Consider this statement: “The great body of citizens are refusing to wait until negotiations are over or policies are acted upon or even determined. They demand to know what is going on and to have an opportunity to express their opinions at all stages of diplomatic proceedings.”

At the hub of public diplomacy in the western United States, here at CPD we were very busy last week. We started off with a workshop on Mexican Public Diplomacy and ended with a conference on International Broadcasting in the Social Media Era. Now you may be wondering what is the common thread, aside from public diplomacy, that links these two bookends of a week together.

Perhaps the greatest deterrent to extremism is prosperity. If people have a decent place to live, can put food on the table for their families, and see their children healthy and being educated, they are likely to tune out recruitment efforts by terrorists and other proponents of violence.

WASHINGTON -- Alhurra television celebrates its ninth anniversary on Feb. 14, with a larger audience and claims of editorial progress.

To celebrate the New Year, Culture Posts is focusing on the relatively new concept: relationalism. Public Diplomacy viewed through the lens of relationalism has several implications. Most immediately, discussions about relations and relationship-building – the hallmark of the “new public diplomacy” – can move to a more sophisticated and nuanced level.

Developing a Relational Eye

George Packer, in his piece in The New Yorker evaluating Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, cites Clinton’s many public events around the world and observes that she “knew she would have to be seen listening in order to help regain the world’s respect” for the United States. Packer also notes that Clinton’s approach was not always appreciated, that her town halls and other such sessions “were sometimes derided as soft and marginal to real foreign policy.”

In 2012, Fergus Hanson released two reports covering the scope of "e-diplomacy" within the U.S. State Department. He provided a broad view of how the State Department had adopted social media and other IT platforms to accomplish the business of diplomacy. Facebook pages for U.S. embassies, tweeting ambassadors, and new forms of knowledge management were among the examples cited to illustrate a larger trend towards the incorporation of information technology into the practice of statecraft.