (p. 3). This edited volume is structured so that carefully selected case studies offer insight into a wide range of international cultural activities, with museums serving to connect different actors across the globe: collections are portrayed as ambassadors, special exhibitions are described as key relational moments in international affairs, cultural goods are returned (or repatriated) to their nations of origin, and satellite museums based on established museum brands (e.g. Louvre Abu Dhabi) are established in different countries. In their work, Smith and Priewe also warn that museums can be spaces that contribute to the marginalization of certain groups, segments of society, or members of a community. They “[…] acknowledge that museums advance hegemonic values through the stories and objects they display and by marginalizing or excluding certain narratives and artifacts, thereby relegating others to sidelines” (p. 3). Chapters devoted to museum diplomacy and human rights, diasporas, and Indigenous rights movements are included to provide a more balanced perspective. These chapters also show how museum diplomacy may be met with resistance from marginalized groups. Linda Grussani, author of the chapter entitled “Inclusion and Refusal in Indigenous Museum Diplomacy,” offers important insights into how marginalized groups respond to cultural diplomacy. For Grussani, “The involvement of indigenous actors in cultural heritage and public diplomacy has been steadily on the rise, […]” (p. 136), but such mobilizations are often met with silence or with more active gestures of refusal and disengagement by members of Indigenous communities. By examining various cases of Indigenous resistance to museum diplomacy, Grussani invites us to understand that these actions—such as the boycott of exhibitions like The Spirit Sings during the 15th Winter Olympics in Calgary—should also be understood as opportunities for these groups to reclaim their voices and to establish their own forms of cultural diplomacy.
Engaging with a range of themes that, in many ways, echo those discussed by Smith and Priewe in Museum Diplomacy (2023), Amanda Laugesen instead examines the library as a site of cultural diplomacy and as a space for forging global connections in her book Globalizing the Library: Librarians and Development Work, 1945–1970 (2019). The book traces the evolution of American library diplomacy during the Cold War. Globalizing the Library reminds us that Cold War propaganda was not limited to the promotion and circulation of cultural products—such as films, music, and theatre—that articulated particular worldviews aligned with specific political projects; it was also fought on a technical front. As Laugesen explains, “Library work more broadly became part of the cultural Cold War as librarians sought to negotiate and articulate a variety of ideals around the nature of information and consumption of information” (p. 5). In other words, strategies for organizing libraries, the professional knowledge underpinning cataloging practices, and the development of collections were also mobilized as subtle tools for conveying ideological positions. In her analysis, Laugesen focuses on Britain and the United States, since “Both countries also used libraries and information in a significant way in their cultural diplomacy efforts. Such work also had the effect of informing and inspiring reflection on professional practices and a broader sense of ‘international consciousness’ at home in the USA and Britain” (p. 6). This international consciousness, in turn, contributed to fostering a context in which professionals felt invested in the mission of supporting their peers abroad, particularly in developing countries. This dynamic was especially significant given that the Cold War coincided with decolonization processes in Asia and Africa. From the 1950s through the 1970s, newly independent states emerged seeking models and strategies to structure their institutions and public services.
What Laugesen allows us to see is a characteristic ambivalence surrounding international development, which appears at times as the product of strategic interests and, at others, as the result of genuine forms of professional solidarity. As Laugesen notes, “The libraries created in developing nations in this period addressed a very definite need in these countries, but at the same time, the involvement of British, American, and other overseas librarians, who often brought with them assumptions about methods, readers, appropriate reading material, and the type of library that should be built, helped to construct very particular sorts of institutions” (p. 66). Through this analysis, Laugesen speaks to the dual nature of international development aid: on the one hand, institutions and resources were urgently needed; on the other, technical assistance often carried inherent constraints, raising the implicit question of whether these countries might have pursued different paths had they possessed the resources to fully design their own institutions. This recurring concern in critiques of international development helps us understand that Laugesen approaches library cultural diplomacy during the Cold War with a clear sense of skepticism.
The following book offers a complementary perspective on GLAMs’ contributions to cultural diplomacy. Rather than focusing primarily on institutions, however, the editors place the emphasis on agency. In their collected edition, Culture as Soft Power: Bridging Cultural Relations, Intellectual Cooperation, and Cultural Diplomacy (2022), Elisabet Carbó-Catalan and Diana Roig-Sanz approach cultural diplomacy through the study of intellectuals and their contributions to international cultural relations. This edited volume, published in open-access format, is structured around the assumption that cultural diplomacy is “an area of study that criss-crosses cultural relations, intellectual cooperation, and cultural diplomacy in an interdisciplinary way” (p. 4). The careful emphasis on interdisciplinarity reflects the fact that the contributors to the volume largely come from the humanities—particularly literature, translation studies, and history—and venture into a field that has traditionally been dominated by political science and international relations scholars. Readers will find that this strong presence of humanities-based perspectives is one of the volume's major strengths.
For example, in her chapter entitled Cultural Diplomacy and Cultural Heritage: Envisioned, Refused, Denied, Accomplished (1889–1969) (chapter 13), Bianka Trötschel-Daniels offers an analysis of heritage diplomacy that foregrounds the role of intellectuals and transnational networks. The chapter examines the historical processes that led to the development of the International Commission on Historical Monuments and the International Council of Museums and Sites, a key institution in the establishment of standards for museums and heritage conservation. Trötschel-Daniels demonstrates how intellectual networks played an instrumental role in the creation of an institution operating within the multilateral frameworks of UNESCO and the United Nations. By documenting the “[…] development of international spaces in which the preservation of cultural heritage functioned as an asset of cultural diplomacy” (p. 269), Trötschel-Daniels sheds light on the porous boundary between state-led conceptions of cultural diplomacy and those driven by civil society. This chapter serves as a representative example of an approach to cultural diplomacy that seeks to capture the role played by civil society actors—an approach that is consistently adopted throughout the entire volume.
The final book considered in this discussion is Natalia Grincheva's Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy: Post-Guggenheim Developments (2020). Grincheva's argument concerning museum diplomacy rests on two main ideas. First, museums are socially recognized and valued for their expertise, which is what makes them attractive actors for diplomatic missions and diplomatic work. According to Grincheva, “Expertise makes non-state actors competitive in the global environment, in some cases to such an extent that they outperform their national governments” (p. 16). Second, museums, as nonstate actors, are generally portrayed as highly dynamic: “In contrast to highly bureaucratic and slow government organisations, non-state actors are usually very dynamic” (p. 16). Moreover, Grincheva argues that “Non-state actors can leverage their legitimacy because they are able to exploit their mobility, flexibility and less centralised organisational structure to better communicate with the public” (p. 17). While it is entirely defensible to view museums as legitimate spaces for the conduct of cultural diplomacy—and to argue that their cultural authority strengthens their power and capacity as agents of cultural diplomacy—the second claim may be more open to debate. In many countries, museums function as state actors: they are created through legislation enacted by a legislative assembly or a parliament. Many of the world's major museums operate under the direct authority of a ministry or governmental department, or indirectly as public agencies; nevertheless, they remain accountable to a minister, sometimes to parliament, and to a board of directors. Although informal visits or impromptu encounters may occasionally be organized, using museums and their collections as backdrops for photographs of world leaders, museums generally function within strict regulatory frameworks. Their operations follow long-term planning cycles, often extending years in advance, from exhibition development to the production of exhibition catalogs.
Museums are undoubtedly valuable agents of cultural diplomacy, but the question remains whether they are truly as agile as suggested when it comes to engaging in forms of cultural diplomacy that go beyond receptions, galas, or cocktail events. Nonetheless, this book remains essential reading for understanding museum cultural diplomacy. Indeed, Grincheva's work goes a step further than many other contributions to the field. She is among the early scholars to connect cultural diplomacy with broader phenomena and major institutional transformations, such as the global corporatization of museums and the emergence of the museum's institutional identity as a global commodity.
These four books, we argue, offer compelling case studies and strong theoretical frameworks to engage with GLAM cultural diplomacy. Our intention here is to delve further into their contribution by raising a number of important questions for which they offer some original answers. The
In Grincheva's (2020) work, museum diplomacy of more recent years seems to suggest that museums are entering a phase where their approach may differ from what we generally expect in cultural diplomacy. In her view, museums have typically been understood as places where “[…] the powerful role of governments [was] setting cultural agendas, defining geopolitical focus and commissioning the international activities of museums” (Grincheva, 2020: 2). At the same time, however, decreases in public funding in an era of neo-liberal globalization have transformed the situation. Her book constitutes a contribution to a perspective of a museum diplomacy that is increasingly emancipated from the state, as financial ties would be thinner and the resultant pressures require more strategic approaches to funding, including commodifying brands or even establishing new satellites abroad. Her outlook on museum diplomacy would, therefore, support the existence of a cultural diplomacy of a different kind—one where the influence of State is relativized. That being said, the diminution of the state and government blurs the boundaries of museum diplomacy, suggesting that the museum ought to be considered to possess greater agency and, accordingly, act as an actor of cultural globalization. Following this thesis, soft power can be reframed as a tool to sustain a museum brand globally.
In Smith and Priewe's Museum Diplomacy (2023), the authors define museum diplomacy as a practice performed in the museum, which acts as both a relational site and a nodal point for many international and transnational relationships. While this perspective is relational, it is also implicitly institutionalist in its outlook on the museum's contribution to cultural diplomacy. In this book, cultural diplomacy is—in almost every chapter—an activity that is in competition with the other important functions that are performed in museums. International relations channel activities and resources; they irrigate museum spaces and its core functions (i.e. collection management, collection development, exhibits, audience work, research) are called to engage internationally with various actors on a variety of issues. Museum Diplomacy (2023) dexterously conveys how the museum's different core functions are put in tension, eliciting a negative, an ambivalent, or a positive response and form of collaboration. Taking a step back, Smith and Priewe's book reveals something that is distinctive about the museum diplomacy literature: while studies on cultural industries and soft power are interested in the output or the effects of cultural activities, museum diplomacy research is significantly shaped by the great interest that researchers place on the effects of cultural diplomacy on museum operations.
Likewise, Laugesen's approach to GLAMs and cultural diplomacy in Globalizing the Library (2019) revolves around a dual process. On the one hand, her analysis captures the international processes employed in the structuration of the sector and investigates institutional labor and institutional work at the international level. On the other hand, libraries are not merely sites of diplomacy, but the very idea of the library—their values and principles—is mobilized by governments in international cooperation and relations. By contrast, Carbó-Catalan and Roig-Sang's Culture as Soft Power (2022) is deeply rooted in a transnational tradition of cultural relationships. Rather than follow an approach that situates itself perfectly in the common definition of cultural diplomacy—as an activity where cultural organizations and activities are organized in support of the state's international relations—Carbó-Catalan and Roig-Sang (2022) adopt a perspective that centers on the international relations of GLAMs and, arguably, a variety of other cultural agents. Transnational approaches tend to recalibrate the influence of the state, placing value on the agency and capacities of non-state actors that collaborate and cooperate with the state to varying degrees. While this approach is salient in Culture as Soft Power (2022), it should be noted that this is also a common thread in all four books selected for this review. Published less than a decade ago, each of these books offers a reevaluation of the role of the state in cultural diplomacy research; this may also be true of the GLAM diplomacy stream of research in the broader literature.
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Cooperation is a central feature of Carbó-Catalan and Roig-Sang's Culture as Soft Power (2022). In their work, the authors’ transnational perspective on cultural diplomacy and soft power requires the role of state actors to be reframed in order not to overemphasize the influence of this form of agency in international affairs. Their analysis of intellectuals in cultural diplomacy also offers insights for creative ways to think about cooperation. For Carbó-Catalan and Roig-Sang, “[…] intellectual cooperation and cultural diplomacy are not necessarily opposed and can be considered as two faces of the same coin” (2022: 5). Moreover, they argue that “Intellectual cooperation is a form of associating one's own image with terms such as ‘disinterestedness,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘cosmopolitanism’” (id.). Building on their perspective, states are actors among others in international relations, and intellectuals constitute a form of agency that engages not simply to either challenge or convey the state logic; intellectuals have their own interests. Thus, intellectuals cooperate with both civil society and the state because their cultural production—either implicitly or explicitly—advocates for certain values and ideals. Since cooperation is a concept tied to strategy in this perspective, there is no need to either assess the moral value of cooperation or consider a cost-benefit analysis for cooperation. Therefore, Carbó-Catalan and Roig-Sang's work is an invitation to rethink the question of agency in GLAMs’ cultural relations. With this in mind, the notion of intellectual cooperation, despite its novelty, also contains some challenges at the conceptual level. What about intellectuals who are also statesperson? How do we manage the boundary between both identities? This is the case for intellectuals of la Francophonie—such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, who was an intellectual and a statesperson. The same could be said about André Malraux, an author, an intellectual, and statesperson.
In Laugesen's Globalizing the Library (2019), cooperation is intertwined with issues of international development. Among the four selected works in this review, Laugesen's book perhaps delves most directly into issues of technical transfers from the Global North to the Global South. Nonetheless, conceptualizes cooperation in a manner similar to that described by Carbó-Catalan and Roig-Sang (2022). The first four chapters of Globalizing the Library (2019) are dedicated to the construction of a space for cooperation that reflects the views of the internationalists, a term that she coined to reflect the discourse of the practice and largely refers to librarian's international professional relationships. This first stream of cooperation—which echoes transnational view of cultural relationships—encounters a national view, one guided by politics and foreign policy. Cooperation sometimes supports not only professional ideals of cooperation, but also foreign policy with state interests and geopolitics. The final two chapters of her book offer an overview of how the internationalist agenda resembles or contrasts foreign policy in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Similarly, Smith and Priewe (2023) have organized their collected edition in a manner that centers on a transnational look at the museum and its professionals. Cooperation is instantiated in many chapters as the institution's contribution to diverse social objectives. For instance, in chapter 3 by Anthony Alan Shelton, one can read how repatriation and the museum space are not strictly about domination. Museum spaces can be used to sustain Indigenous self-determination and international relationships. In this case, the museum is a space that also welcomes and makes room for important social demands from groups that have been excluded or marginalized. Likewise, chapter 7, written by Simona Bodo and Ana Chiara Cimoli, draws attention to how museums can sustain cooperations that emerge from communities. In this chapter, museums are spaces open to diaspora and their social demands. These chapters highlight the ambivalence about GLAM institutions as both sites of repression and dispossession of marginalized groups and as spaces that can also be reclaimed by those groups, making space for them to conduct their own international relations. The type of cooperation described in this volume brings us closer to ideas of mediation and intermediation, where the museum is a site for negotiating and remediating cultural relationships. While Smith and Priewe do not build on the conceptual repertoire of international cooperation as Laugesen does in Globalizing the Library (2019), the assemblage of conceptualizations in Museum Diplomacy (2023) nonetheless has its own discursive language—one of mediation as cooperation—to help us understand how museums are sites of cooperation.
Although Grincheva's (2020) work largely documents how museums facilitate international relationships as autonomous actors in the economic sector of culture, her focus on branding illuminates dynamics of cooperation at play in this context. When museums develop as global franchises, the value of cooperation shifts from technical transfers to symbolic transfers. Grincheva conveys the perspective of galleries and museums on cooperation. Her documentation of K11 gallery in Hong Kong demonstrates how cooperation can be about bringing together the best talent and the most prestigious institutions and their experts to collaborate on projects (Grincheva, 2020). The knowledge, but foremost the symbolic value, is what is at stake, suggesting that GLAM cooperation is also a matter of constructing cultural legitimacy.
The four books selected for this review provide cultural diplomacy research with insightful material that can help us identify important patterns and characteristics about GLAM diplomacy. GLAMs are institutions with distinctive features: they are sites where collections are developed, studied, preserved, researched, and exhibited. One of the main characteristics of this literature—as evidenced in the pages of these books—is that the practice of cultural diplomacy is studied from its effects, by way of its transformative dimensions and its challenges through fulfilling GLAM institutions’ core missions and functions. These outlooks on cultural diplomacy are not limited to an analytical configuration that would posit GLAM institutions as mere instruments of the state's will; they also consider the fabric of GLAM identities to discern how cultural diplomacy can become either an opportunity or a practice and a social demand that constitutes a challenge for GLAM professionals. A second characteristic of this literature has to do with the field itself. GLAMs are well known to engage in a diversity of international cultural relationships; therefore, studying GLAM diplomacy is almost always an act that leads researchers to adopt a transnational view that builds on a long history of cooperation between institutions and professionals, while also accounting for scenarios in which state actors mobilize or engage these institutions for a specific purpose. The GLAM diplomacy literature almost always contains these two levels of analysis. When it comes to GLAMs and cultural diplomacy, many of the cases from which these books draw their empirical material and their analysis invite us not only to underscore but also to relativize the role of state actors.
