Stephanie Stallings recently suggested that creative collaboration is a useful model for cultural diplomacy. She is definitely onto something. Circumstances have changed around the work of diplomacy. Publics are now much less distant, more assertive, and actively engaged participants in the making of their encompassing cultural worlds.

Just over two decades after Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power”, Russia is set to officially introduce the phrase into its foreign policy vocabulary at the highest echelon. It was recently announced that, starting in 2013, Russia will jump on to the soft power bandwagon by making the highly demanded concept the focal instrument of its new foreign policy strategy. The development, in keeping with the rich traditions of Russian theater, unfolded in three key acts.

Act I

APDS Blogger: Frank Cheng

BEIJING. On the first day of our trip, the MPD student delegation to China visited Peking University (PKU). We met with Professors Wang Dong and Yu Wanli as well as students of international relations to discuss the U.S.-China Bi-National Commission Report on Mutual Trust and their perspectives on Chinese public diplomacy.

APDS Blogger: David Mandel

BEIJING. So the first thing is that it is big, bigger than you thought, though you imagined it to be very big. Big in an almost surprising way, such that you are taken aback but not so much that you cannot rationalize it, because, after all, you knew it would be.

APDS Blogger: Dao-Chau Nguyen and Danni Li

APDS Blogger: Sarah Myers

In January 2013, a group of nine Masters’ of Public Diplomacy students will embark on a trip to Beijing, China. A mixture of native Chinese and Americans, we hope to accomplish an ambitious set of goals: to gain an understanding of how public diplomacy is thought about and engaged in academic contexts as well as how it is innovatively used in practice—through film, at airports, over the Internet, in media, and by corporations.

Few had probably even heard of the country Kazakhstan until the 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. At the time, the satiric film starring Sacha Baron Cohen was roundly denounced by Kazakhstan for its unflattering portrayal of the country, still coming out of the shadows of the former Soviet Union.