New ways and actors when diplomacy goes digital - The e-Diplomacy Campaign "Midwives4All"

This article focuses on Midwives4All, an ediplomacy campaign launched by the Swedish MFA in 2015. The campaign aims to spread knowledge about the benefits of midwives and evidence-based midwifery. Within the campaign, the Swedish MFA, and in particular its Communications Department (UD-KOM), combines e-diplomacy and networking and the campaign has become one key activity within the Swedish feminist foreign policy. It is organizing diplomacy in new ways that regards both choices of channels and the networking with interand nongovernmental organizations. The limited impacts of the campaign are seen as consequences of the peripheral status of the issue and the lack of systematic structures for e-diplomacy so far. In spite of this the case indicates that e-diplomacy has the potential to raise and empower both new actor groups and new issues on the diplomatic agenda. 1. New tools for a new policy – introduction Diplomacy and international politics is one of the least systematized areas of politics and has even been described as anarchy [1]. However, new norms, social ideas, and identities have slowly decayed the hierarchies, and in particular gender equality is an emerging issue [2]. Such changes open for new structures and issues to be addressed on the international diplomacy agenda. International politics and diplomacy issues that are less formal and institutionalized than national ones have the potential to gain even more from digital media [3]. The emerging conceptualization of ediplomacy grasps the use of social media and other digital tools in the context of international and diplomatic relations [3]. Digital diplomacy and ediplomacy are used as interchangeable concepts. The Swedish government has long had a democratic and inclusive approach in its foreign policies. The policies and development program has been focusing on issues like public health, education, equality and democracy as a key for development [4]. As a formalization of this policy, the Swedish Prime Minister in 2014, in his declaration of the new government, clarified the government’s feminis t foreign policy. It was formulated as “Ensuring that women and girls can enjoy their fundamental human rights is both an obligation within the framework of our international commitments, and a prerequisite for reaching Sweden’s broader foreign policy goals on peace, and security and sustainable development” [5]. This policy aim is in line with the in 2015 formulated UN sustainable development “Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” [6]. The Department of Communication at the Swedish MFA (UD-KOM) is in charge of developing the communicational tools needed for digital and public diplomacy. They support the diplomatic objectives to “effectively project Swedish values and political interests abroad, as well as maintaining relationships with the public and other governments” [7, pp. 168]. The Swedish MFA was assigned to implement the idea of a feminist foreign policy and this campaign became a key activity in this policy formation. Figure 1. Screen shot from the Midwives4All Twitter account, published 26 Feb. 2015, 4:25 AM 2438 Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2017 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41451 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-0-2 CC-BY-NC-ND The campaign’s basic arguments, as shown above, build on research presented in The Lancet’s series on midwifery and UNFPAs State of the World’s Midwifery Report [8]. 1.1 Aim of the paper The aim of the article is to analyze the campaign “Midwives4All” as a case of e-diplomacy and discuss how a feminist foreign policy can gain from new forms of diplomacy and technologies. The paper is organized around three research questions: RQ1: How is e-diplomacy conceptualized? RQ2: What is the Swedish MFA’s approach to ediplomacy in general and within the Midwives4All campaign in particular? RQ3: How can e-diplomacy facilitate other issues and actors than the traditional diplomatic actors? This paper consists of four sections. The introduction includes a discussion on research methods and selection of the case. Secondly, theories and models in the emerging field of e-diplomacy is presented and discussed (RQ1). The third section presents the case study of “Midwives4all” and the Swedish MFA’s (RQ2) approach to e-diplomacy . Finally, the case is analyzed and related to a more general discussion (RQ3). 1.2 Grasping on-going processes – Methods and material The e-diplomacy campaign “Midwives4All” was launched by the Swedish MFA in February 2015, but the MFA is not the only actor as there are a number of ‘nodes ’, i.e. external collaboration partners, connected to the campaign. The combination of the use of social media and networking so far appears to be rather unique for Swedish diplomacy and thus the case was selected to show such a process. The case is also related to a general policy change – towards feminis m. We hereby explore the usage of social media in a very specific political setting and the integration of evidence based arguments for midwifery, which makes it interesting in several ways. The case also indicates how a relatively small country can use ediplomacy to reach out and put emphasis on a far beyond mainstream issue to “punch above their weight” in diplomacy [9]. Thus, the case was chosen because it combines e-diplomacy, networking and features of the Swedish feminist foreign policy. The case study is grasped through an analysis of documents, places and narratives to understand gendered dimensions [10]. This includes public documents, interviews and focus groups with stakeholders, and monitoring of social media dialogues. The social media element of the process focuses on social media activities by the Swedish MFA and its followers on the social network platforms where the Midwives4All initiative is present, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Thunderclap, Instagram, and the Midwives4All website. The campaign’s presence on social media sites has been analyzed in terms of process and effects of e-diplomacy. Two time spans have been chosen for the collection of data: 23 February – 23 March 2015 and 1 – 30 September 2015 to respectively cover the first month after the campaign was launched and the period of the Thunderclap campaign. No aggregated data on statistics has been made available, thus the analysis rather focuses on the content. The snap shots chosen to illustrate the process and its result are not representative, but should rather be seen as illustrations of the way they are arguing and presenting the issues. The narrative of this campaign was formed through a half day focus group interview with central professional staff and diplomats managing the campaign at the Swedish MFA in March 2016. The interview provided critical and focused discussions on the framing of the campaign, its formulation, process, and challenges. The advantage of this approach is that, through discussion, the informants highlight and reflect upon issues that cannot be prepared as questions before the meeting [11]. Additional interviews have been arranged with representatives for some of the campaign’s nodes. 2.What is e-diplomacy? – Conceptualizing the key issue e-diplomacy is extending the meaning of egovernment into the field of communications and power relations among states in the globalized political arena. In this section RQ1 is addressed firstly by framing the field of diplomacy into contemporary social change and secondly by focusing on actors and issues, before summing it all up into an analytical model that will be used for the final analysis of the case.