citizen diplomacy

While in India, our team had the opportunity to meet with many groups conducting citizen diplomacy to help improve India-Pakistan relations. These groups varied in their scope of approaches from being deeply involved in conflict transformation, to not directly taking a stance on the issue at all.

APDS Blogger: Anna Dawson

Citizen diplomacy is a concept defined as individuals taking actions to engage with those outside of their country in a meaningful and mutually beneficial dialogue. In China, the kind of citizen diplomacy undertaken by both Mr Woo and Mr Yang are individual actions that were unheard of just a couple of years ago.

If you could tweet on behalf of your country -- what would you say? In Sweden, one citizen per week is getting the chance to tweet from the nation's official @Sweden Twitter account. The goal of the campaign initiated by Curators of Sweden is to promote the "democratisation of the country's brand".

Imagine handing your Twitter account over to a stranger. Now imagine a country handing over its Twitter feed to a citizen. Crowdsourcing digital communications has reached a new level as @Sweden hands over the official Swedish Twitter account to one of its citizens for a week.

December 18, 2011

The video project was voluntary and the students had to raise the funds to see it through. The Israeli Student Union offered advice on logistics. "We discovered a huge potential for improving Israel's public diplomacy efforts around the world through this creative and groundbreaking project," said Maayan Friedland, a Student Union spokesperson.

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