NOON CITY DEPARTMENT OF STATE
→🏢
→ Bureau of Soft Power Diplomacy୧‿︵‿︵
→ / Special Mission O1 Athens, Greece
→ / Special Mission O2 TBC
→ Senior Advisor ☁️ MCG☁️
NOON CITY DEPARTMENT OF STATE
→🏢
→ Bureau of Soft Power Diplomacy୧‿︵‿︵
→ / Special Mission O1 Athens, Greece
→ / Special Mission O2 TBC
→ Senior Advisor ☁️ MCG☁️
︵‿︵‿୨ Bureau of Soft Power Diplomacy Mandate ୧‿︵‿︵
The Bureau of Soft Power Diplomacy is an A-R-B* strategic diplomatic office operating under the auspices of the Noon City State. Its mandate is the study and advancement of soft power through material culture, relational presence, and affective atmospheres across diverse geopolitical and cultural contexts.
Staged through the fieldwork of civilian diplomat Margherita Cloud Glenn, the Bureau embeds within host cities to observe, document, inhabit & subtly influence diplomatic ecologies — where codes of conduct, symbolic exchange, and presence hold affective and political resonance.
At the Bureau, diplomacy is understood as a site of ambient governance, wherein gestures, material objects, and spatial systems set the specific affective tone.
Margherita functions as both character and method: embedding herself in civic and institutional environments to gather sensory data, participate in ritual, and develop soft power artefacts that fold fiction into functional authority.
Soft Power works through attraction rather than coercion, shaping hearts and minds (Nye 2009). Additionally, the Bureau engages J.L. Austin’s speech-act framework, specifically how ceremonial words, objects and atmospheres perform power.
The Bureau’s methods move seamlessly ┈┈➤ Between diplomacy & theatre, presence & persuasion, recognising, after Goffman, that diplomacy is always staged, and always felt!
The Bureau’s research includes embedded fieldwork, documentation and the creation of material artefacts, through which it poses some critical questions:
✰ How do elaborate bureaucratic fictions, enacted in situ (!) turn spectatorial belief into temporary but functional authority?
✰ How diplomatic objects communicate authority┈┈➤ cultural or otherwise?
✰ What is the affective presence of personal belongings in formal environments?
✰ How does symbolic exchange function when fiction is embedded within the real?
The Bureau is an i n s e r t i o n !
An apparatus that operates within, rather than against, the atmospheric protocols of diplomacy.
*A-R-B: ARTISTIC RESEARCH BODY
*becomes≡ is revealed as!!!
Nye, JS Jr 2009, ‘Get smart: combining hard and soft power’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 88, no. 4, pp. 160–163.