TODAY, AMERICAN diplomatic compounds around the world resemble armed bunkers, resting behind higher and higher walls, literally and figuratively, than ever before. After the tragic 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed, politicized criticisms of how he perished led to calls for fortress diplomacy. Whatever intelligence or operational failures occurred in Benghazi, a clear-eyed view of the tragedy would recognize that Stevens was doing precisely what American diplomats must—talking with local players. Stevens clearly understood that his mission required him to talk to Libyans, to venture beyond the high-walled safety of the embassy.

In fact, lowering the metaphorical walls guarding U.S. diplomacy by developing a strategy of engagement with civil society is overdue. “America must always lead on the world stage,” President Barack Obama stated at West Point in May 2014. “U.S. military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance.” He went on to allude to soft-power tools, arguing that the United States forms alliances “not just with governments, but also with ordinary people.”

Civil society–focused diplomacy offers good value. Enlarging the space for civil society can catalyze change at a minute fraction of the cost the United States pays to maintain its military dominance. It also aligns with U.S. values, since aiding civil society is a way for the United States to bolster universal human rights and cultivate democratic aspirations. It is good for America’s image in the world—scenes of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton meeting with Afghan women leaders, holding roundtables with Burmese activists and dancing with Malawian farmers have helped restore America’s reputation as a force for good. Above all, it can serve a dynamic understanding of U.S. interests by anticipating and, where possible, influencing shifts in countries’ leadership.

The Obama administration launched its “Stand with Civil Society” initiative in late 2013, but it has yet to satisfactorily articulate or implement a detailed vision for what such a “societal diplomacy” should involve. What does such person-to-person diplomacy entail in practice? What can it achieve? And what happens when societal diplomacy comes into tension with traditional government-to-government diplomacy?

THE IDEA of “societal diplomacy” is a simple one—it rests on the notion that America’s international relations need not be limited to other sovereign governments. Rather, the U.S. government must engage and build relationships with civil society, which encompasses the broad general public, political activists and human-rights defenders, the legal community, businesses, academics and independent media. Washington should, moreover, aim to liberalize governments and protect civil society’s agency.

The first major goal of societal diplomacy is to carve out space for civil society worldwide, especially in countries where illiberal governments are seeking to monitor and shrink the space for civil society to dissent, resist and rally for reform. Openness and free expression facilitate reform and innovation, which, in turn, spur economic development and prosperity. An empowered citizenry may also be more likely to question going to war, which incentivizes more peaceful and cooperative behavior among states.

Second, societal diplomacy would serve to further U.S. interests by hedging its bets on who will wield power in the future in a given country and enhancing its legitimacy by matching rhetoric about democracy with deeds. The United States can gain flexibility in responding to unpredictable outcomes in countries where current power arrangements may not hold. America should expand its notion of what defines a foreign partner to include liberal opposition actors in order to build relationships that will outlast brittle autocracies. By nurturing relationships with democratic activists and community leaders, the United States can position itself on the “right side of history,” the term Obama so hesitantly used in reference to Egyptians calling for democratic change in 2011.

Finally, societal diplomacy would have positive ramifications for the United States’ legitimacy as a global leader. Popular acceptance of American global leadership has declined over the last decade. According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, foreign countries’ confidence in the ability of the American president to “do the right thing regarding global affairs” was dismal during the George W. Bush presidency (in 2005 and 2006, there was not a single nation in which over 75 percent of its population expressed confidence), and has declined throughout the course of the Obama presidency after an initial spike. In acting unilaterally to invade Iraq on a false pretext, violating international human-rights standards at Guantánamo Bay, and instituting a legally and ethically dubious targeted-killing program against suspected terrorists, the United States has lost some of the moral authority that it once claimed as the leader of the free world.

Rebuilding a positive image on the world stage requires winning back the trust of not only allied governments but also people around the world. Supporting liberal activists or NGOs in the Middle East now, for example, can help counter the damage done by decades of U.S. support for authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. Supporting civil society throughout East Asia is equally important—from Hong Kong residents demanding direct democracy, to repressed dissenters and worshippers elsewhere in China, to those jailed after the coup in Thailand, to NGOs still marginalized in Myanmar. By lending soft-power resources to strengthen civil society around the world (for example, expertise and training, monetary support, and the time and attention of its diplomats), the United States can chip away at the false idea that its goal is to spread democracy by force—and the well-founded suspicion that its support for democratization is self-servingly selective in practice.

THE PRIMARY tactics of societal engagement are twofold: talking and acting. Washington-based diplomats on travel or those on the ground must meet meaningfully with civil-society actors—if such meetings do not compromise the latter’s safety, agency or reputation. From the outset, a diplomat must signal an intention of being there for civil society as much as or more than for the authorities. Our diplomacy should actively prioritize nonviolent civil-society resistance to illiberal rule. For example, in April 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with opposition parties and civil-society leaders from Belarus in Vilnius. In doing so, she showed solidarity against President Aleksandr Lukashenko and boosted that solidarity by conducting the meeting along with the European Union’s foreign-policy chief and the sitting Lithuanian foreign minister. Coupled with targeted economic sanctions on Lukashenko’s senior leadership, such highly visible diplomacy put the United States clearly behind preserving space for civil-society leaders.

Shedding post-9/11 “fortress diplomacy,” diplomats abroad should also dispatch more gritty, candid reporting by cable to Washington on civil society, vividly demonstrating the value of engaging it to decision-making readers. In this and other ways, the State Department would be wise to reconceptualize what it means to be a successful diplomat, incorporating employees’ intensity and success in interaction with civil society into standards and benchmarks for career advancement.

Traditional notions of soft power, most notably in Joseph Nye’s writing on the topic, overemphasize popular culture’s import. The dissemination of popular culture to the public of the country in question can be left to the private sector (the Internet, television, film, video games and other industries). With finite resources, in a division of labor, the U.S. government can leave private channels to disseminate cultural messages, while societal diplomacy today must prioritize actually enlarging the space of NGOs, democrats, artists and writers to express themselves.

Often the United States has succeeded in engaging and strengthening civil society because circumstances were propitious. But in order for societal diplomacy to be a cornerstone for U.S. foreign policy, it must also be put into practice where political circumstances are less opportune. What would societal diplomacy entail in practice in two cases chosen precisely because they would pose quite serious obstacles for U.S. policy implementation: China and Saudi Arabia?

AS CHINA emerges as an economic, military and diplomatic power, a credible case could be made that a larger voice for civil society and political liberalization could make the Chinese state more of the “responsible stakeholder” Robert Zoellick encouraged as U.S. deputy secretary of state, and restrain aggressive moves, such as in South China Sea territorial disputes. Even so, China is and will continue to be a thorny case. Beijing’s opposition to political dissent and to external backing of civil-society actors is pronounced. Engaging independent reformers therefore risks increased bilateral friction. Yet only engaging civil-society elements approved by the government risks limiting dialogue to groups established by or beholden to the state.

Funding levels for overall U.S. assistance programs in China have contracted in recent years; it’s very difficult to justify development assistance to an economic powerhouse and to demonstrate that such assistance does not simply underwrite the autocracy’s legitimacy. The remaining aid emphasizes dialogue on effective rule of law on terms acceptable to Chinese authorities and consistent with use by the state as an instrument of power. Some modest assistance to civil-society groups has, however, been disbursed by the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor without publicly identifying grantees, and by the National Endowment for Democracy more overtly (roughly $6–8 million each year since 2007 for internal groups and some in exile).

Still, societal diplomacy is more than aid. It could involve two possible future foci in China. First, the United States could try to foster dialogue with various emerging autonomous civil-society groups and political-reform advocates. It must take into account the reality that increasing support to nonstate actors in China will surely have negative effects—for example, civil-society groups may come under threat from the state. Yet, in the spirit of hedging U.S. bets about potential political futures in China, this effort would build lines of communication and relations of trust.

The question of whom precisely to lend support to deserves careful consideration. Even those NGOs more autonomous from the state may be elite-led rather than representative of the mass public. Yet civil-society groups are commonly also led by elites in other nondemocratic, transitioning and consolidated democratic countries. In a 2014 Brookings Institution volume, China’s Political Development, Tsinghua University professor Wang Ming identifies political, intellectual or economic elites as possible proponents for democratization. Of these groups, intellectuals seem most promising and uncompromised, as embodied by the literary scholar, political prisoner and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

The question of who to engage in China raises the question of where. Societal diplomacy should prioritize four already-emerging trends of social mobilization in China. First, major coastal cities are growing as centers of political and economic power—and expectations are rising, too. Second, other cities and rural areas are not benefiting as markedly from China’s economic transformation, leading to popular grievances. Third, in Xinjiang and Tibet, ostensibly autonomous regions with indigenous cultural majorities, those groups are being supplanted by Han Chinese settling and running them. Fourth, in Hong Kong, a model for economic prosperity under veritable rule of law, civil-society vitality was embodied by massive demonstrations starting in July 2014.

As for the second focus, information independent of state control is crucial to empowering civil society. As Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang note in their insightful 2013 book A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China, the 2012 media stories about relatives of ostensibly reformist Premier Wen Jiabao and other so-called princelings corruptly enriching themselves showed that “the foreign media, including the Chinese-language media overseas, now plays the civic role of supervision that should belong to the Chinese domestic media.” U.S. societal diplomacy should amplify these surrogates for the absent independent media in China, including through enhanced use of Radio Free Asia.

In the case of China, societal diplomacy could catalyze particular ideas; rather than exclusively championing concepts like “democracy,” “freedom” and “human rights,” U.S. diplomats can assist indigenous actors raising specific questions about the internal contradictions of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. As Stanford University sociologist Andrew G. Walder notes in China’s Political Development, “If it is possible to police the Internet and monitor the flow of information within China, surely it is possible to monitor the incomes and the behavior of officials and strike hard when malfeasance and abuse of power is detected.” One might also ask why, if the Chinese state cares about the welfare of its people, having pursued economic policies lifting millions out of poverty, it does not (1) provide for a clear legal status and government services for those moving from rural areas to cities to work; (2) grapple with health-endangering pollution yielded by breakneck growth; and (3) provide open information about other public-health issues like SARS and avian flu.

SAUDI ARABIA may be an even more difficult test for societal diplomacy. Bilateral relations with the Saudi monarchy form a cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a partner in U.S. counterterrorism efforts and counterbalancing Iran in the region. Economically, Saudi Arabia possesses the world’s largest crude-oil production capacity and has been a key supplier to U.S. domestic as well as world markets. Thus, there is much at stake in considering a strategy that might distance the United States from the royal family, which has been firmly in control of the country since 1932, especially at a time of a succession of kings and when tensions between the two allies have run high due to disputes over involvement in the Syria conflict and U.S. nuclear negotiations with Iran.

Moreover, civil society in Saudi Arabia is feeble. Few actors or organizations are permitted to act as intermediaries between the state and the citizenry. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL):

Although there are hundreds of civil society organizations working in various fields in Saudi Arabia, the vast majority of them are government-affiliated, and there are few, if any, truly independent organizations. Civil society remains underdeveloped, due in large part to a restrictive legal framework that limits organizations’ activities and funding and a lack of expertise in establishing effective and sustainable institutions.

Only charities or missionary organizations are permitted to operate in an official, registered capacity in Saudi Arabia; advocacy organizations, on the other hand, are legally prohibited. Registered organizations are severely restricted in their activities and are subject to “invasive supervision and monitoring of internal affairs, through government attendance of organizational meetings,” according to the ICNL, preventing the broadening of existing NGOs’ mandates. Finally, according to Saudi law, NGOs must obtain approval before communicating with regional and international actors, and they are barred from receiving foreign funding in practice.

Accordingly, current U.S. support for civil society in Saudi Arabia consists of initiatives uncontroversial with the Saudi government. For instance, the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, in its own words, “works with local organizations to support Saudi reforms to improve education, the situation of women, economic development, civic participation, and the rule of law.”

The United States does have more opportunities to engage Saudi civil society, however, than meet the eye. Moderate and even liberal voices do exist in the Kingdom. Since the early 2000s, they have pressured the ruling family for greater respect for civil and human rights. They include Saudi intellectuals who in 2001 began calling for reform on websites and in newspapers, organizing lectures, leading meetings in the diwaniyat (the Gulf region’s intellectual and social salons), and—most importantly—submitting petitions to the king that demanded greater civil liberties and institutional reforms.

In implementing a successful societal-diplomacy strategy in Saudi Arabia, the United States must also acknowledge the role and influence of Islamist actors. As Mariwan Kanie of the University of Amsterdam wrote in an analysis of Saudi civil society for the Clingendael Institute, Islamists belonging to the Sahwa, or Awakening, movement were more successful than liberal intellectuals in calling for respect of human rights during the early 2000s. Using sermons, lectures in religious centers and materials circulated widely throughout society, Islamists campaigned for important benchmarks including a ban on torture and the right to legal defense in court. As Kanie notes, the Shia intellectual and religious community has played a similar role, working to gain concessions on human rights and advocating tolerance, openness and pluralism.

The United States would be wise to open lines of communication with these actors and quietly encourage them to continue their gradual but groundbreaking work. However stalled it became, the Arab Spring showed that forces for change are bubbling beneath the surface even in Saudi Arabia, arguably the region’s most oppressive state. America should build relationships with reformers now in order to avoid the mistakes of Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, where such actors were dismissed as inconsequential to their country’s political trajectory and the United States was left awkwardly reaching out to the activists it was complicit in muzzling in its steadfast support for the regime.

Many of these actors will prove reluctant to engage with the United States. Many will avoid direct criticism of the royal family and are unlikely to risk jeopardizing their relationship with it in favor of a relationship with the United States. The United States can more visibly come to the defense of the few overtly political civil-society organizations in Saudi Arabia that organize against the state and are unregistered with the Ministry of Social Affairs, which have thus been subject to a legal crackdown in recent years. Abdullah al-Hamid and Muhammad al-Qahtani, two founders of the most prominent of these human-rights organizations, the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, were punished with jail sentences and travel bans in 2013. The United States should vocally affirm the right of these reformers to operate alongside state-sanctioned organizations.

The United States could also play a significant role in shoring up the efforts of Saudi female activists seeking greater gender equality, who currently constitute the most energized and active movement for reform in the country. Gradual gains have been made in the status of women in education, employment and participation in civil society. The United States should support female activists’ own goals, which do not typically extend beyond demands for parallel female institutions in public life.

Washington could also continue to cultivate relationships with the youth of Saudi Arabia through increased cultural-exchange programs. According to Kanie, young Saudis are key participants in the country’s literary and cultural clubs that assemble to discuss culturally, religiously or politically sensitive topics. Media training, especially for youth activists, could prove particularly effective. According to Mai Yamani’s research in her book Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia, use of online media has created a “new political culture,” especially among Saudi youth. Online forums constitute rare platforms to express opinions contrary to the state’s narrative in relative safety, such as news websites where readers can take part in dialogue in the comments section.

Such efforts will not go unnoticed by the Saudi royal family. Building a rapport with Islamist reformers in particular has drawn the ire of the regime in the past; for example, when the Saudis insisted that a U.S. ambassador be withdrawn in the late 1980s for having met with a senior Muslim cleric, and when they reprimanded the United States in 1993 after American diplomats met with the leader of a fundamentalist movement that was agitating for greater rights.

As for its traditional diplomacy with the Saudi regime, while maintaining an alliance with Saudi Arabia may advance some U.S. policy goals in the Middle East, the United States should exercise leverage over the regime whenever feasible to extract human-rights concessions. This aspect of state-to-state diplomacy will serve not only to boost Saudi civil society’s development, but also signal to the country’s few bold reformists that the United States does not condone the Saudi royal family’s crackdown on dissent, especially during a succession.

THE CASES of China and Saudi Arabia do reveal the problem of societal diplomacy clashing with traditional goals of state-to-state diplomacy. Simply put, authentically and energetically engaging with civil society will be perceived as subversive, which may harm U.S. bilateral relationships. It could cause tensions with China as a nascent adversary and Saudi Arabia as an ostensible ally. There would be marked short-term trade-offs, at the expense of eliciting Chinese cooperation on UN Security Council votes, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, trade disputes or currency valuation, or Saudi cooperation in dealing with terrorists, Syria, Iran and energy access.

Realpolitik suggests that there are no permanent allies, only permanent interests. Traditional state-to-state diplomacy toward illiberal governments like China and Saudi Arabia, influenced by realpolitik, has been conducted as if those governments were permanent—in the name of stability. It has focused on short-term stability to the detriment of long-term stability.

Yet political contexts change. A long-term U.S. conception of stability would anticipate and indeed facilitate evolution toward more liberal governance. The United States cannot infallibly predict the timing and nature of political change. One need look no farther than Iran under the shah, the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, South Africa under F. W. de Klerk, Libya under Muammar el-Qaddafi, or Egypt under Hosni Mubarak and then Mohamed Morsi. An enlightened sense of the national interest is dynamic in nature. It prepares for and engages currents of change, such as in China or Saudi Arabia. A more nimble—and indeed, more realistic—foreign-policy strategy requires diplomacy with civil society. At best, it will contribute constructively to political change brought about by domestic actors, serving more liberal rule and U.S. interests. At the very least, it will help the United States diversify its portfolio of interlocutors for those moments when unpredictable political change emerges. Even, perhaps especially, in the hardest cases, a dynamic understanding of interests requires a dynamic approach to diplomacy. The time for doctrinal musing about “engagement” with civil society has passed. It is time for concerted implementation.

Mark P. Lagon is president of Freedom House and former U.S. ambassador-at-large to combat trafficking in persons. Sarah Grebowski is a William V. O’Brien fellow in international law in the Master of Science in Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University.

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