Recently, someone forwarded me Jim Carrey’s YouTube video in support of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi. At the same time, on TV, I watched Bill Gates introduce Don Cheadle at last year’s Davos summit. Later, I flipped through a magazine that featured pictures of Princess Diana with landmine victims. Angelina Jolie was in the room, too, even though she didn’t make an appearance – she simply pervades the media air we breathe. In Celebrity Diplomacy, University of Waterloo political science professor Andrew F. Cooper traces the technological, cultural, and political forces that create these daily logjams of stars and their causes.

We live in a world of celebrities without borders. Actors, athletes, musicians, and billionaire philanthropists are creating, as Cooper puts it, a new kind of “filter or conduit between citizens and sites of authority.” Today’s stars command a very big stage, and they use it. At the same time, traditional institutions have become showbiz-friendly – the UN, for example, has been dubbed a “celebrity hotel.”

Cooper structures his book around the twin titans who changed everything – Bono and Bob Geldof – and in so doing points out the problems that ensue when entertainment and diplomatic worlds collide. Smooth-talking good cop Bono leaves himself open to charges of compromise, while “Give Us the Fookin’ Money” Geldof failed to see that Live 8 was distinctly lacking in African performers. The changes that Geldof and Bono have inspired are unquestionably better, but their success has created new obstacles, particularly compassion fatigue and gridlocked media space.

Celebrity Diplomacy is a useful, though slightly colourless, history of the phenomenon. It doesn’t touch on some of the more mindbending aspects of celebs and their causes. Its tone is on the academic side, and it skimps on contributions from political and pop culture pundits, who could have made the book more challenging and more vivid. For all its factual detail, the book slights the person who really did start the ball rolling: Bob Geldof’s late wife, Paula Yates. She is the one who mobilized Geldof, after watching the famous Michael Buerk television documentary on the Ethiopian famine.