Agonistic museum diplomacy: Advancing a conflict-oriented approach to global engagement

Abstract

The contemporary moment is saturated with conflicts—geopolitical turmoil, genocides, and wars; identity-related discrimination and harassment; socioeconomic disparities; and ecological disaster. Amid this landscape, we address museums as venues of conflict: spaces in which conflict emerges and plays out between different actors and on intra- and interinstitutional levels. In this article, we assert that a different attitude and engagement with conflict in museums is necessary. We offer the concept of agonistic museum diplomacy as a generative theoretical approach to understand conflict and cultural connection in museums. Contextualizing this approach within scholarship on cultural diplomacy, museum diplomacy, and agonism, we demonstrate how agonistic museum diplomacy can foster different forms of engagement with conflict—from superficial resolutions of conflicts (which might, in the worst case, reinforce existing disenfranchisement with museums) to more substantial institutional changes that respond to conflicts (which might, in the best case, strengthen inclusivity, legitimacy, and trust in museums). We argue for agonistic museum diplomacy as a necessary conceptual framework and demonstrate that conflict-attuned museum management and practice advances knowledge about cultural diplomacy, its values and discourses, which is necessary in our conflictual times.

Keywords

cultural diplomacy agonism conflict museums museum diplomacy agonistic museum diplomacy

Introduction: Museums in a conflictual contemporary landscape

The contemporary moment is saturated with conflicts: geopolitical turmoil, ongoing genocides and wars, identity-related discrimination and the institutionalization of harassment, growing socioeconomic disparities and wicked problems such as ecological anthropogenic destruction. This is taking place amidst a changing geopolitical context, in which the rules-based international order is being challenged by increasing conflict and competition. Museums are also sites of multifaceted conflicts, for example, in terms of contested museum objects and collections (subject to repatriation and restitution claims and conflicts over acquisitions), and engage in representational disputes (whose stories, cultures and positions are narrated, exhibited and centered in their spaces).Thus, conflicts in various forms, durations, degrees of intensity, violence, and public controversy play out in crucial ways in and around museums.

Museums have been identified as holding potential as cultural diplomacy actors (Davidson and Pérez-Castellanos 2019; Grincheva 2020, 2021; Smith and Priewe 2023). Located amidst state and civil society, museums have a public orientation that can facilitate cross-cultural communication, advance mutual understanding, and build trust within and between diverse ethnic, linguistic, and social communities. Museums also function to provide social spaces that facilitate interaction between diplomatic and government representatives, as well as cultural workers (Priewe 2021; Smith 2025). Beyond mere sites where diplomatic practices play out, burgeoning scholarship on museum diplomacy recognizes the agency of cultural institutions in advancing partnerships and their own agendas, in relation to a variety of other actors at the state and non-state level. This capacity is not new; rather, museums have long histories of international engagement (Cartolari 2025; Priewe and Smith 2025; Smith 2021). And while scholarship has long approached such initiatives within a framework that prioritizes nation-states as the primary actors of and locus for cultural diplomacy, growing research shows that museums have carefully navigated such dynamics, while engaging in professional networks and other activities (see Smith and Priewe 2023 for an overview). This critical understanding of museum diplomacy is vital: it problematizes positivist, celebratory, and potentially propagandistic approaches to cultural diplomacy.

In this article, we focus on museum diplomacy but advance a specific argument for a conflict-attuned framework, more specifically, an agonistic perspective to conflict (Mouffe 2013; Landau 2019), which we suggest is a necessary approach to navigate a changing world. With the aim to advance a conceptual understanding of agonistic museum diplomacy, we argue that conflict is constitutive of democratic plurality, diversity, and difference. Further, we suggest agonism as a conceptual lens to name, navigate, and thus constructively approach a variety of conflicts about values and resources that museums currently struggle with and over. We begin by surveying cultural diplomacy, contextualizing it in relation to soft power, public diplomacy, and cultural relations, within which we situate museum diplomacy as a specific practice. Subsequently, we introduce agonism as a radical democratic approach and discuss its conceptual merits. Ultimately, we lay out what an agonistic museum diplomacy could look like, including an open attitude and an open space toward and institutional commitment to hold space for conflicts (Landau-Donnelly 2024). Here, we acknowledge museums’ agency to communicate, cooperate and co-curate in inter-state and global settings that are not determined (or else) independent of a nation state's official relations, agreements, or modes of cultural exchange. Advancing an expansive approach to cultural diplomacy, we foreground agonism as an analytical framework to significantly widen existing understandings of museum diplomacy.

Recognizing our own intersectional positionalities and privilege of writing from predominantly peaceful Western liberal democratic societies, we offer the following reflections on the contours of agonistic museum diplomacy via conceptual discussion and interdisciplinary dialogue, which has taken place virtually and in-person in Toronto in 2025 and Berlin in 2026. Thus, we gesture to Canadian and German museum contexts where we are institutionally based, while recognizing that museum conflicts also arise beyond our local geographies. In what follows, we proceed by discussing concepts from the cultural diplomatic toolkit and offer a critique of the nation state as the central unit of analysis to study diplomatic relations. Subsequently, we engage in a theoretical discussion of agonism to fully introduce and explain the conceptual facets of agonistic museum diplomacy.

Rethinking the assumptions of cultural diplomacy

Culture has long been seen in light of its instrumental capacity as a vehicle or medium in which ideological messages can be conveyed in a captivating manner. This has been the basis for scholarship on cultural diplomacy across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which largely understands culture as a material form that functions in a communicative capacity.¹ This approach to culture solidified it as a category to be mobilized by nation states in larger foreign policy contexts. The Cold War (1947–1991) was central to the development of the practice of using culture as a means to advance ideological perspectives (understood, on one hand, as an avenue to advance intercultural understanding and pacification, and on the other, as a more affective and emphatic communicative medium). While a liberal international order began to take shape after 1945, its full unfolding remained stymied by the Cold War and confined to the West (Kocs 2019). The practice of cultural diplomacy also followed this pattern: cultural diplomacy was mobilized significantly by the United States and Soviet Union to advance their respective ideological perspectives during the Cold War. However, this practice largely occurred through prominent initiatives rooted in Western art forms such as jazz, ballet, fine art (among others, see Von Eschen, 2006; Prevots 2001; Barnhisel 2015; Guilbaut 1985). Just as twentieth century cultural diplomacy needs to be understood within larger geopolitical contexts, it now is vital to understand cultural diplomacy within the spread of a Western liberal order, the expansion of globalization, and neoliberal market capitalism.

Soft Power

Soft power has become a central concept in international relations and cultural diplomacy that has proliferated and been adapted in various national contexts since the 1990s. Coined by the late political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. (1990), soft power is the ability of a country to get what it wants through attraction rather than coercion, drawing on the allure of the country's culture, political ideals, and foreign policies (North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative, 2018). Nye (1990) argues that soft power exists alongside military and economic forms of power, both of which function based on penalty and negation rather than the power of appeal. (Note, that these three power types do not operate in isolation, but rather in concert.) As Ien Ang, Yudhishthir Raj Isar and Phillip Mar (2015) argue: “The soft power Nye was advocating that the USA deploy alongside—not instead of—its hard power was the universal appeal of its popular culture, as embodied in cultural goods and services, as well as the international influence of what he called the ‘ethnic openness’ of its way of life, or the political appeal of the American values of democracy and human rights” (p. 367). Nye introduced this concept at the end of the Cold War at a time when the US government was worried about a Japanese economic threat and needed a different way of understanding its power (Wu 2024). Thus, soft power was a means to reckon with US dominance, as well as the dissolution of the bipolar world order and growing multilateralism (Manor and Golan 2026).

A state-centric framework, the concept found its heyday alongside the full emergence of the neoliberal political order, and soft power itself is also rooted in capitalist consumption as a product of the liberal order. For Ang, Isar and Mar (2015), a central aspect of soft power lies not solely in its cultural form. They argue that its potential impact has to do with the rightfulness and “moral authority” accorded to that state's values. As they explain, with reference to Nye's (2004) work: “the soft power a country may project…rests also on ‘its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority)’” (p. 367). Thus, soft power is closely tied to state values and narratives of legitimacy.

While soft power has been widely adopted (see Schwartzel, 2022), Nye's (2004) articulation of the term directly ties this concept to the US-led world order. As characterized by anthropologist Robert Albro (2015), soft power originates and exists in relation to “an American-centric conception of international affairs” (p. 386), including US economic dominance. Pointing to the contradictions of this use of culture, Albro underscores how culture is seen as an attractive “resource” tied to the liberal world order, while also functioning as a commodity. He explains:

…American popular culture takes the form of ‘products and communication’, which, in turn, are effective when they ‘embody liberal, free-market principles that coincide with US society’. (Albro, 2015: 86).

Albro argues that Nye's postulations about soft power are contradictory, in that they advance an understanding that does not fully capture how cultural meaning is produced. As Albro points out, assuming that free market liberal values naturally embed themselves in cultural products overlooks the complex ways that meanings and values are actually attached to cultural expression. As recently emphasized by public diplomacy and international public relations scholars Ilan Manor and Guy Golan, soft power led to an emphasis on nation branding: “Following logic of attraction, states branded themselves globally treating the nation-state as if it were a consumer product” (2026: 2; see also Nisbett and Rofe, 2022). Thus, soft power is a means of understanding how the US could function “as a normative hegemon but not a military one” (Manor and Golan, 2026: 6).

Culture's role in global discourse is framed as a means of attracting international audiences to embrace liberal ideals of freedom and individual choice, presented primarily as market-driven commodities and promoted through the free market rather than direct government intervention. Thus, soft power is intertwined with the liberal international order and neoliberal capitalism, in a manner that makes the concept limited or difficult to deploy in other geographic or cultural contexts. The central conceit of soft power, which makes it even more problematic in light of the postulated decline of the neoliberal political order (Gerstle, 2022), is that it advances the idea that this approach to national culture is appropriate and sufficient for all nation states, rather than recognizing the nuance and contradictions of national culture (Albro, 2015: 388). More significantly, this forestalls the potential for mutual engagement. Instead soft power advances “personal freedoms exercised as consumer choices in ways that often fail to engage with the perspectives or grievances of foreign publics,” thus, significantly limiting the potential of this concept as a means to fully understand cultural diplomacy (Albro, 2015: 388), while also recognizing the limitations of soft power to fully account for geopolitical relationships.

Cultural diplomacy and cultural relations

Beyond considering cultural diplomacy as a tool of soft power (Cull, 2007), other concepts such as cultural relations have also been deployed in (and before) the post-Cold War order and should be understood as adapted, and adaptable, to this particular historical context. Diplomacy can be understood as the handling of relations between groups, with cultural diplomacy serving as a more specific term to apply to “the care of relations between groups by way of culture” (Smith and Priewe, 2023: 2). The modes in which this occurs are diverse, but the aim is the constructive advancement of a particular narrative (Balfe, 1987; Cull, 2009, 2019; Schneider, 2006). As political scientist Patricia Goff explains, “cultural diplomacy can offset negative, stereotypical or overly simplistic impressions arising from policy choices or hostile portrayals. It may also fill a void” (2013: 421). Thus, cultural diplomacy offers a “means of communication between and among peoples, [and]…mediates and enables the complicated relationships that foster the sense of belonging in the world” (Jessup and Smith, 2016: 283). Cultural diplomacy has been articulated in a much-used definition by Milton C. Cummings (2003: 1) as “the exchange of ideas, information, art, and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding.” Thus, it has been largely understood as a state-based instrumental practice, where culture is deployed in support of policy objectives and the national interest. This definition has been inherent ever since Robert Thayer of the US State Department coined the term cultural diplomacy in 1959. While cultural diplomacy also takes place equally in non-state and sub-state formations, scholarship on cultural diplomacy has been dominated by a focus on American Cold War culture (Gienow-Hecht, 2010).

Offering another means to discuss the work of culture in the world, the concept of cultural relations is employed largely to discuss non-state-driven practices. In the words of the Goethe-Institut and British Council (2018), cultural relations is seen as “neutral—resulting in mutually-beneficial relationships—and cultural diplomacy [is perceived] as designed to achieve a self-interested benefit, whether or not any benefit accrues to the partner” (p. 10). Through this lens, the work of international cultural institutes that are operating at arm's length from the government, such as the Alliance Française, British Council, and Goethe-Institut, are understood to be advancing less instrumental relationships and possibly establishing longer-term horizons of engagement, connection, and cooperation, which are characteristic of active cultural relations. While the distinction between cultural diplomacy (normatively understood as a state practice) and cultural relations (understood as a practitioners’ term, with more diffuse impacts and modalities) are common in the field, we suggest that a critical approach to cultural diplomacy instead recognizes non-state actors and privileges a networked approach to international relations, rather than only being interested in the activities of nation-states (Jessup and Brison 2024).

Reflecting on the dominance of the two paradigms of cultural diplomacy and cultural relations over the past 40 years, they are a particularly hubristic approach to understanding culture in the international sphere. This impression is supported by an examination of cultural relations as enacted by some of its leading practitioners in recent decades. A key element of such hubris is the misplaced insistence on culture as a neutral entity. Christina Ruiz (2014) argues that culture's neutrality has pervaded cultural diplomacy, explaining that for countries who lack favor in the global hierarchy, culture is a valuable means in which they can engage in international relations. As she explains: “Cultural exchanges are seen as a neutral way of maintaining contact, particularly when they involve ancient objects that recall a glorious past.” A classic example is the British Museum's loan of the Cyrus Cylinder to Iran in 2010. According to the museum: “Although political relations between Iran and the U.K. are at the moment difficult … it is all the more important to maintain the cultural links which have been so carefully built up over a period of years and which could in themselves lead to a better relationship” (Associated Press, 2010). The British Council offers another example of mobilizing culture as a supposedly neutral ground. For example, the CEO of the British Council stated that in the context of declining Russian-British relations, he would respond by “seek[ing] to increase the British Council's presence and activities in that country” (as cited by Ruiz, 2014). A key element that facilitates this mobilization of culture is the perception of its neutrality, as well as the understanding that cultural institutions are not directly controlled by the nation-state but have an arm's length relationship that guarantees autonomy. Thus, culture can be used for communication and engagement even in situations where bilateral relationships are fraught, tense, or nonexistent. However, this perception of culture as a neutral entity is just that: “a fiction at the core of cultural diplomacy” and cultural relations (Brison et al., 2025: 55) and a dominant mode for understanding culture, which fails upon closer examination. The situation, according to Jeffrey Brison, Lynda Jessup and Sarah E.K. Smith (2025: 55), is thus: “[that] cultural diplomacy takes advantage of the diplomatic field's perception of culture as a benign entity advancing long-term goals seemingly independent of the ‘hard power’ military-strategic and economic interests of the state.” Culture, and cultural institutions, are never neutral. They advance ideological and political positions, even if these are not always recognized by the public or participating entities. Decades after the conclusion of the Cold War, the function of culture as a means of international engagement is now significantly changing. This is, in part, due to changing geopolitical dynamics. Gerstle (2022) argues that the demise of the neoliberal order has been unfolding since the 2008 financial crisis. In the United States, President Trump has made his own contributions to herald the waning of the post-World War II and post-Cold War order by actively dismantling the US-championed international trade system (Froman 2025), and overseeing the US retreat from championing liberal values and democracy (Patrick 2025) and its global role in general. This has been coupled with broader threats to liberal democracy over the past 20 years and ongoing (Nord et al. 2025) and the ascendance of competing regimes, such as China, leading to a more multipolar, rather than hegemonic, international system (Ashford 2025). Not to mention, the seismic shifts caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the technological disruptions of artificial intelligence (AI) and the dominance of Big Tech.

The world that is unfolding as we write this article is not the world of the soft power era, which in its overall stability, prosperity, and multilateralism now feels rather quaint, if not impossible. We suggest that contemporary cultural diplomacy needs new and more appropriate conceptualizations to fully account for its functioning.² Moreover, any understanding of cultural diplomacy must also take seriously that Cold War cultural diplomacy was discussed in relation to values that were never universal, but instead very Western-centric. Looking at the landscape of cultural diplomacy today, we must account for the perspectives and values of other actors and allow for a range of opinions including perspectives that may not necessarily embrace globalization as inherently beneficial.

Advocating for democratic conflict: Agonism as a promissory concept for cultural diplomacy

What concepts can help us understand the uncertain and conflictual present if the assumptions and potency of soft power and its concomitant limitations of cultural diplomacy belong to a bygone post-Cold War era? We propose that Chantal Mouffe's concept of agonism³ can offer an insightful analytical perspective to grasp diplomatic practices and conflicts within the fields of cultural diplomacy in general, and museum diplomacy in particular.

Mouffe's notion of agonism developed out of her influential post-Marxist work with Ernesto Laclau, most prominently their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). Our reading of Mouffe highlights three key aspects of agonism that help us to chart an agonistic museum diplomacy. First, in the tradition of post-foundational democratic and political theory, Mouffe (2005: 17) assumes that social developments and conditions are radically contingent, that is, not necessary, which “requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and acknowledging the dimension of undecidability which pervades every order.” Neither rational calculations of interest nor normative persuasion are capable of definitively securing political decisions which, in contrast, have to be made “in an undecidable terrain” (Mouffe, 2005: 12). Following her hegemonic theoretical standpoint, decisions are always made on a contingent terrain shaped by power, characterized by inclusions and exclusions as well as asymmetries of power and domination, and must be made with a claim to political enforcement (Marchart, 2019: 374; Landau, 2021: 160).

Second, Mouffe's notion of agonism emerged from the trope of political difference (Marchart, 2010), which, according to Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière and others, can be positioned as a critical juxtaposition of la politique and le politique, politics and the political. The political works in constant challenge to institutionalized structures, routines, and patterns that materialize in the form of politics, which encompasses ongoing modes of dislocating, questioning, or overcoming politics. Mouffe (2005) argues: “By ‘the political’ I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by ‘politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political” (p. 9). In this understanding of the political, the fixation on the nation state as the sole, reified, hegemonic arena of politics is suspended and the manifold negotiations of the political—for example, enacted within and via museums—can address a much wider variety of actors and arenas of political and potentially diplomatic action.

Third, Mouffe understands conflict as constitutive for (democratic) societies. Mouffe's thinking and analysis revolves around a concept of democratic politics that goes beyond the fallacy and/or obsession with consensus, which is not only impossible (and problematic) in political practice but also ontologically problematic as it suppresses conflict that is irreducible. Mouffe criticizes the rationalistic basic assumptions of both an “aggregative” and a “deliberative” model of democracy: in the first case, political actors are guided by an instrumental calculation of costs and benefits; in the second by communicative reason. However, such thinking is strongly reliant on liberal individualism and rationalism and does not sufficiently take into account the diverse lived experiences of differently positioned bodies and identities (Landau et al., 2021: 30–31).

In contrast, Mouffe assumes that democratic societies are inherently permeated by political antagonisms, conflicts, and we/they distinctions. Mouffe does not imply that every social situation is antagonistic, but that antagonism represents a constant possibility for establishing a friend/enemy opposition. If, she argues, antagonism is unavoidable in democratic societies, the goal cannot be to resolve conflict definitively. At the same time, however, these antagonisms, as irreducible as they are, bar the opportunity to construct encounters and/or communities that are reliant on differences (Valentine 2013). Antagonisms therefore must be domesticated or tamed. Mouffe (2005: 30) argues: “Antagonisms can take many forms and it is illusory to believe that they could ever be eradicated. This is why it is important to allow them an agonistic form of expression through the pluralist democratic system.”

According to Mouffe (2005: 52), agonism therefore is a form of sublimated, regulated antagonism, “a sort of ‘conflictual consensus’ providing a common symbolic space among opponents who are considered as ‘legitimate enemies.’” Central to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism is the transformation of a confrontational friend-enemy-dialectic, which is premised on destruction, erasure, or annihilation, into a logic of competition amongst legitimate adversaries. While in conflict, adversaries abide by the “rules of the game,” which are premised upon the respect for the liberty and equality of “all.” Agonistic adversaries, then, see themselves “as sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place” (Mouffe, 2005: 20). In sum, agonism centers conflict as constitutive and necessary for ongoing engagement, learning and exchange. Yet there is no need to symbolically, or even more existentially important, physically eliminate an adversary. Significantly, the democratic project unfolds in public space, which is “the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation” (Mouffe, 2007: 3). We suggest that culture and, specifically, museums can provide such agonistic “battlegrounds” and that museum diplomacy (as a subset of cultural diplomacy) can be understood and practiced as the art of creating such agonistic terrains of “conflictual consensus” (Landau, 2021; Løgstrup, 2021).

Along these lines, recent scholarly contributions have fruitfully taken up Mouffe's interventions. Agonistic approaches have been carried into fields such as urban studies, human geography, and architecture (Heindl, 2020; Berger, 2018; Landau et al., 2021), the theorizing of emotions (Mihai, 2014) and reconciliation (Maddison, 2022). In advanced debates on contemporary memory culture (Cento Bull and Hansen, 2016; Cento Bull and Clarke, 2021; Nienass, 2023), “agonistic memory … proposes to acknowledge and accommodate different, even opposing, interpretations of the past as necessary components of democratic politics” (Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2023: 8). This conflictual perspective has been extended into negotiations regarding contentious cultural heritage, in which an agonistic perspective can contribute to making hardened, irresolvable conflicts, often trapped in friend/enemy logic, more workable (Hamm and Schönberger, 2021; Deufel, 2017).

With regards to the connections between agonism and the museum, Mouffe herself has written about this institutional and spatial arena (Mouffe, 2010, 2013). Inspired by the resonance of her theories in the field of contemporary art and curating, Mouffe (2010) wonders what role artistic and cultural practices can play in the struggle for hegemony and contends: “By staging a confrontation between conflicting positions, museums and art institutions could make a decisive contribution to the proliferation of new public spaces open to agonistic forms of participation where radical democratic alternatives to neoliberalism could, once again, be imagined and cultivated” (p. 330). In this quest, cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen (2013: 4) argues that Mouffe “advocates the development of strategies for art institutions to become allies. Institutions should not be discarded but, on the contrary, be used as sites for agonistic politics in which social conflicts are made productive.”

In addition, various scholars have argued for the role of museums as agonistic spaces (Pozzi, 2013; Landau, 2021, Landau-Donnelly, 2024). Pozzi (2013) concludes, however, that “what still remains to be determined is a proper architectural and museographical translation of [the agonistic museum]” (p. 12). This is, in fact, a central concern for the quest of sketching practices and places of agonistic museum diplomacy. Museum scholar and mediator Nora Sternfeld (2018), drawing on Mouffe's agonism, advocates for a radically democratic museum that “foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate … giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” (Mouffe, 2007: 4–5). Furthermore, Jaschke and Sternfeld (2015) combine Mouffe's agonism with James Clifford's (1997) influential concept of the museum as a contact zone (see also Løgstrup, 2021). They argue that both concepts deal with contingency and assume that the (hegemonic) status quo is neither neutral nor objective or self-evident, but rather the result of social struggles. Hence, the contingency of hegemony embraces what “is,” but maybe more importantly, what could be and what could, should or will be different in the future.

Secondly, Jaschke and Sternfeld explain that both concepts emphasize the importance of recognizing existing conflicts, rather than repressing or harmonizing them. They conclude that the concept of the contact zone becomes “decentered” and a space of constant renegotiation of existing rules and narratives: “Agonistic negotiation thus comes into view as taking place in different locations within society. For we know from the concept of the contact zone that where there is power, there is not only powerlessness for the other side, but always also the power to act” (Jaschke and Sternfeld, 2015: 177–178, translated by authors). Similarly, Johanne Løgstrup (2021) has specifically considered the museum as a conflict zone, and Friederike Landau-Donnelly (2024) the museum as a place to hold space for conflict and an agonistic public space. Considering war museums as agonistic spaces (Berger and Kansteiner, 2022; Cento Bull et al., 2019), or museums as “safe spaces for dangerous ideas” in the context of heated debates around climate change (Hulme, 2014), such agonistic museums practice agonism onsite and online, physically and digitally, in differently mediated ways. In short, as places where different positions encounter each other in ways that hold space for conflict and difference.⁴

In sum, agonistic theory offers multiple entry points into a critical discussion of cultural exchange, institutions, networks, and governance settings that come to the fore in cultural relations and cultural diplomacy. Equipped with a power-sensitive framework to look at differences in values, resources, and communication styles, agonism offers an understanding that differences can be productive parameters in cultural relations, and can be negotiated in the contact/conflict zones of museums.

The potential for agonistic museum diplomacy

The current geopolitical and thus diplomatic condition is antagonizing, but the conceptual thrust of agonism seems worth protecting, cultivating, carrying over into less antagonistic, more agonistic futures. Before we close with some conceptual propositions explicitly for agonistic museum diplomacy, we emphasize that agonism should in no way be misunderstood as a definitive taming or resolution of conflicts, let alone ultimate sublimation or cessation of conflictuality (Moran, 2025). While Mouffe's work has been critiqued (Landau-Donnelly, 2025; Hokkanen and Koivanen, 2025; Eagleton, 2022) for her Euro-centric, logocentric, rather disembodied and arguably conservative assumptions about (Western) liberal democracy (which might not be so universally applicable after all) and whether agonistic encounters and/or confrontation can feasibly be implemented (Roskamm, 2015; Bröckling and Feustel, 2010), we seek to advocate for a practicable agonism that can take place in museums. In the concrete space of the museum, agonism raises questions about who stands in conflict with whom and about what?

Additionally, in a cross-cultural conflictual environment, there are different cultures, or cultural presumptions and codes, around conflict. In some cultures, it might count as a sign of humility, politeness and good manners to avoid conflicts at all costs. Other cultures seem to have more culturally normalized approaches, or even appreciation to discuss controversial issues in a heated manner as a sign of passion and vivacity. In short, the constellations of conflicts about resources and values are multiple (Landau-Donnelly 2025). We might also think about the different approaches to cultural policy, management and governance that posit museums as inherently antagonistic, as Dylan Robinson (2024) puts it, “reckoning with the museum's carceral space and toxic treatment of life” (p. 237).⁵ Put more conceptually, agonism is scattered within and across cultures, which carry different cultural traditions of the ways conflict is staged in public. What is more, different cultures adhere to varying interpretations of liberty and equality for all, which are Mouffe's axiomatic parameters to make agonism work.

A conflict-attuned approach to museum diplomacy debunks the myth that museums are neutral institutions. In the German context, for example, the recent study Das verborgene Kapital: Vertrauen in Museen in Deutschland. Wie die Menschen in Deutschland auf eine Kultureinrichtung im Wandel blicken (The hidden capital: trust in museums in Germany—How people in Germany view a cultural institution in transformation) authored by the Berlin-based Institut für Museumsforschung (Institute for Museum Research) found an extremely high degree of trust in museums, comparable to similar studies in other parts of the world (see Dickenson, 2024), which could overwrite their constitutive conflictuality. Put differently, undifferentiated or blind trust might be counter-productive to create trust via actual encounters of diversity and difference in museums that we identify to be at the heart of agonistic museum diplomacy. Considering the multiple crises that liberal democracies find themselves in, museum might be paradoxically more endangered to hollow out their own potential to be agonistic by desperately holding on to processes and narratives of “democracy,” which in fact are rendered less democratic via democratic mechanisms that infringe the autonomy of art and academia. We urge museum scholars and practitioners to rethink the problematic underpinnings of a potentially ungrounded or excessive form of trust in museums. Instead, we advise to stay alert about what the museum is doing in the global, diplomatic dimension. This specifically concerns the terms of museums’ diplomatic practices of mediation, understanding, and celebration of difference, including when, where, and for whom.

And this also goes in line with our plea for museums to unlearn their partial or complete, implicit or explicit obsession with consensus. We invite museums to be open, curious, and courageous to practice conflictual consensus-making instead, while avoiding rotten compromises (Holper, 2025). We suggest that what is needed is a conflict-attuned approach to museum diplomacy and cultural diplomacy writ large in a potentially (de)neoliberalizing and clearly antagonizing global cultural order. This museum diplomacy for agonism is the realization that blanket trust and/or belief in consensus is both a potential opportunity and a potential trap.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Julian Paulenz for their research assistance.

ORCID iDs

Sarah E.K. Smith

Joachim Baur

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/German Research Foundation (project number: 564218981).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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