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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

WHY OBAMA IS LESS POPULAR IN ASIA
NOV 20, 2008 - 10:33AM PDT
Posted by Adam Clayton Powell III
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Much that is written about public diplomacy focuses on Europe and the Muslim world. National news media in the US, headquartered in New York and Washington, equates foreign opinion with approving editorials in The Guardian and large crowds in Berlin. By those criteria, President-elect Barack Obama is wildly popular. Just elect Obama, the thinking goes, and America's public diplomacy problems are solved.

Not quite: The data indicate Obama was never as popular in Asia as in Europe. And it turns out President Bush was never as unpopular in Asia as he was in Europe.

This was documented by the Pew... FULL TEXT
 
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LETTER FROM MOSCOW
NOV 13, 2008 - 12:00PM PDT
Posted by Nicholas J. Cull
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It is a confession for a historian of the Cold War to admit that he had never visited Russia until last week, and that is the case for me. I nearly went in 1975 but the “evil forces of capitalism” contrived to scrap the educational cruise ship on which my family and I were booked. I saw something of the Eastern bloc in Czechoslovakia and East Berlin in the 1980s; I had Russian friends, and even published on Russian subjects, but never having seen Russia for myself was a significant gap in my experience. And quite an experience it turned... FULL TEXT
 
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A PD CHALLENGE ON THE PAKISTANI SIDE
NOV 13, 2008 - 11:49AM PDT
Posted by Rob Asghar
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Given that President Bush told journalists this summer that Pakistan will be the next American president's biggest foreign policy challenge, let's take a moment to consider the public-diplomacy issues for both sides now that the U.S. has a new President-elect.

Pakistan faces a significant PD challenge of its own: convincing the nations of the West that it is not a treacherous pseudo-ally. Just try the obligatory Google search of "Pakistan" + "double-game" – the 22,000 hits will demonstrate, as Newsweek does here, that much of the West's political leadership believes Pakistan is secretly supporting jihadists while taking Western aid that... FULL TEXT
 
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TRANSFORMATIVE MOBILIZATION: FROM OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN TECHNIQUES TO PUBLIC DIPLOMACY
NOV 9, 2008 - 6:33PM PDT
Posted by Monroe E. Price
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It may be peculiar to comment on one’s own blog. But, having just provided a post on possible directions for Obama’s international broadcasting and public diplomacy strategy, I realized I had missed the elephant (or donkey) in the room.

In thinking about a strategy for the new administration, the obvious question (so obvious that it’s already three-quarters asked) is: what would it mean to harness, for global understanding, the Obama campaign’s approach to “movement” thinking and its brilliant exploitation of the potential of the Internet?

International broadcasters have been struggling with the question of how to adjust to new technology.... FULL TEXT
 
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CHANGING INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTING IN THE OBAMA ERA?
NOV 6, 2008 - 4:44PM PDT
Posted by Monroe E. Price
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Can two late thinkers, a French philosopher and British media scholar, point the way to a new American public diplomacy— or at least an American international broadcasting strategy— for the Obama era?

Let’s start with two unarguable points. The very election of Barack Obama shifts the world of public diplomacy and automatically alters the dynamic of U.S. messaging abroad. As Timothy Garton Ash put it in the Guardian, “Obama is himself a weapon of mass attraction.”

Second, as commission after commission and report after report found this decade, without addressing underlying foreign policy initiatives, attention to the form and technique... FULL TEXT
 
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