Crisis Communication as a Multilevel Game: The Muhammad Cartoons from a Crisis Diplomacy Perspective

Abstract

The Muhammad cartoon crisis in 2005 provides an illustrative example of how crises travel across geographical boundaries, in this case, from a national newspaper into a full-fledged public diplomacy crisis at the international level. From a crisis management perspective, a multilevel setting poses a real challenge to actors trying to contain the situation at hand. Likewise, the multilevel nature of a crisis poses a challenge to crisis communication theories, which have traditionally focused on rhetorical strategies in single organizational crises. As a response, this article proposes a framework for examining crisis communication based on how actors’ framing impact the perceptions of arenas, stakeholders, and communication strategies.

Online Reactions to the Muhammad Cartoons: YouTube and the Virtual Ummah

“…Due to the cartoons, embassies were attacked, and at least 200 people were killed and hundreds of others were injured (Ruthven ). Lindholm and Olsson (:262) point out that in mid‐2006, the Danish Foreign Ministry got thousands of protest letters and spam mails, while calls in the Muslim world to boycott Danish products spread. In fact, criticisms against Denmark and its interests extended to the Internet in the form of online attacks, as over 600 Danish websites were either defaced or hacked (Carr ; Ruthven ).…”

Reassessing Nation-Branding: Danish Public Diplomacy towards Muslim-Majority Countries after the 2005 Cartoon Crisis

“…In this effort to fund the NGOs after the crisis, the government acted precisely in line with Kelley"s argument about crisis public diplomacy, to limit the magnitude of the damage. Lindholm and Olsson (2011) observed other efforts by the government related to the communication strategies that were used. They found that, consistent with the initial position, the government had insisted to frame the issue as the "freedom of speech.…”

“…These kind of positions was typical of the government"s response to the crisis, and as Lindholm and Olsson (2011) argued, only after the crisis deepened and entered the escalation phases that the government tried to change their position, but not enough to reverse their initial stance. This was a symptom of a crisis response, without even trying to rebuild their reputation.…”

“…Some focused on the security issues, by using the post-structuralist analysis and the theoretical framework of securitization to understand how the simple events such as cartoon drawing could initiate a security concern (Agius 2013;Hansen 2011aHansen , 2011b. Others focused on how Danish government dealt with this issue, by using diplomacy as the focus of analysis (Arsenault & Powers 2006;Lindholm & Olsson 2011;Pultz 2012;Rolfe 2009). I follow the latter group in trying to elaborate the notion of Danish public diplomacy towards Muslim-majority countries.…”

Imageries of the social world in epistemic governance

“…Furthermore, the idea of a clash of civilizations soon became the dominant framing of the event in the mass media (Eide et al, 2008;Hussain, 2007;Powers, 2008), contributing to reorganizing international diplomacy in the immediate and also in the medium term (Lindekilde et al, 2009: 296;Lindholm and Olsson, 2005). In the process a Muslim global ummah was recreated almost anew as a pan-Islamic coordinated community that could act nationalistically (Saunders, 2008).…”