On Thursday, May 17, 2012 I attended the discussion on “Digital Diplomacy: A New Era of Advancing Policy” at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and on Twitter at #DigiDiplomacy. Carnegie had already posted video and audio of the event by early afternoon. Read More

If we do not highlight it often enough, cultural diplomacy promotes the creation of transnational social spaces of engagement and interaction. And, even as they are often identified with particular cultures or countries, cultural diplomatic interventions are also unavoidably cosmopolitan in nature, insofar as they move between, confront, and conjoin multiple social worlds. In this way and even when carried away by the worst excesses of national chauvinisms, cultural diplomacy is inherently a transnationalist project of sorts. Read More

Although democracy retains its allure, the Arab uprisings that began last year were about democracy primarily as simply a means to an end. The real goal of those who took to the streets was to grasp a better future for themselves and their families. Having a job, getting enough to eat, being assured that children could receive decent education and medical care – these constitute the substance of everyday life that so many in the Arab world had long been denied and were determined to claim. Read More

Author’s Note: This blog is the edited version of a speech I gave at the recent NATO conference on The Power of Soft Power. When Joseph Nye first coined the term soft power over 20 years ago, the United States and Europe were in a different place than they are today. Read More

I have spent some time as of late picking through the now infamous train wreck that was the American pavilion at Shanghai. Cynthia Schneider offers her opinion on what went wrong here. Here’s my take: Read More