Pop, Oana Elisabeta

Research Topic

The evolution of Brand America: US foreign policy, public diplomacy and rhetoric towards the Middle East from Bush Senior to Obama

My doctoral research explores the extent to which a country’s international political actions and messages towards a specific ethnic and religious group during consecutive administrations have the potential to affect the way foreign audiences perceive that country, its government, its people, its culture and products. Specifically my research will analyse why the United States has progressively lost the sympathy and support of the global audience starting the end of the Cold War, hence after the Bush Senior Administration and during the Clinton and Bush Jr. Administrations, and will examine how it managed to gradually recapture hearts and minds worldwide with the election of President Obama.

A nation brand is made of six components: Tourism, People, Culture and Heritage, Investment and Immigration, Foreign and Domestic Policy and Export Brands (Anholt and Hildreth, 2004), but this thesis proposes that it is the US political brand - understood as the US foreign policy making and communicating – that has the potential to significantly impact on peoples’ perceptions of the overall US nation brand and by consequence on the US world hegemony. The Middle East was chosen as a case study in the detriment of Russia, Africa or Latin America, because a significant body made of political and media analysts and scholars, both in the US and abroad, and polls conducted all over the world stress the fact that the US- Middle East relations are a catalyst not just for peace and security in the region, but in a evermore interdependent world inhabited by a growing Muslim population (Pew Forum, 2009), for the global peace and security.

The theoretical framework will be made of complementary fields of study examining concepts of soft power, public diplomacy, foreign policy making, presidential rhetoric analysis and nation branding which are combined to form an understanding of the link between the making and communicating of foreign policy and its impact of a nation’s brand.

Research Supervisors

Dr Pauline Eadie and Professor Alex Danchev

Primary Funding Source

None

Research Interests

• Nation Branding
• US foreign policy and culture
• The Middle East Peace Process
• Media studies
• foreign languages
• Romania in all aspects (Member of the League of Romanian Students Abroad).