Douglas C. Nord. Sister City Diplomacy: Community Engagement in US-Russian Relations from the Cold War to Today. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Abstract

In 1963 the legendary broadcast reporter and American statesman Edward R. Murrow said, “The real crucial link in international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” In his book, Douglas C. Nord invites readers to focus on these “three feet” of international relations—what we now broadly call people-to-people diplomacy. Today the world once again finds itself searching for ways out of international political entanglements and diplomatic gridlock, seeking to ease tensions and reestablish meaningful dialogue. When discussing the current state of US-Russian relations, political analysts often invoke the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as a kind of “tuning fork” against which to gauge the tone of communication between the two major world powers, as well as the level of tension in the complex instrument known as “track 1 diplomacy”—official governmental international dialogue conducted by professional diplomats. As the current state of world politics makes us once again turn to the infamous “tuning fork” to analyze the level of international tensions, Nord’s book provides examples of how people-to-people diplomacy could be used for “keeping the peace when it matters too much to be left to politicians,” as Don Carlson and Craig Comstock (1986) put it in the subtitle of their study of “citizen summitry.”

Text in English