Celebrity Diplomats: Results, Please...

For most of USC's seminar on "Celebrity Diplomacy" earlier this week, academic experts and others marveled at the forays of the likes of Bono and George Clooney and Angelina Jolie into foreign policy areas, sharing stories of their ability to gain access to world leaders where career diplomats could not.

Then, after several hours, came the contrarian: Writer-producer Rob Long, one of the industry's higher profile conservatives who also pens regularly for National Review. He challenged the notion that celebrity-led forays into world trouble spots amount to much, and noted the lack of results despite reams of publicity and years of effort. As an example he cited the flow of stars who have called attention to the crisis in Darfur. He said that when he was in Khartoum in 2006, the underlying feeling was of cynicism and resistance to any efforts from the West. "Until you change those minds, you won't get anywhere," he said.

When he heard that the Skirball Center was hosting a global conference of African first ladies, with celebs like Sharon Stone and Maria Bello in attendance, he said he thought, "I want to blow my brains out, because nothing is going to happen at that conference."

"The idea of 'raising awareness' as an outcome," he said, "is just trivial." The mistake, he added, is confusing philanthropy with diplomacy. He also swiped at the United Nations, which all but invented the idea of celebrity diplomats, noting that while "Hotel Rwanda" may have inspired Don Cheadle to take a more active humanitarian role in Darfur, the movie itself shows the world body's ineffectiveness and "is not an endorsement of UN peacekeeping at all."

Long attributed some of his biting commentary to the fact that he had been up until 2 a.m. shooting a pilot, but he does raise a point: How do celebrity diplomats measure their success?

Talk to many activists involved in Darfur, and they express much gratefulness for celebrity efforts, even if there have been varying degrees of commitment. I recently asked John Prendergast of the Enough Project whether there was some downside to the celebrity attention, and his answer was on the order of "absolutely not."

Eric Falt, director of the outreach division of the UN's department of public information, noted that their program of celebrity ambassadors was critical to getting the the masses to pay attention to issues like malaria.

"What do we do to combat malaria?" he said. "Do we just not care?"

"We can't bring attention to these issues without everyone's help, and certainly not without the power of celebrity, because they do already have that connection to people."

Political consultant Donna Bojarsky, director of the industry-centric Foreign Policy Roundtable, noted that famous figures who get involved in diplomacy quickly realize that "you can't even get to the advocacy stage, particularly in this country, unless you have 'heat' around something."

Long suggests that celebrities can be effective when their aim is a specific and achievable goal, like clean water in Africa, rather that pressing for an intervention of UN peacekeepers. But celebrity diplomacy is heading into ever more complex situations.

The likes of Bono, Clooney and Jolie are taking their efforts beyond a humanitarian role or a UN designation. As USC visiting professor Andrew Cooper put it at another panel, "Bono has been described as having a state of his own; he's sort of outgrown Ireland." Clooney recently went to the White House to press for a special envoy to Darfur. And Jolie has been outspoken about the need for a continued presence in Iraq, pointing to the plight of refugees. "Whatever you think of her private life, in terms of celebrity diplomacy, she hasn't made a faulty move," Cooper said.

With Cooper was Douglas Kellner, philosophy of education chair at UCLA. The author of "Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy," Kellner says that the world demands a broad range of diplomatic efforts --- including celebrity diplomacy. It's something not lost on President Obama, "the world's super global celebrity, bar none."

The risk is that spectacle will be substituted for substance, a prospect that will surely lead to more scrutiny. As celebrity diplomacy enters more complex arenas, so too will the skepticism and with it the demand for results.