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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.

CONNECTIVITY AND NETWORKS RULE: VIRTUALITY, PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND THE FOREIGN MINISTRY
NOV 26, 2008 - 10:40AM PDT
Posted by Daryl Copeland
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When USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy embarked on its Virtual Worlds project a few years ago, I admit to being somewhat sceptical. The undertaking seemed, at the time, just too ephemeral, too abstract, too distant from the machinations of realpolitik and the grind of bureaucratic process which I experienced daily as a diplomat.

My thinking, not unlike internet applications, has since migrated.

Since its popular inception in the early 1990s, the epicentre of the internet has continually moved. In less than a decade it has shifted from Web 1.0 — which can be thought of as read/write/broadcast mode — to... FULL TEXT
 
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REFLECTIONS ON U.S. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
NOV 24, 2008 - 8:22PM PDT
Posted by Kristin M. Lord
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With help from USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy and hundreds of other individuals and groups, I recently authored a Brookings Institution report on public diplomacy and what it should look like in the coming years and decades. That report is available on-line at Voices of America: U.S. Public Diplomacy for the 21st Century.

This blog won’t retread that ground. Instead, I’d like to share some personal reflections you won’t find in the text.

Reflection Number 1: I always knew that Americans were patriotic and cared about America’s image in the world, but I was stunned by the incredible outpouring of... FULL TEXT
 
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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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