Middle East
APDS Blogger: John Nahas
Numerous initiatives, programs and events seek to foster democracy and democratic reforms in the Middle East. Some hit, most miss.
The USC Center on Public Diplomacy was pleased to host Professor Virginia Haufler for a Conversation in Public Diplomacy. Virginia Haufler discussed the public diplomacy involved in governing corporations in zones of conflict, based on her chapter “Governing Corporations in Zones of Conflict: Issues, Actors, and Institutions” in the forthcoming book, Who Governs the Globe?
Listen to this event | download .mp3 (34 MB)
November 9, 2009, will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While many have forgotten the impact of living with the wall for a quarter of a century, it was a constant reminder of the Cold War and the threat of atomic war. Choreographer Nejla Yatkin was a teenager in Berlin living with the reality of the divided city. She experienced the threat of imminent conflict in the battle between East and West, and saw the world open up when the wall went down.
Yesterday, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) made a public statement accepting the call of the French president Nicolas Sarkozy for a Middle East peace conference and his offer to host this conference. In his statement, Abbas emphasized that a condition for holding the conference must be a total freeze of settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories.
CAIRO --- I’ve spent the past week in Syria, Qatar, and Egypt, primarily to proselytize about public diplomacy. In Syria, in a Damascus University lecture (carried by Al Jazeera Live) and a lengthy interview on Syrian National Television, I made the case that Arab states do an exceptionally poor job of conducting public diplomacy and that their standing in the global political community suffers as a result.
