This book explores new grounds that public diplomacy is entering today, as domestic publics come to the forefront of the policy - acting both as foreign policy constituencies and public diplomacy actors cooperating with their foreign counterparts. The author discusses the phenomena of public diplomacy's domestic dimension described as government's ability to engage its own society in foreign policy practices through information, cooperation and identity-defining. By analysing data from over 80 recorded interviews with Australian, Norwegian and American public diplomacy practitioners, this volume illustrates both successful and unsuccessful models of such cooperation. From Norwegian Peace Diplomacy, through Australia's ambivalent engagement with Asia, to U.S. Government-sponsored exchange programs, the author argues that governments around the world are slowly accepting a paradigm shift in diplomatic practice from monological/dialogical to a more collaborative public diplomacy. This book is an essential resource for students, scholars, experts and diplomats interested in world's best-practices of engaging domestic civil society actors in foreign policy statecraft.

This book offers a detailed analysis of all mainstream novels of Iain Banks. It explores the question of mediation, the process of a semiotic (re)construction of the world on the part of Banks's characters, with reference to the four directions of fictional worldmodelling, i.e. the four types of relationship between the individual and the world established by the author's first novel, The Wasp Factory. In order to give justice to the extremely eclectic novelistic production of Iain Banks, the analysis of fifteen of his novels contained in the present study employs diverse interpretative "tools", fusing elements of various methodologies: structural-semiotic analysis supplemented by a mythographic approach along with psychological and gender specific theories. Mediating the World in the Novels of Iain Banks: The Paradigms of Fiction thus develops a critical paradigm capable of uniting the extremely versatile mainstream production of this Scottish writer.