Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf Thursday underscored importance of projecting the country’s soft image through public diplomacy by encouraging people-to-people contacts, cultural exchanges and promotion of trade the world over.

New Delhi, Jun 26 (IANS): The cultural cooperation between India and Africa is moving beyond traditional exchanges to focus on education and capacity building initiatives which can become "a part of the national idiom", says Suresh Goel, director general of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR).

Azerbaijani, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu are among the languages that can take MTSU students to fascinating, far-flung parts of the world through the Critical Language Scholarship program.

The show at Georgetown University was a first for me, and maybe, according to Waleed Shamil, a first for this country.

Three years ago—back when I was still a carefree cyberutopian—I wrote a short essay on “high-tech diplomacy” for Newsweek. That essay—by far the glibbest text I've ever written—chided American diplomats for not exploiting the immense digital soft power that a company like Amazon had to offer.

The US Mission in Pakistan brought the band from New Orleans, Louisiana to play at events and participate in musical exchanges in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad. The band’s visit to Pakistan hopes to answer the call from many Pakistanis to see more American exchanges in the country and promote cultural understanding.

At the beginning of May 2012, students, faculty and alums of Emerson College met with their counterparts in the beachside community of Rosarito, Mexico to commemorate the 5 year ongoing public diplomacy projects in the wake of the drug cartel crisis.

I had an opportunity to visit Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe in November 2011. As I traveled from north to south on the African continent, I was able to take a close look at African culture. The trip convinced me that Africa is not a "cultural desert" as some have claimed, but an oasis steeped in culture.