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Battles to Bridges: US Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy after 9/11. By R.S. Zaharna. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 233 pp. ISBN 9781137446152 (pbk).
Following media coverage conducted by U.S.-owned or -led media organizations about the 9/11 attack, the first global reactions were sympathy for Americans. It was a predictable precursor to what would be the long-lasting invasions of some Middle Eastern countries that had played no part in the attack. Global sympathy then changed into negative feelings ranging from fear to hatred of the government of the United States. Like many other scholars, in her book Battles to Bridges Rhonda Zaharna attributes this loss of sympathy to the United States' aggressive diplomacy in the wake of 9/11. Media outlets cannot transform the nature of diplomatic practices. However, expecting media institutions to initiate geopolitical effects, particularly in the context of adversarial relationships between countries, is neither unprecedented nor unreasonable. Battles to Bridges is one of a number of academic attempts to discover the roots of America's strategic failure in communicating its political and cultural message to Middle Eastern countries. This book, which is one of the few explanatory texts on the topic, engages academic debate for the first five chapters, and critiques the array of theories and models that may be brought to bear on the question of American strategic communication and public diplomacy for the final three chapters. Zaharna displays an academic fondness for granular details and historical anecdotes. While this is often a strength, it does, at times, become a weakness in the text.
After reviewing U.S. public diplomacy lessons in their historical context, Zaharna- a professor...