Faces of Cultural Diplomacy — Johanna Mendelson Forman

What happens when decades of work in conflict resolution and reconstruction meet the everyday spaces where people build relationships?

Johanna Mendelson Forman is a scholar and practitioner whose career spans international affairs, peacebuilding, humanitarian response and post-conflict reconstruction. She has worked with institutions including the United Nations, USAID and the World Bank, addressing questions ranging from security-sector reform and economic development to humanitarian assistance and the rebuilding of societies affected by conflict.

Forman is also the creator of Conflict Cuisine®, which brings together three fields often considered separately: food, war, and diplomacy.

Forman looks beyond the formal settings of diplomacy. While food has long been used at state dinners to persuade and build alliances, she describes gastrodiplomacy as “people-to-people eating”: everyday encounters in restaurants, markets, food trucks and around shared tables. Migrant restaurants are central to this story. They enable newcomers to share their cuisines and histories, support their families and build relationships with surrounding communities. Food therefore becomes cultural memory, economic resilience and a tangible way of understanding conflicts that can otherwise feel distant.

Based in part on Johanna Mendelson Forman’s “Why Conflict Cuisine? Why Now?” in Is the Kitchen the New Venue of Foreign Policy? (Stimson Center, 2016).