Abstract:
One of the strategies of the Indonesian government under the Directorate of Public
Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia to
improve the country's image through culture is the Indonesian Art and Culture
Scholarship program. IACS is a practice of diplomacy that aims to introduce
Indonesian culture to the younger generation of the international community,
especially Australia and various other countries to learn culture directly in
Indonesia. Australia and Indonesia have established a very long diplomatic
relationship and Australia was chosen to be one of the scholarship recipient
countries which aims to create harmonious relations between the two countries.
This research shows the establishment of the Indonesian Arts and Culture
Scholarship in 2019 (offline) and 2021 (online) as Indonesia's efforts to implement
Cultural Diplomacy towards Australia through the use of arts and culture as a
means. The research method used in this writing is a qualitative research method in
analyzing the problems studied, using data obtained from; official state data, online
media, books, articles, and news. To analyze this research, the author uses an
understanding of the main theories, namely Cultural Diplomacy and Public
Diplomacy. The results of this research show that the implementation of the
Indonesian cultural arts scholarship program before the pandemic in 2019 and after
the covid 19 pandemic in 2021 turned out well in introducing and teaching
Indonesian art and cultural diversity through people-to-people contact to the
international world, especially Australia.
