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Why Cultural Diplomacy  
Is More Relevant—And More  
Challenging—Than Ever

Authors 
WILLIAM HARVEY Founder, Cultures in Harmony and Concertmaster and National Symphony Orchestra, Mexico, 
FERNANDA VILLALVAZO Founder, Péepem Art Association and Concert Violinist 

keywords: 
cultural diplomacy, indigenous culture, violin, 
pandemic art 
 
abstract 
The authors, both violinists and founders of 
cultural diplomacy organizations, relate the 
challenges of conducting meaningful cultural 
diplomacy during a pandemic. Their work 
included video collaborations bringing together 
musicians from North America, Europe, Africa, 
and Asia; in-person work in the remote Sierra 
Tarahumara mountains of northern Mexico; 
and a unique project to promote the sustained 
livelihood and increased access of freedom and 
security of 326 Afghan musicians.  
 
introduction 
Two of the events of the 21st century that had the 
greatest impact on world history were the terrorist 
attacks of September 11, 2001 (Boston University, 
2021) and the current pandemic. Although 
very different, these two events re-ordered how 
societies interact with each other, had profound 
impacts on how people and societies protect 
themselves (whether from terrorism or disease), 
and exacerbated the deterioration of global trust, 
hardening the cultural, religious, national, and 
ethnic (Hswen et al., 2021) barriers we created for 
ourselves.

The authors of this paper both founded cultural 
diplomacy organizations in which music soars 
effortlessly over those barriers, affirming our 
common humanity. During the pandemic, they 
frequently worked together, despite the differences 
in their organizations’ history, in order to answer 
a seemingly impossible question: how can cultural 
diplomacy continue to forge connections between 
people, when most contact between people 
remains risky to their health due to the highly 
communicable nature of COVID-19? 
 
cultures in harmony 
William had just started studying violin at The 
Juilliard School in New York in 2001 when Al 
Qaeda terrorists hijacked planes, crashing them 
into the World Trade Center. Five days later, he 
played the violin for soldiers returning from a long 
day of clean-up work at the World Trade Center 
site, often referred to as “Ground Zero.”

Seeing how meaningful music was at that difficult 
time changed his life, but also led him to speculate 
regarding factors that could explain the tragedy of 
September 11, arriving at the hypothesis that the 
pace of globalization has surpassed our ability to 
grow in empathy. Cultural exchange can help us 
connect with people on the other side of the world, 
people very different from ourselves. So, William 
started studying the field of cultural diplomacy, 
which has a long and rich history. 



50ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts 

In the twentieth century, many countries saw 
a need to underwrite exchanges based on the 
arts, culture and education to celebrate both 
our differences and what we share. The United 
Kingdom founded the British Council (n.d.) in 
1940 to create in a country overseas a basis of 
friendly knowledge and understanding of the 
people of this country, of their philosophy and 
way of life, which will lead to a sympathetic 
appreciation of British foreign policy, whatever for 
the moment that policy may be and from whatever 
political conviction it may spring (n.d., para. 6). 

The United States entered the game by founding 
the United States Information Agency in 1953, 
eventually folding it into the State Department 
in 1999 (Arndt, 2005). France has the Alliance 
Française, Spain has the Instituto Cervantes, 
Germany has the Goethe-Institut, and China has 
the Confucius Institute, among others. Private 
cultural diplomacy organization, focusing on 
people-to-people exchanges across cultural and 
national barriers, also exist: the Institute for 
Cultural Diplomacy defines the pursuit for which 
it exists as a course of actions, which are based on 
and utilize the exchange of ideas, values, traditions 
and other aspects of culture or identity, whether 
to strengthen relationships, enhance socio-
cultural cooperation, promote national interests 
and beyond. Cultural diplomacy can be practiced 
by either the public sector, private sector or civil 
society (n.d., para. 4).

In November 2001, just after the Taliban lost 
control of Afghanistan, a 16-year-old named 
Ajmal from Jalalabad told the New York Times: 
“We are searching for any kind of music. It’s been 
six years since I heard music. There are no words 
to explain the happiness I think I will feel when 
I hear it (Weiner, 2001, para. 14).” His words 
caused William to wonder what the impact on 
Ajmal’s perception of the USA would be if an 

American were to be the first person to play music 
for him. Accordingly, he attempted to get the 
State Department interested in sending him there 
but was rebuffed. He would have to design and 
implement such cultural diplomacy projects on 
his own, not knowing at the time that his dream of 
going to Afghanistan would be fulfilled nine years 
later.

In 2005, William founded Cultures in Harmony 
(CiH) to promote cultural understanding through 
music. Since then, the organization has carried out 
more than 40 projects in sixteen countries, from 
Pakistan to Cameroon. The organization has taught 
young musicians in Tunisia, collaborated with folk 
musicians in Turkey, and taught composition to 
the Yoro tribe in the middle of the jungle in Papua 
New Guinea. Their first project in Mexico in 2007 
saw them give master classes to members of the 
youth orchestras of Mexico City and at the Escuela 
Superior de Música, where the authors of this 
article first met.

To more completely incorporate cultural diplomacy 
into his career, William applied to teach music 
at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music 
(ANIM) (n.d.), founded by Dr. Ahmad Sarmast.  
In 2010, he became the first foreign teacher at 
ANIM, a project funded by the World Bank (2012). 
Every day teaching Afghan girls and boys the violin 
was an opportunity for William to connect across 
a seemingly vast cultural chasm while fighting 
the anti-music principles of the Taliban. During 
their first period in power, from 1996 to 2001, 
the Taliban prohibited the study and performance 
of music, even outlawing the act of listening to 
recorded music, famously stringing cassette tapes 
from trees (Armangue, 2021; Wroe, 2001).

Dr. Sarmast asked William to found the Afghan 
Youth Orchestra, the first in Afghanistan's 
history where boys and girls would play side by 
side (Rubin & Wakin, 2013). After four years in 

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Afghanistan, William moved to Latin America. 
Cultures in Harmony continued its work 
connecting Muslim and non-Muslim populations 
until 2018, the most recent year when they sent 
a group of teachers to Tunisia. The motivation 
remained the same: to bridge the divisions etched 
into the world's consciousness on a brilliant 
September morning, seventeen years earlier, in 
that first event that defined the present century. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
péepem art association 
Fernanda left Mexico for Europe to study violin 
performance, violin pedagogy, and choir and 
ensemble conducting: first in Italy in 2008, then 
in Austria in 2010 at the Universität Mozarteum 
Salzburg. After many years of living abroad and 
having experienced firsthand how music and art 
in the context of intercultural exchange allow 
communication and social evolution, she founded 
Péepem Art Association in 2018 to promote 
intercultural exchange through music and art. 

Its first major project, called ArtisTeach, brought 
eight Mexican music students to Europe for three 
weeks in January 2019, first for a week in northern 
Italy, then two weeks in Salzburg, where they took 
master classes, lessons, instrumental pedagogy 
workshops, and played in chamber music concerts 
and a string orchestra. In the process, they got to 
know Austrian culture and interacted with host 
families (Péepem Art, 2022). 

In November of the same year, Péepem Art, 
supported by Foro Cultural de Austria en 
México, (Clases Maestras, n.d.) the Mexican 
Embassy in Austria, and the Music Faculty of the 
Autonomous National University (UNAM), sent 
three Austrians—one teacher and two students—
from the Mozarteum University to Mexico. The 
teacher gave master classes and joined the two 
students to interact with Mexican musicians as 
soloists, in chamber music ensembles, and in a 
string orchestra formed specifically for the project 
(Villalvazo, 2021). Like many projects planned for 
2020, further collaborations were stalled. 
 
virtual cultural diplomacy in 
the pandemic 
In 2020, the authors, now both living in Mexico, 
shared a concern regarding how to conduct 
cultural diplomacy in a pandemic. Many arts 
organizations around the world released videos in 
which each artist separately recorded their role. 
As concertmaster of Mexico’s National Symphony 
Orchestra, William participated in such a video 
(Instituto Naclanal de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 
2020). The Juilliard School’s version of Bolero 
(2020) is a particularly noteworthy example.
However, as soon as health authorities permit, 
arts organizations rooted in a particular city seek 
to continue to create art in person, their rosters 

1 For more information: www.culturesinharmony.org. Cultures in Harmony has maintained 501(c)(3) status in the USA since December 
16, 2008.

Figure 1. William Harvey conducts the Afghan Youth 
Orchestra in a sold-out concert at New York's Carnegie 
Hall on February 12, 2013



52ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts 

united on a single stage in front of their loyal 
audiences. 

A few arts organizations realized the potential of 
this newly popular video genre to embody cultural 
diplomacy at its best. In Nico Muhly’s Throughline 
(Barone, 2020), commissioned and performed 
by the San Francisco Symphony, that orchestra’s 
music director Esa-Pekka Salonen appears to cause 
a harp to sound in California from the comfort of 
his home thousands of miles away in Finland, his 
gentle striking of rocks and trees coinciding with 
the harp notes(San Francisco Symphony, 2020). 
Famed sitar player, Anoushka Shankar (2000), 
released a multicultural collaboration, “Those 
Words,” in which the presence of solitary musicians 
in their homes heightened the impact of the song’s 
wistful nature, suggesting that we are each isolated 
only if we choose to be. The gold standard of the 
genre may be the World Economic Forum’s (2021) 
video “See Me,” which brought together renowned 
cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the chamber orchestra of ANIM, 
and musicians from South Africa, Brazil, China, 
and more. 

Cultures in Harmony chose to launch a platform 
that would eventually feature many of these 
kinds of videos: “Connecting Cultures through 
Counterpoint” (Cultures in Harmony, n.d.). In 
2020, the platform paid musicians in Congo, 
Zimbabwe, India and Mexico to share aspects of 
their culture. But that did not allow us to encourage 
the kind of dialogue that cultural diplomacy can 
achieve at its best. So, in 2021, CiH launched 
#Connect4 videos that bring musicians from four 
different countries together to play the same piece 
of music. 

For the first video, Pakistani sitar player Nafees 
Ahmad, director of the music department at 

Karachi’s National Academy of Performing Arts 
and frequent CiH collaborator since 2009, sent 
the founder of CiH one of his compositions 
called “Musica Senza Confini,” or Music Without 
Borders. William arranged two violin parts for 
Fernanda Villalvazo (coauthor of this article) and 
Keamogetswe Magau, a violinist he met while 
serving as guest concertmaster of the KwaZulu 
Natal Philharmonic Orchestra in Durban, South 
Africa, in 2017. Percussionist Stephen Solook, a 
frequent CiH project participant, improvised a 
percussion part. (Cultures in Harmony, 2021a)

The video made a strong positive impact, receiving 
many comments on social media: one user on 
YouTube wrote, “It's beautiful to see how the music 
makes [this] possible…Very different countries and 
cultures playing together in spite of distance.” The 
version on Facebook received over 20,000 views 
(Cultures in Harmony, 2021b). 

As part of its virtual activities during the pandemic, 
Péepem Art Association initiated a virtual 
Christmas concert in 2020 that allowed people 
from around the world to experience a holiday 
musical event that could not easily be duplicated in 
person. Musicians from the USA, Mexico, Austria, 
Germany, Thailand, Greece, Bulgaria, Wales, and 
Sweden each played and explained to the virtual 
public a holiday-related musical piece from their 
culture. (Péepem Art, 2020) 

However, no cultural diplomacy video can 
substitute for in-person projects.  
 
 
 
 
 
 

2 It is incorporated as an association under Austrian law. For more information: https://www.facebook.com/P%C3%A9epem-
Art-195130021401739 

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socially distanced cultural 
diplomacy—where the violin is 
happiness, and the mountains 
go up instead of down 
In 2021, the authors looked for a way to unite 
their separate organizations through a face-
to-face project in which it would be possible to 
connect cultures through music, but without 
excessive risk of contracting or transmitting 
COVID-19. They thought of going to the remote 
Sierra Tarahumara mountain range in northern 
Mexico, where the indigenous Rarámuri people live 
amidst spectacular scenery without many public 
services, stores, paved roads, transportation, or 
access to service or construction professionals, 
as a result of which Rarámuri must perform for 
themselves tasks such as potable water extraction, 
building construction, animal husbandry, 
farming, manufacture of clothing, and more. 
The violin plays an exceptionally important role 
in their culture, so much so that in some small 
communities, about one in ten people have some 
familiarity with playing the violin: Rarámuri 
ceremonies, from foot races to parties, often 
feature the violin. As it happens, the authors of 
this article were not the first classical musicians to 
travel there. 

When the American pianist Romayne Wheeler 
graduated from the Vienna Conservatory of Music 
in 1972, his professors suggested that he document 
the music of Native Americans. An unusual series 
of circumstances (Rodríguez, 2016) led him to 
first visit the Sierra Tarahumara in 1980, when 
he started to visit annually. From 1992, he began 
to live there full time, dedicating all the proceeds 
from his international concert career to helping the 
Rarámuri with education, health, and food security.

With the support of the United States Consulate 
in Ciudad Juarez, the authors went to Chihuahua 
to give medicine and musical supplies to the 

Rarámuri, supporting Romayne’s decades-long 
mission (Cultures in Harmony, 2021c; U.S. 
Mission to Mexico, 2021). The vastness of the 
landscape and a lifestyle rooted in the outdoors 
certainly permitted the authors to maintain social 
distancing.

The authors went to the Sierra Tarahumara to help 
musicians preserve their culture and traditions, 
but they ended up being the ones who felt helped 
and welcomed. Visiting a place that remains almost 
pristine, connected to its traditional culture, and 
where the value of a person is measured by how 
much he or she contributes to others, reconnected 
the authors with our own deepest values. During 
the project Fernanda and William managed to get 
rid of their preconceived notions and strict classical 
training to meld their music and their souls with 
the purity of the landscape and the hearts of the 
people who inhabit it. In-depth conversations with 
many Rarámuri about topics ranging from music’s 
role in society to the noteworthy affinity many 
have for long-distance running (Lieberman et al., 
2020) expanded their own paradigms, positively 
impacting their professional lives as musicians in 
the megalopolis of Mexico City. 

For their own part, they were able to offer many 
Rarámuri violinists instruments, cases, bows, 
strings, rosin, and other supplies they need to 
maintain the importance of the violin in their 
culture. Rarámuri communities live in the most 
remote parts of Chihuahua state, allowing them 
to preserve the essence of their culture. In most of 
these communities, all the food and materials that 
exist have been produced there or are transported 
on the backs of the people who live there (Cultures 
in Harmony, 2021c). It would be difficult for 
Rarámuri to buy items at a music store unless they 
hitch a ride or walk several hundred kilometers 
to the nearest city. There are some local violin 
makers, who can craft the instruments using wood, 



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but to get the materials to make items like strings is 
impossible for them. As their society works mostly 
on a barter basis, earning money inside the Sierra 
Tarahumara becomes very difficult. Apart from 
visitors paying them for some assistance or a few 
programs offered by the federal government, like 

Sembrando Vida (Secretaria de Bienestar, 2020), 
Rarámuri must go to a bigger town or city outside 
their mountain range in order to earn money. All 
of these factors motivated the intention of the 
authors to support their colleagues in the Sierra 
Tarahumara. 

 
 
 

Porfirio Cubesare, who helped the authors as a 
friend, guide, and implementation partner in 
their work there, told them about his concern 
regarding changes in the amount of rain the 
Sierra Tarahumara receives: global warming is 
affecting their crops and the way they produce 
food (Argomedo, 2020; Guajardo, 2009), but he 
believes that these changes are because God wants 
the Rarámuri to better preserve their traditions 
and retain their fundamental values. The irony in 
these words stems from the Rarámuri culture’s 
inherently austere and climate-friendly lifestyle.

Romayne Wheeler has incorporated himself into 
the Rarámuri lifestyle more thoroughly than any 
outsider probably could. Like the Rarámuri, he 
uses the traditional huarache instead of shoes. He 
wears traditional clothing and lives a simple life 
with few luxuries. He has adopted many aspects of 
their philosophy as his own, writing one of the key 
anthropological texts about their beliefs (Wheeler, 
2000). He continues to write new books about 
them, books which have inspired many people 
around the world. One of the most important books 
is Life through the eyes of a Tarahumara: contains 
stories, reflections and poems that transport the 
reader to a simple life, full of beauty, commitment 
to nature, yet with many difficulties, a deep-rooted 
spirituality, and unique perspectives. In this book, 
which also contains expressive photographs, the 
author transports the reader to the heart of life, the 
rites and the customs of the Rarámuri people in an 
entertaining, simple and realistic way. 

The race starts early in the morning and lasts all 
night because they want to run at least thirty laps 
around the circuit. The course is 150 kilometers. 
But this is not just a race; the men have to move a 
ball made of lightweight arbutus wood about the 
size of a baseball while running. They throw the 
ball in front of them with their feet, the ball may 
not be touched by anything other than a foot, or a 

The authors went to the  
Sierra Tarahumara to help musi-

cians preserve their culture and tradi-
tions, but they ended up being the ones who 

felt helped and welcomed. Visiting a place 
that remains almost pristine, connected to 

its traditional culture, and where the value of a 
person is measured by how much he or she con-
tributes to others, reconnected the authors with 
our own deepest values.

Figure 2. The authors with Rarámuri violinists Herculano 
and Porfirio Cubesare, Sierra Tarahumara, northern Mex-
ico, April 2021.



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stick and runners may not finish the race without 
a ball...They run at the speed of a fast-trotting 
horse. They are often accompanied by friends 
to encourage them and not lose their bets. You 
must keep in mind that they maintain this rhythm 
day and night, up, down, through the bushes, 
forests, rivers and throwing a ball! It should not be 
assumed that at the end the runners are exhausted 
and that they arrive out of breath, only a few sweat 
and quicken their breathing. There are doctors 
who have proven that their pulse does not vary 
when they climbs two thousand meters from the 
ravine to the summit. One of my friends, Patrocinio 
López, once carried my luggage up a steep hill 
while playing a happy tune on the violin he made. 
Reaching the top, he pointed his finger towards 
a distant mountain range, saying that if I had not 
accompanied him, he would have already reached 
there (ibid, pp. 128–129).

However, advancing age and the pandemic 
compromise Romayne Wheeler’s continued ability 
to help the Rarámuri as he has since 1980: by 
leaving the Sierra Tarahumara in order to give 
fundraising concerts around the world.  In order 
to best assist his work converting musical concerts 
into tangible assistance for the Rarámuri, the 
authors realized that it might be helpful for the 
fundraising concerts to come to him, rather than 
him going to the concerts. The authors formulated 
an idea that can be implemented even during a 
pandemic: the Festival of the Sierra Tarahumara 
(Cultures in Harmony, n.d.). 

This event will connect festival guests and 
members of the Rarámuri community. It brings the 
public to the mountains, providing attendees with 
an unforgettable experience that is very difficult 
to replicate in any other context or place. Those 
attending the festival will have the opportunity to 
know impressive and pure landscapes, live with the 
indigenous community of Retosachi, take walks to 

the neighboring communities guided by members 
of the community, experience a traditional 
Rarámuri party, and at the end of each day, listen 
to a concert of classical music with internationally 
renowned soloists while they enjoy the sun setting 
in the Batopilas canyon.

Likewise, festival guests will enjoy the opportunity 
to meet Romayne Wheeler—composer, pianist, 
writer and humanitarian, whose life is dedicated to 
music, reflection and altruism. They will be able to 
listen to his music and poetry full of wisdom, the 
result of years of introspection and contact with 
indigenous communities.

In 2021, the authors held the festival for a local 
and livestream audience, but in 2022, guests 
will have the opportunity to experience this for 
themselves. Even as the pandemic renders most 
in-person cultural diplomacy impossible, the 
unique cultural and geographical conditions in the 
Sierra Tarahumara facilitate mutually beneficial 
exchange. 
 
an unsought exchange: the 
exodus of afghan musicians 
After returning from Retosachi in April, a project 
Cultures in Harmony that never would have 
sought, came to its attention. Kabul fell under the 
control of the Taliban on August 15, for the first 
time in nearly twenty years (Zucchino, 2021). 
ANIM founder Dr. Sarmast, then in Australia 
for medical treatment, and William Harvey, then 
in Mexico City, were inundated with dozens of 
messages from Afghan musicians seeking to flee 
the Taliban, who banned music during their first 
time in power from 1996 to 2001. Dr. Sarmast 
focused on the evacuation of the ANIM community, 
which he eventually achieved, relocating hundreds 
of students, teachers, and their family members to 
Portugal (Reuters, 2021). 

CiH focused on musicians who Dr. Sarmast 



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could not include in his plans. Currently, William 
manages a WhatsApp group responsible for 326 
musicians. Cultures in Harmony has raised over 
$30,000 to assist them. To date, CiH has assisted 
many Afghans with survival-related expenses 
such as food and fuel, urgently needed due to 
the Taliban’s inability to manage an economy 
(Goldbaum, 2021). CiH helped two Afghan 
musicians get accepted to and assisted their travel 
to universities in the USA—Indiana University 
Jacobs School of Music and Nyack College. Another 
musician is now in Canada thanks in part to their 
efforts. In Mexico, CiH partners with Proyecto 
Habesha (n.d.), an organization with seven years 
of experience in resettling Syrian refugees in this 
country. Together, they will bring seven Afghan 
musicians to Mexico in late April 2022; those 
musicians will be on track to become Mexican 
citizens. They will spend one year in Aguascalientes 
learning Spanish before taking a one-year music 
course at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico 
City.

The role that the anti-music principles of the 
Taliban played in inspiring the founding of 
Cultures in Harmony underscored the importance 
of assisting Afghan musicians in their hour of 
greatest need. A global network of contacts needed 
to be mobilized instantly. The pandemic imposed 
a perverse advantage: many people needed to 
help Afghans now had more time to do so. For the 
Afghan musicians, suddenly their membership in 
a global community of musicians became more 
salient than their identity as Afghans in a country 
whose new government now rejected the morality 
of music, a prohibition that for Afghan musicians 
transcends the merely professional and touches the 
core of their identity. 

The first Afghan musician to arrive in the USA 
thanks to CiH posed at the airport with the cello 
teacher at New York’s Nyack College who helped 

her get accepted. Seldom have the connections 
facilitated by music appeared as poignant as 
in an image of two women rendered similar in 
appearance by winter weather, pandemic-imposed 
face masks, and the Afghan arriving without her 
guitar, since it would have been a risk for her to 
approach the airport in Kabul with it, given the 
likelihood that the Taliban would destroy the 
instrument, prevent her from leaving, and/or 
incarcerate her.

conclusion 
Cultural diplomacy is more relevant than ever 
because the world is both more connected and 
more divided than ever before. On the one hand, 
a globalized economy, the internet, and social 
media connect us in ways almost impossible for 
our ancestors to imagine. On the other hand, 
the maintenance of vestiges of political and 
economic imperialism, plus terrorism motivated by 
economics, politics, or religion, have exacerbated 
all forms of hatred, whether based on religion, race, 
ethnicity, nationality, gender identity, or sexual 
orientation. The attacks of September 11, 2001, 
made it impossible for the citizens of the country 
with the world’s largest economy and military—the 
United States of America—to continue to ignore 
these problems. The COVID-19 pandemic has only 
made these problems worse: suspicions caused 
by the virus’ likely origin in China have deepened 
political divisions between the China and the rest of 
the world while increasing acts of hatred directed 
against people of Chinese background (or people 
perceived to be of Chinese background) in many 
countries. Even inside the same culture, barriers 
appear when we discuss our approach to the virus 
and in many parts of the world violent attacks to 
doctors and nurses were registered (Semple, 2020).

No single discipline can claim to solve these 
problems, but cultural diplomacy does attempt to 
alleviate them by affirming the connections that 



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reminds us all of our membership in one human 
family. Cultural diplomacy as practiced by both 
Cultures in Harmony and Péepem Art Association 
had to evolve due to the strictures imposed by 
the pandemic. Since cultural diplomacy normally 
depends on in-person interaction—indeed, it has 
previously been impossible to imagine cultural 
diplomacy without people in a room, exchanging 
ideas from each other’s cultures or appreciating 
the art another culture created—cultural 
diplomacy became more challenging than ever 
before at precisely the historical moment when 
we desperately need reminders of our common 
humanity.

Cultures in Harmony and Péepem Art Association 
worked together to create a virtual collaborative 
video that brought together musicians from 
Pakistan, South Africa, Mexico, and the United 
States to play the same piece of music. These 
organizations collaborated on an in-person project 
in the Sierra Tarahumara in northern Mexico, an 
isolated area where people live much of their lives 
outdoors, thereby obviating the need to constantly 
think about social distancing. 

Cultures in Harmony rose to the challenge of 
helping Afghan musicians in spite of the pandemic, 
and here an obvious through-line can be drawn. 
The USA ignored the reactionary ideology of the 
Afghan mujahideen they empowered in the 1980s 
in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Many of those 
mujahideen would go on to found the Taliban, 
under whose totalitarian rule music was illegal. The 
USA continued to ignore them until the attacks of 
September 11, 2001, made that course of action 
impossible. For nearly twenty years, an American-
backed order in Afghanistan enabled music to be 
legal, as it is in every other country in the world, 
but the USA ignored lessons from other nation-

building efforts throughout history and the Taliban 
reconquered the country, once again banning 
music, creating an exodus of Afghans (particularly 
including musicians) during a pandemic that also 
might have been avoided or mitigated had we paid 
greater attention to the interconnected nature of 
modern human society and its impact on our global 
natural environment. 

What other consequences might result if we 
forget our common humanity? What wars, acts 
of terrorism, and pandemics can we avert if we 
remember it? No single tool can guide humanity 
on a wiser or more peaceful path, but at minimum, 
cultural diplomacy provides a small corrective. The 
American audiences who witnessed the US tour 
by the Afghan Youth Orchestra in February 2013 
undoubtedly felt more convinced of the importance 
of US support of Afghanistan. A small project 
that Cultures in Harmony implemented in China 
in 2018 created a positive image of American 
culture in the minds of the dozens of people who 

experienced it, but massive cultural diplomacy 
by China in the USA before the pandemic might 
have reduced the incidents of tragic anti-Asian 
racism that increased since early 2020. That the 
government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan  

3While the pandemic prevented Romayne Wheeler from giving as many concerts as he would like, some were able to proceed, including 
the one described here: https://www.fundaciongrupomexico.org/DiaVoluntario/Paginas/ConCausa.aspx 

What other consequences 
might result if we forget our 

common humanity? What wars, acts 
of terrorism, and pandemics can we 

avert if we remember it? No single tool 
can guide humanity on a wiser or more 

peaceful path, but at minimum, cultural di-
plomacy provides a small corrective. 



58ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts

H A R V E Y  &  V i l l a l v a z o  | 
C U L T U R A L  D I P L O M A C Y 

 
 
 
fell, that those tragic incidents of racism did 
happen, should not be taken as a failure of cultural 
diplomacy, but rather, as motivation to work 
harder. 

Cultural diplomacy, which can be defined as 
building peace through understanding between 
peoples, is more challenging than ever at precisely 
the moment when it is more necessary than ever. 
Practitioners within and beyond academia will 
need to continue acts of cultural diplomacy in order 
to inspire all eight billion residents of this planet to 

see themselves in the other. 



59 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1

H A R V E Y  &  V i l l a l v a z o  | 
C U L T U R A L  D I P L O M A C Y

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