Cultural Diplomacy
Hosting a concert by the shores of Rawal Lake, the US embassy brought together America's "Ari Roland Jazz Quartet" and Pakistani rock band "Fuzon", capping the night with the "world premiere" of a special friendship song.
Dubbed the world's first stealth concert, Sound Central is ready to rock the capital of Afghanistan. Founded by Australian Travis Beard, a photojournalist and guitarist in the Kabul-based rock band, White City, Sound Central is a rock music festival bringing artists from around Central Asia to Kabul for a groundbreaking modern music festival.
In the last few years, India has deftly indulged in Bollywood promotion in China, part of soft power diplomacy that both sides feel help in creating a positive atmosphere for nurturing bilateral ties that often get entangled in sensitive issues.
We have to accept that inevitably Europe will account for a smaller proportion of world output, as the balance shifts to the emerging world. But it can and still will be able to deliver an enviable lifestyle for its people. And insofar as it projects power to the world, it will be soft power, through admiration for its cultural and technical achievements.
The American companies get a peek into the high-walled Chinese playground; China gets an injection of Hollywood storytelling pep, marketing savvy and global distribution that might help its film industry kick on. Despite the endless barrage of coverage declaring the 21st century Beijing-owned, Chinese cinema isn't flourishing.
The goal of this project was to stimulate greater awareness and knowledge of how culture influences public diplomacy and help generate multicultural perspectives of public diplomacy. Although cultural diplomacy may benefit from culture as a highly visible tool for promoting mutual understanding, public diplomacy is vulnerable to the hidden aspects of culture that can generate mutual misunderstanding.
About 750 foreign students from 73 countries received scholarships from the Indonesian government to study Indonesian culture, arts and language at universities across the country...the program, launched in 1974, was among Indonesia's cultural diplomacy programs aimed at promoting Indonesian cultures to the rest of the world.
Written long before the emergence of the Taliban, "The Wandering Falcon" moves far beyond the Western media's stereotypical depiction of the tribal areas and lays bare the nature of a place that is now a focal point of U.S. and European foreign policy.