Public diplomacy is a way of communicating a country's foreign policies to other countries with the main purpose of building favorable relationships. It is a vital instrument for international relations, used to construct relationships between nations and create positive images of a country in another. It also serves to address matters of conflict, build trust, and provide a platform for dialogue. In times of crisis, public diplomacy can help to bridge the gap between countries and create a more constructive atmosphere for negotiations. However, the role of public diplomacy in international crises has not been thoroughly studied in terms of the analysis of message strategies during challenging and critical times. Additionally, there is a lack of understanding of the effectiveness of public diplomacy as a crisis communication tool in the context of social, economic, environmental, political, and health crises. This dissertation seeks to address this need by examining the message strategies employed by a nation-state when confronted with a critical international political crisis. This dissertation argues that public diplomacy can be used as a feasible approach in crisis communication when analyzing international crises, such as in the case of Turkey–Russia; the case of the shootdown of a Russian warplane in 2015 and the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara in 2016. Building from these case studies, the overarching questions of this dissertation are: First, do the public diplomacy functions (message strategies); advocacy / influence, communication / informational, relational, promotional, warfare, and political; used by governments differ when confronting a crisis? And second, do the public diplomacy functions used by the government differ when used in a digital platform and on a government official website during a crisis? Lastly, how did the traditional media frame and interpret both crises? To analyze the questions, three different data sets were used (official press releases from both Turkey and Russia, Twitter posts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the presidential accounts of both countries, and the highest circulation newspapers in the US – The New York Times, The Washington Post and in the UK-The Guardian, The Times) in the two crises mentioned above. Thematic analysis in qualitative research was used to examine the information included in all the date sets. Based on the results of the analysis, a new theme -apology- was identified and this is the contribution of this study. Additionally, the results indicated that traditional diplomacy between the leaders and behind-the-scenes diplomacy were influential in mitigating the crises. To conclude, this study supports the idea that public diplomacy is a viable approach in crisis communication to help nations mitigate crises.
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