IMPLEMENTATION OF INDONESIAN ART AND CULTURE SCHOLARSHIP (IACS) AS INDONESIAN CULTURAL DIPLOMACY TOWARDS AUSTRALIA IN THE PERIOD (2019 & 2021)

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.