Vaccine (public) diplomacy: legitimacy narratives in the pandemic age

This paper examines how China, United States, the European Union, and Russia deal with the COVID crisis creating a legitimacy narrative to promote their political projects and values. The counter-pandemic measures include the use of public diplomacy tools and the novelty of the vaccine. The results show that presidential overexposure, tweets, and the language of emotion are strong arguments in building an agenda of international relations. This finding highlights the impact of COVID-19 on political leadership and public governance. Pandemics contributed to the deinstitutionalisation of public diplomacy. The paper offers a comparative view on the use of strategic narratives for foreign policy objectives. Political communication has performative effects on the international order to the extent to which an action has political consequences.