When assessing America's power toolbox, comic book culture is rarely discussed as an effective instrument, but likely stands as one of the most globally influential...Tampering with the art form by amateurs is dangerous and can lead to terrible results. That is exactly what happened in the case of the EU's online comic, Captain Euro (www.captaineuro.com). It seeks to entertain by portraying its nonviolent crusader as the protector of democratic peace.

Repower Greece organized an academic US tour to spark a discussion across North America on rebuilding Greece and changing the world’s negative perceptions of its people. Below are the findings of the discussions as they were presented by Alexandros Costopoulos, one of the initiative’s organizers.

A special delegation of 11 Israeli high school students landed in Paris on Sunday as part of the Israeli Jewish Congress' "Young Ambassadors" program..."Teenagers are the most useful group when it comes to public diplomacy," Sloutsker said.

Nordic Ministers of Culture and representatives of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Åland met with Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Tara Sonenshine on February 20 at the U.S. Department of State to mark the opening of the Nordic Cool 2013 festival.

The hazy heat of Jakarta is a far cry from the cool climate of Bandung, where ceramic artist Rifky Effendy was trained. But after 10 years of living in the concrete jungle, he is going out with a bang, curating Indonesia’s first exhibition at the prestigious Venice Biennale 2013 before his planned move back to the West Java capital.

The United States has two distinct approaches to human rights violations in the countries of the former Soviet Union. When it is in Washington's perceived strategic interest, the U.S. government normally remains quiet. When its strategic interests are not at stake, U.S. officials speak forcefully and work to expose human rights violations and corruption.

The United States is applying different standards in its public criticism of the human rights record of authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union (FSU), according to a new report released here Monday by the Open Society Institute (OSI). The key variable, according to “Human Rights and the Failings of U.S. Public Diplomacy in Eurasia”, appears to be the perceived strategic importance of the specific country.

In honor of the New Year (both West and East), I would like to share a relatively new lens for viewing relations in public diplomacy. Many may have heard of the terms individualism, which privileges the individual, and collectivism, which favors the collective or group. What they may not have heard about yet is relationalism, which privileges personal relations. At the time of this writing, relationalism literally “isn’t in the dictionary” – at least the most prominent one in the English-language.