What's wrong with the paradigm of winning 'hearts and minds?"

Many of the public diplomacy initiatives targeted at the Middle East focus on "winning the hearts and minds" of the people of the Middle East. To the extent that the objectives and strategies of public diplomacy initiatives are built around the goal of winning the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East, such initiatives are most likely destined to fail.

This failure is inherent in the emphasis on persuasion built around top-down agendas directed at changing the attitudes and opinions of the targets of the message so that they would be more closely aligned with the goals of the sender of the message. Inherent in the idea of winning the hearts and minds is the notion of wanting to change the receiver of the message so that they would be more closely aligned with the sender's agendas. In the context of US public diplomacy efforts, the goal is to ultimately create positions of support for (a) US policies, (b) US corporations that might operate in the Middle East, and (c) US structures in the Middle East that would serve other US economic interests such as its need for oil.

Ultimately, the framework of wanting to win the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East closes opportunities for dialogue. To the extent that US public diplomacy efforts engage with the Middle East only with the goals of serving US economic and geo-political interests, these efforts close opportunities for dialogue.

The culture-centered approach suggests an alternative framework by pointing out that communication initiatives in the Middle East need to begin with a commitment to dialogue that is built on opportunities for listening to the voices of the people of the Middle East. It is only by beginning to listen to the people of the Middle East that we can talk about creating possibilities for communication.

Instead of talking about "winning," US public diplomacy efforts need to begin by being interested in truly understanding what the people in the Middle East have to say.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

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