development diplomacy
India now sees Africa as a promising market for Indian goods, services, and investments. This is evident in the government’s recent concerted focus on the India-Africa relationship—high profile visits by top leaders to African countries, a recasting of India’s development diplomacy, and an attempt to match action to past promises. [...] At the same time, India’s development diplomacy for the continent has been through a strategic shift.
This article unpacks Turkey’s transition from being a historically status-quo nation to that of a proactive international player, using as examples the recent formation of a middle power alliance with Mexico, Indonesia, Korea and Australia (MIKTA), an emphasis on religion as an “explicitly recognized factor of influence on foreign policy,” and economic cooperation with developing countries such as Somalia, Sudan, Syria and the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
On April 16, CPD hosted a policy briefing on water and public diplomacy in Washington, D.C. as part of the CPD Water Diplomacy Initiative.
Ms Khar and her government seem to be playing to the tune of the military establishment’s obsession with India and the inroads it has made by projecting ‘soft’ power in Afghanistan. That has allowed New Delhi to re-establish the historical friendship with Kabul, a development that has hardened the Pakistani GHQ’s approach to supporting Taliban proxies to control Afghanistan.
Disjointed aid efforts, in the form of implementing thousands of “quick fix” projects, have miserably failed, however, wasting the precious aid monies of taxpayers to Afghanistan. The way forward must avoid more of the same but draw on the many lessons learned in order to ensure a sustainable and irreversible transition to the Afghan responsibility.
To be sure, Iran wields a considerable amount of what is known in foreign policy circles as "soft power" in Iraq. Iran sends millions of Shiite pilgrims to Iraq each year to visit the shrines of Hussein and others. Iran builds hospitals, and provides water and electricity.
After 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, whereas India projected soft power into Afghanistan, having by now invested some $ 2 billion in reconstruction and infrastructure building in Afghanistan, Pakistan stuck to its old paradigm of offering safe havens to and supporting a proxy war by the Taliban and Haqqani network.