Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the relationship between a country's foreign aid and development assistance programmes and the communication of a positive image to both domestic and international audiences by using soft power analysis as its framework.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the relationship between a country's foreign aid and development assistance programmes and the communication of a positive image to both domestic and international audiences. The author argues that political communications analysis can provide useful critical understanding of the aid and development industries beyond the more traditional approaches of political economy and postcolonial studies. To this end, the paper frames foreign aid and development assistance through the political theory of soft power, arguing that these activities ought to be thought of as acts of public diplomacy and thereby conducive with the source government's power accumulation strategy rather than any act of international philanthropy. Moreover, the analysis of explicit and implicit political communications from a number of governments historical programmes reveals the multitude of audiences that these activities engage with beyond the direct recipients of assistance.