Academic Conferences as Cultural Diplomacy: My Visit to the University of Leeds
APDS Blogger: Erin Kamler Read More
Rock and Roll Jihad for Peace
Salman Ahmad, founder of South Asia’s most successful rock band Junoon, has been on a rock and roll jihad (struggle) ever since his first concert at 18 – a medical school talent show in Lahore, Pakistan. Eyes closed, emotions pumped, he was ripping through Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’ on his guitar, mesmerized by the crowd’s screams, only to discover that the yelling was coming from a group of bearded students from a religious group outraged by music they considered un-Islamic. Read More
PD Lessons from a Chinese New Year Gala
APDS Blogger: Di Wu Read More
Striped Pants Backpacker
Veteran Canadian diplomat Daryl Copeland has been on the ramparts of diplomatic studies for several years now, advocating a kind of diplomacy he calls Guerrilla Diplomacy. Last week, at the International Studies Association convention in New Orleans, a panel of expert academics reviewed Copeland’s thesis and generally applauded his ideas. Read More
New Media, Old Truths
Many journalists and commentators have examined and illuminated the role of new media and technology in the on-going protests in Iran. Exposing the electoral fraud perpetrated by Ahmedinejad last year and the violent repression of resultant protests certainly called for the skill of traditional journalists and the new media capabilities of Iranian citizen witnesses and participants. Read More
Reframing the Dinner Conversation between the West and Pakistan
If Pakistan were a person, who would it be? Would it be Odysseus, undergoing a series of grueling tests in order to claim its true heroic identity? Would it be a hapless Sancho Panza, looking on with alarm as it’s dragged into ruin by the misadventures of those around it? Read More
Responding to Natural Disasters with Humanitarian Aid: Implications for Public Diplomacy
In 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit a number of countries, the coastal regions of Indonesia and Sri Lanka were devastated. Before the tsunami, the public opinion of the United States in these and surrounding Muslim countries was predictably low; however the huge efforts of US humanitarian aid immediately following as well as long after the crisis swayed public opinions that remained high even a year later in a follow-up poll. Read More
Japan and the Art of Apology
A discussion of Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada's apology for Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea during World War II.
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U.S. Public Diplomacy Sputtering in Muslim World
DOHA, QATAR --- In the beginning, there was The Speech.
After that, there was the letdown. Read More
Palestine Looms over Efforts To Bridge the U.S.-Islam Divide
DOHA, QATAR --- When Hillary Clinton addressed the U.S.-Islamic World Forum here on Sunday night, she found the going smooth…until she hit the bump of Gaza. A group of religious leaders, whose spokesman was Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., asked why the Obama administration could not do more to help the beleaguered residents of Gaza, whose supplies of food, water, and medicine are barely at survival level. Read More
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