Citizen Diplomacy is the concept that the individual has the right, even the responsibility, to help shape U.S. foreign relations, "one handshake at a time."
Citizen diplomats can be students, teachers, athletes, artists, business people, humanitarians, adventurers or tourists.
[2] One of the pioneers of citizen diplomacy, physicist Robert W. Fuller, traveled frequently to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s in the effort to alleviate the Cold War.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fuller continued this work in political hot spots around the world and developed the idea of reducing rankism to promote peace.
The phrase "citizen diplomacy" was first coined by David M. Hoffman in an article about Fuller's work which appeared in Co-Evolution Quarterly in 1981.