Toward a Public Relations Approach to Nation Building

This article advances a public relations approach to nation building. A public relations approach to nation building focuses on cooperative relationships and offers a communication-centered, participatory approach for improving ethnic relations in multicultural states. This research evaluated the Neighborliness Campaign in Malaysia and found it was effective in building cooperation between people of different ethnic groups. However, the Neighborliness Campaign also suffered from the unintended consequences of other government nation-building efforts. To improve future communication campaigns for nation building, a public relations approach, based on relational communication, is offered.