Vanessa Bravo co-authors article in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy

Vanessa Bravo, assistant professor in the School of Communications, served as the lead co-author of “Communicating the homeland’s relationship with its diaspora community: The cases of El Salvador and Colombia” in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy.

This peer-reviewed article, which Bravo wrote in collaboration with Assistant Professor Maria DeMoya at DePaul University in Chicago, analyzes about 200 news releases, speeches, factsheets and other public information material to compare the ways in which each government – El Salvador’s and Colombia’s—communicates with, or about, their diaspora communities.

The article also explores the themes used to ‘construct’ the image of the diaspora for each country, as well as the issues that these governments traditionally associate with their expatriates. Besides, the study analyses the type of relationship described in the official communication (that is, communal relationship versus exchange relationship), with its findings suggesting a typology of government-to-diaspora communication and a new category of relationship (‘hybrid’ relationships).

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy is published by Brill, a publishing house founded in 1683, and the journal describes itself as “the premier research journal for the study of diplomacy and its role in contemporary international relations. It publishes the best research on the theory, practice and technique of diplomacy in both its traditional state-based bilateral and multilateral forms, plus more recent forms of diplomacy.”

Since Vanessa Bravo started teaching at Elon University in 2011, she has published work in Public Relations Review, the International Journal of Communication, Global Media Journal (American Edition), Revista Internacional de Relaciones Públicas (Universidad de Málaga, Spain) and Palabra Clave (Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia).

She has also authored a book chapter in “Communication and Community” (Hampton Press).