Boundary Spanners of Humanity

Book excerpt: "Boundary Spanners of Humanity tackles the growing severity of global problems and our strained ability to collaborate by critically re-examining two pivotal tools: communication and public diplomacy. R.S. Zaharna, a leading scholar of public diplomacy and international strategic communication, exposes the limitations of intercultural communication and state-based public diplomacy and proposes a pan-human vision of communication that can revolutionize how we communicate globally. The book reveals how dominant views of communication and public diplomacy are based on a 19th-century mindset of separateness that clashes with today's global connectivity and diversity. In a radical break from outdated models that divide humanity into cultural categories, Zaharna introduces a vision of humanity-centered public diplomacy featuring three complementary logics of communication. Used together, these communication logics are key to leveraging diversity, navigating connectivity, and enhancing our capacity for collaboration. Zaharna's innovative approach stems from decade-long, interdisciplinary research spanning ancient cosmologies, diverse intellectual heritages, contemporary social science, and emerging neuro-biological science. Boundary Spanners of Humanity provides a rich array of examples from ancient diplomacies to the covid-19 pandemic to illustrate a vision of pan-human communication that spans our diversity and harnesses it as an essential strength in collective problem solving and global collaboration"--