Description
Over the past twenty years, nation-branding has become a widespread international practice. Governments around the world, regardless of their democratic credentials and level of socio-economic development, have pursued similar sets of ‘branding practices’ to present themselves and their state in a favourable light. Across contexts, the pool of common activities includes seemingly ‘cosmetic’ doings such as the development of tourism slogans or the hosting of international events, as well as more ‘institutionalised’ doings such as the development of new government branches, re-modelling cityscapes, or re-telling national pasts and futures. Combined, these doings have lasting effects on their surroundings as they monopolize political discourse and mould material environments.
Regardless of its widespread use, nation-branding remains marginalized in critical international relations and politics research, where it is commonly understood as a vain, superficial selling technique with little political salience. If we look from the ground up, however, an alternative interpretation emerges as statements and practices that may look like superficial slogans are deeply involved in the imagination, actualization and legitimation of political regimes. To show this, we draw on years of fieldwork conducted on practices of nation-branding in three authoritarian regimes: Kazakhstan, Qatar and Thailand. In particular, we trace how national brands are made and how they seek to stabilize politicized interpretations of identity as inevitable, legitimate and true. Our analysis builds on and extends recent debates in IR, politics and political geography about nation-branding’s political undercurrents, and adds further empirical evidence to the theoretical claim that political orders are practical achievements based on shared conceptions of who we are. In our increasingly image-obsessed and attention-seeking world, branding practices do not passively promote given political entities; they bring them into being. By simplifying complex political narratives and then claiming that they reflect how a state ‘really is’, nation-branding practices de-politicise their own production process, normalise their suggested interpretation of reality, and thus contribute to legitimate the way society and power relations are currently organised.
