The School of Media & Public Affairs announced a new director for the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication in a release Tuesday.

Babak Bahador, an associate research professor at SMPA and director of the Media and Peacebuilding Project, is now leading the IPDGC, which researches public diplomacy and global communication and is operated jointly with the Elliott School of International Affairs. Bahador said as director, he wants to begin projects on innovations in public diplomacy and how global communication impacts global and domestic politics.

Bahador said he hopes the institute will become a “center for excellence” in researching public diplomacy as it helps countries communicate with each other in order to bring more peace into the world.

“​​As people in international relations have been looking at different forms of communicating, whether it’s through traditional diplomacy or public diplomacy and other forms of communication across borders, we’re going to have much more understanding in the world and will hopefully lead to a more peaceful world,” Bahador said.

SMPA and the Elliott School established the institute in 2001 to research public diplomacy and global communications, form connections with the U.S. State Department and other government agencies and work with the joint Master of Arts program in Global Communication between the two schools, according to the institute’s website. William Youmans, an associate professor of media and public affairs, has been the program’s director since January 2022 and is currently serving as a visiting professor for Northwestern University’s campus in Qatar.

Bahador said he is organizing an event for this semester about how media communication can help mitigate election violence. He said the event will focus on how the U.S. can observe and learn from other countries that have experienced election violence.

“Because our focus is on international communication, we want to have this two-way communication flow of learning from each other,” Bahador said. “In countries like Nigeria, Kenya, certain European countries around the former Yugoslavia, they have had election violence and therefore, there might be some things they’ve done there that has reduced, that mitigated that.”

Bahador said he plans for the institute to host other events, like having its new visiting fellow from Kosovo present the research they plan on conducting while spending the year with the institute. He said the institute also has guest speakers from the State Department visit to participate in events, including one he is planning for September.

Bahador said he is “hoping” that students in his media and peacebuilding class, along with the public diplomacy class taught by public diplomacy fellow Frank Wierichs, will participate and get involved with planning events through the institute.

“We’re gonna put the word out throughout the University, with the Elliott School, with SMPA,” Bahador said. “Anyone who’s interested in coming to these is very much encouraged to attend and participate.”

Bahador said he will use his background in media and peacebuilding to bring more projects surrounding the issue to the institute’s global communication component, which might differ from Youmans’s background in Arab and Middle Eastern media.