Non-western celebrities and diplomacy: introduction

The origins of the specific project featured in this Cultural Report lie in a larger scale project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the White Rose East Asia Centre at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. The project set out to explore the influence and roles of a range of informal political actors such as former leaders, political spouses and 10 celebrity diplomats, to name but a few, across both the domestic and international levels of analysis in three regions of the world: East Asia, Russia and the Arab World.