Culture, Diplomacy, and Power: The French and British Models of Cultural Diplomacy in the Early Twenty-First Century

The objective of this thesis is to offer a new conceptualization of contemporary cultural diplomacy that builds off of the emergent triadic interaction between a resource -culture-, an instrument -diplomacy-, and a relation -power. It also develops an analytical model of state-driven cultural diplomacy and it tests it on the initiatives undertaken by the United Kingdom (UK) and France in the framework of their strategy towards partner countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the aftermath of the so-called “Arab Spring”. Overall, the thesis has the ambition to bring a new theoretical perspective to the study of cultural diplomacy and to assess the role of cultural diplomacy in contemporary foreign policy and its place in the practice of power in international relations.