Naima Green-Riley's second assignment with the U.S. Foreign Service wasn't a coincidence.
While serving as a public affairs officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Alexandria, Egypt, Green-Riley focused her attention on both the Arab Spring and an uptick in global outreach by China that immediately preceded its Belt and Road Initiative — a massive infrastructure project signaling a potentially fundamental shift in global power dynamics.
"I was noticing a lot of Chinese activity in the Middle East and Africa in ways that were intriguing and made me want to understand China more," Green-Riley said.
The State Department granted her request to be placed in China, where she served as a consular officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou from 2014 to 2015 during the Obama administration's "Pivot to Asia."
That assignment informed a question that would drive her academic career: How do the United States and China use public diplomacy to shape relationships with the rest of the world? Today, as an assistant professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Green-Riley expands the traditional framing of public diplomacy as a soft-power tool, arguing it can be far more consequential — especially in the context of two superpowers wielding influence across the globe.
"I'm interested in U.S.-China relations, but I'm also interested in comparing the ways that these two very big countries create relationships with the rest of the world," she said. "Whatever the U.S. and China do will have implications for most of the rest of the world, given the huge impact that they have on politics and global economics and global security issues."
Green-Riley is exploring this topic in a book she's now writing for Princeton University Press. The book is based on her Harvard doctoral dissertation, "How to Win Friends and Influence People Overseas: The U.S., China, and the Microfoundations of Public Diplomacy," which won Harvard's Edward M. Chase Prize for the best dissertation on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace. She hopes the book will illuminate why some countries succeed in public diplomacy while others struggle — particularly given how differently the U.S. and China operate.
Beyond her work on U.S.-China relations, Green-Riley has also researched how race affects the way people think about international relations. In 2023, she co-authored a quantitative study of how white and Black citizens differ in their support of using American force abroad. A newer article extends this work, showing that Black Americans hold distinct foreign policy preferences from white Americans on a more comprehensive set of topics, from military intervention and foreign aid to trade and environmental policy. This dimension had been largely overlooked in prior scholarship, Green-Riley said.
"As I continue to do this work related to race and international relations and public opinion about foreign policy, I hope to broaden the aperture on the ways that different types of people across the U.S. are thinking about the world, and hopefully that will help those who are interested in the ways that public opinion changes from group to group to have a better grasp of some of the specific differences," she said.
Rooted in her experience as a diplomat, Green-Riley sees her research, which has been supported by, among others, the Wilson Center China Fellowship and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, as advancing both academic theory and real-world policy. She is committed to reaching both policymakers and the general public.
"The essence of my work in policy was that it relied on an idea that an informed citizenry and one that is engaged in politics creates a healthier society and ultimately a healthier global ecosystem," she said. "That's why I hope that the impact that I have doesn't stop in the scholarly realm, because most of it is focused on the relationships between powerful governments and the foreign publics for whom their policies tend to matter in different parts of the world."
For Green-Riley, teaching Princeton students reinforces that commitment.
"They are the future movers and shakers of this country and this world," she said. "My hope in teaching here is to influence the way they're thinking about these important issues, so that when they do important work in the future, they'll keep some of the ideas we discussed in class in mind. And maybe that will impact the degree to which countries are engaging with each other and taking into consideration their relationships with the people of other places moving forward."