Congratulations to NPCU visiting student Mª Luisa Azpíroz Manero, who received her PhD just before Christmas for a thesis entitled, 'American Public Diplomacy in the “War on Terror”: Analysis and Evaluation of its Influence on the Spanish Press'. Mª Luisa was based at Facultad de Comunicación, University of Navarra, Spain. Her supervisor was Professor María Teresa La Porte Fernández-Alfaro. She spent time at the New Political Communication Unit, Royal Holloway, in 2008 and presented an early iteration of her thesis. Her abstract is below. She can be contacted on mazpiroz@alumni.unav.es. Well done Mª Luisa.

Mª Luisa Azpíroz Manero: American Public Diplomacy in the “War on Terror”: Analysis and Evaluation of its Influence on the Spanish Press

Public diplomacy is an international political communication activity that experienced renewed importance in the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The “War on Terror” promoted by the Bush Administration was accompanied by the implementation of public diplomacy strategies designed to reinforce the fight against terrorism and to diminish the levels of anti-Americanism, especially in the Muslim world, through the exercise of soft power. The object of this thesis is, in the first place, to study public diplomacy as an international political communication activity. In the second place, to carry out empirical research that, resorting to framing theory as a methodological tool, analyzes and evaluates the influence of Bush’s declarations and speeches, as a part of American mediatic diplomacy, in the Spanish press, in two case studies on the “War on Terror” (the first case study spans the period from 9/11 to November 2001, and the second, the months prior to the Iraq War). To do so, the content of this thesis is set out in six chapters. The first chapter presents a theoretical framework of public diplomacy, the second chapter explains the methodology that is used in the empirical study and the third chapter offers a context for the case studies where that methodology is applied. Chapters four, five and six constitute the empirical part of the work: in the first two the results of the analysis of mediatic diplomacy in two specific periods of the “War on Terror” are exposed, and, in the last, an evaluation of its influence based on the results of the analysis and on the consideration of other relevant factors is performed.