APDS Blogger: Aparajitha Vadlamannati

At USC on April 6, the Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars held a conference on the Future of Public Diplomacy. Experts, academics, and practitioners gathered to discuss what lies ahead for the field of public diplomacy. There were a couple of major takeaways from the conference.

Qatar’s Education City is a prime example of the flourishing partnership and dialogue between the US and the Muslim world, a senior US official has said.
Kathleen Stephens, acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs and former ambassador to South Korea, made the observation.

And all of this may in the end be an attribute of America's vaunted soft power - our foreign policy is not made in a hermetically sealed environment by wise-men-for-life but rather rises from the give and take of our democratic process, which at the end of the day is open to all.

Seib is the author of Real-Time Diplomacy, a study of politics and social media that will be published in April. He says that stories about ordinary people have a real impact on foreign policy...

We live in a world of diverse cultures, and we know very little about social engineering and how to “build nations"...America’s capacity to maintain alliances and create cooperative networks will be an important dimension of its hard and soft power.

Reexamine the strategy of “reset” with Russia. The President should commission the National Security Council to form a task force for a bottom-up review of Russia policy in view of Putin’s return to the Kremlin and Moscow’s sabotage of the U.S. policies on Iran and Syria. The U.S. should use its public diplomacy assets to “name and shame” Russia as an enabler of the Iranian and Syrian regimes.

Indian foreign policy discourse is hardly Pakistan-centric; its major pre-occupations are the rise of India, its soft-power promotion, UN reforms and India’s role in a reformed UN, relations with the United States etc.