Abstract
Within cultural diplomacy studies, in the past decades the focus was on governmental institutions of the state conducting cultural diplomacy. However, recently, valuable scholarly papers have pointed out the crucial impact of local stakeholders in the recipient state as meaning-makers.
Studies examining engagement of local non-governmental actors with US cultural diplomacy (Fosler-Lussier, 2015), cultural diplomacy of Japan (Brienza, 2014; Clarke, 2016) and other claim that local stakeholders influence the country's cultural representation abroad in a significant way while shaping the narrative according to their needs. The paper will demonstrate that this claim indeed applies also to the case of Czech stakeholders participating on Israeli cultural events in the Czech Republic.
The paper examines a range of Czech non-governmental actors (churches, economic chambers, professional cultural entrepreneurs, et. al.) and their specific strategies in which they shape Israeli cultural representation abroad. The paper builds on a chapter from a PhD thesis dealing with Israeli foreign cultural representation.