Simon Haselock examines how to communicate from the frontline

“Winning hearts and minds is about persuasion”

"My God, this is the end of diplomacy!” Lord Palmerston apparently retorted when the first telegram landed on his desk in the 1840s. It was a seminal moment, heralding the nineteenth-century information revolution that would emerge from separating communication from transport. Foreign intervention was a much simpler business in Palmerston’s Britain, when it was carried on outside direct public gaze, than in the current era, with its culture of what the BBC’s Nik Gowing describes as the “tyranny of real-time journalism”.

The digital revolution is not the only factor that has redefined the relationship between foreign affairs, diplomacy and the use of force. As General Sir Rupert Smith argued, there has been a fundamental shift in the reasons why and how wars are fought: interstate industrial wars of the twentieth century have given way to ‘war amongst the people’ such as the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and the uprisings of the Arab Spring. These wars are about politics, the lifeblood of which is opinion, belief and the power of persuasion.

Sir Gerald Templer, the British High Commissioner tasked with defeating the communist insurgency in Malaya, first coined the “hearts and minds” phrase. Winning hearts and minds was not about the hard pushing power of force but about the soft pulling power of persuasion: now, this is more important than ever.

Soft power, as Joseph Nye argued, is about getting others to want the outcomes that you want. He argues that a country’s soft power rests primarily on three resources: its culture, its political values, and its foreign policies. These resources only come into play however when they are perceived as possessing legitimate moral authority.

The doctrine we have developed at Albany is ‘comprehensive communications’, a better way of describing the marriage of means and ends that is required to communicate strategically. Itmirrors the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ used by NATO governments as the way to coordinate diplomatic, military and economic tools when managing international crises. It is an inclusive concept that is less likely to be captured by narrow specialists.

The nature of communicationsin the information age also requires governments and institutions to become more agile. They have to adapt to digital technology, which punishes slow decision-making and hierarchical communications. Speed is now imperative: information can no longer be controlled, but at best it can be managed.

In Darfur, the tradition of storytelling beneath trees is the best example of grassroots communications. Faced with the challenge of communicating the 2008 Darfur Peace Agreement to a remote, diffuse population across a vast region, we devised a festival to engage Darfuris, attracting several hundred thousand people. It worked.

Effective communications strategies put locals and individuals at their centre and identify the conduits and platforms that will carry the stories we want to tell. Doing so requires communications programs to have a significant research capacity and an ability to understand local information ecology, culture and practice from the start.

Comprehensive communications implies listening rather than just transmitting. It’s about understanding perceptions, politics and processes, and requires approaching from all angles. To do this at the same time as adapting to the effects of digital communication means transforming institutional cultures and management hierarchies.

You could say it’s a rather greater challenge than that facing Palmerston 170 years ago. 

Simon Haselock is a co-founder and director of Albany Associates, communications specialists in conflict environments. www.albanyassociates.com