Introduction

Launched in 2013, the CPD Annual Review was developed to serve as a guide to understanding the global landscape of public diplomacy, its ebbs and flows, its triumphs and its shortcomings.

This year’s Annual Review captures the scope and scale of public diplomacy around the world in 2014 through an analysis of 2,233 English-language news stories aggregated by the PD News team at CPD. It includes a broad array of activities and actors involved, both as principals and recipients. These stories were carefully coded and analyzed for this report (See Appendix 1 for details).

For the purposes of the Annual Review, “public diplomacy” broadly refers to an international actor’s communication with a foreign population, through institutions and individuals, to advance interests and increase understanding.

The importance of the public dimension of diplomacy in international relations is made clearer in the digital age with the increasing power that public opinion holds. The CPD Annual Review demonstrates that public diplomacy is present in every region of the world with a growing number of non-state actors who hold the same share of presence in public diplomacy news as traditional state actors. Although public diplomacy activities are typically concentrated within the functions of Government PD and Cultural Diplomacy, we’ve seen a remarkable increase in Digital Diplomacy activities this year in comparison to 2013. Another PD category that showed noticeable growth in 2014 was Global Development and International Aid.