This research analyzes why diplomacy is failing in the Dominican Republic. In this thesis, I describe how Dominicans construct their foreign affairs, and the limitations that diplomacy has had in the country. In order to achieve these goals, I have analyzed official documents such as the 2013 and 2015 payrolls of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and legal documents including Article 146 from the Constitution, Organic Law 314 from 1964, and the Protocol of Transparency and Institutions. I argue that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Dominican Republic lacks seriousness and is characterized by the following variables: (1) patronage, (2) corruption, and (3) the systematic violation of Dominican law. The thesis emphasizes how these variables have had a tremendous impact on the exercise of diplomacy. The research analyzes the reaction of the Dominican state and its citizens and how the nation responds to criticisms by the international community. Dominican citizens think that the opinion of international media is a campaign against their country. The implications of this false public perception is an intense nationalism, and the government encourages this. The true problem, as this thesis demonstrates, is institutional weakness. The government uses intense and widespread nationalism to hide institutional weakness and state corruption. After exploring this dialogue between the government, citizens and international media, I move forward framing concepts such as soft power and new public diplomacy to reinforce the importance of listening to foreign publics. In addition I explain why the country needs to change the traditional approach to foreign affairs. The adoption of a new public diplomacy is required to establish credibility and the integration between state, citizens and international publics.

This thesis, as part of the one-year Master Programme in Social Science with specialization in Digital media, has taken up the concepts of nation branding and new public diplomacy and examined them from the perspective of the role that new, digital or even innovative – as some may call them – media play within them. It consists of five (5) chapters and is a little less than sixty (60) pages long. The concepts and fields above  are usually confused with each other, as people tend to use the one notion for naming the other and vice versa. However, what is common in those two fields is the involvement of new media, such as social media platforms or platforms that enable crowdsourcing activities. Especially, within the past few decades that the internet has invaded the most into the lifestyle of a large segment of this planet, it seems as things, thoughts, ideas and actions are driven by or with the internet. Thus, with the opportunity of this thesis, I wanted to examine the role that new media play when it comes to talking about nation branding or new public diplomacy acts. This work has attempted to achieve that by focusing on a recently run initiative in Greece, called “Up Greek Tourism”. The initiative’s goal was to promote Greek tourism abroad, in an attempt to help Greece from within. A group of Greek people formulated the group and intended to gather the money through a crowdsourcing platform, in order to advertise Greek tourism abroad. What I actually tried to do is investigate the way they handled their channels of communication and the reason they chose internet as being central to their communicational policy. My idea was to do that by discursively analyzing a TEDx talk of the initiator, conducting a semiotic analysis on the images they used in their advertisements and by a short content analysis from the early stages of their Facebook page, through which it became known. Last but not least, I tried to verify the results by using their own answers from an open-end questionnaire they answered for me.

The master thesis deals with a new phenomenon in the world of diplomacy: digital diplomacy. The main objective of this work is to determine whether the digital diplomacy is able to improve the relationship between the American and Islamic civilization. To fulfill this goal, the case study of Digital Outreach Team, of a team of specialists who search the internet and communicate with Muslims with negative attitude towards US, was used. The work is divided into three chapters. The first chapter provides a theoretical introduction to digital diplomacy. The second chapter is devoted to the use of digital diplomacy in the Unied States: a world leader in information and communication technologies, with an emphasis on digitization of activities of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the third chapter we find the analysis of the digital activities of the team and assessment of the digital diplomacy on Arab soil.

Incorported in Russia's public diplomacy arsenal towards France is memory diplomacy, according to which Russian authorities seek to integrate their own historical narratives with those of France and to export commemorative practices there. This often overlooked diplomacy type is one of the most covert soft power tools. This thesis examines how has Russia utilized memory diplomacy as a soft power towards France from 2000 to 2019. It argues that Russia has deliberately omited to promote its past role, whether direct or indirect, when local interpretations of a shared event in France are too fragmented. In more consensual conditions and particularly regarding the Second World War, Russia's memory diplomacy has been versatile in its methods, using both traditional and new public diplomacy tools. With soft power as a goal, the Russian authorities have targeted the diverse Russian diaspora communities in France and French politicians through this memory policy to have them relay the Kremlin's political position.

Public diplomacy is a form of diplomatic activity aimed at communicating directly with foreign publics. In light of the technological developments of recent decades, digital tools and platforms have transformed the field of public diplomacy and became a significant force in shaping the diplomatic field. Sweden is a country with a strong international presence, where public diplomacy is a prioritized field for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. This study contributes to the limited research on Swedish public diplomacy strategy by analyzing the way in which Sweden’s four core values are communicated in the digital sphere. The analysis is conducted in two segments. First, the Swedish public diplomacy strategy is examined. Secondly, using Critical Discourse Analysis, twelve articles published on the website for Swedish Foreign Policy Stories were analyzed. The analysis shows that the core values are incorporated in the texts. The values are not stated overtly, but strong indications in the discourse can be found suggesting their relevance. The size of the sample is not large enough to allow for generalizations of the findings. The study concludes that except for discourse, other elements, such as the visual semiotic choices also contribute to the communication of Sweden’s four core values.