This volume takes concepts familiar to foreign policy scholars and reimagines their usefulness in a global era. The essays in this collection feature unique methodological and theoretical contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The field of rhetorical studies often assumes a US-centric approach that elevates American chief executives as the sole doers and makers of foreign policy discourse. This work points to a more comprehensive, global perspective of foreign policy discourse and offers key concepts, case studies, and approaches. It also examines who enacts discourse, where it happens, and how it influences relationships in/between local, national, transnational, and global spheres.
Among the cases researched in this collection are foreign policy rhetoric from Cold War foreign policy in Latin America, the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine war messages, and the development challenges of the Ford Foundation and the Kenya Women Finance Trust, among many others.
ContentsIntroductionSection 1. Old Concepts, New WaysCold War Foreign Policy in Latin America: The “Johnson Doctrine” and a Paradigm of War | José G. Izaguirre IIIRhetorics of Sovereignty in Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine War Messages | Stephen J. HeidtOn a Collision Course: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Anchorage Summit, Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, and the State of US-China Relations | Stephen J. Hartnett and Chiaoning SuThe Unnatural Rhetorical Career of Natural Rights: The US Commission on Unalienable Rights and the Problem of Difference in Global Governance | Zornitsa KeremidchievaSection 2. New Concepts, Old ThingsIt Begins in Corruption, and Plunder, and Kidnapping: Slavery and the Law of Nations in the Early Republic | Robert Elliot MillsThe Return of the Secret: The Protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Baltic Independence, and US Foreign Policy Rhetoric in the Late 1980s | Kristen M. EinertsonVernacular Foreign Policy in the Fatigue Press | Dominic J. MantheySection 3. New Approaches, Future DirectionsThe Ghosts of Development: Speech, Money, and Global Subject-Making at the Ford Foundation and the Kenya Women Finance Trust, Timothy BarneyHow Community Organizations Do Care as Foreign Policy Actors, Belinda A. Stillion SouthardTransnational Rhetorical Approaches to Foreign Policy: Analytic Tracks to Examine the Global Refugee Crisis | Sara L. McKinnonContributors
Allison M. Prasch is associate professor of rhetoric, politics, and culture in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on the intersections of rhetorical theory and history, US presidential rhetoric, foreign policy, and space/place.
Sara L. McKinnon is professor of rhetoric, politics, and culture in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, director of the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program, and cochair of the Human Rights Program. Her research is the areas of migration, legal studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
