Yep, the Azeris have oil... huge amounts of the stuff, so much so that the country is the ugly guy made good who’s suddenly never lonely. And Azerbaijan likes it, to the extent it wants to re-brand itself as a cultural, social and economic hot-spot rather than some backwater parked next to the Caspian Sea. And sport is a perfect branding opportunity.

The second area of Turkey’s ethos gap is in relation to the Kurdish question and the confrontations with Armenians and Alevis – longstanding conflicts inherited from the Ottoman Empire. These disputes influence Turkey’s global reputation and challenge the vision of its highly idealistic values-driven foreign policy discourse.

The ongoing Singapore Festival in France and the traveling Singapore: Inside Out campaign are just two veins of Singapore's global cultural outreach, an attempt to promote its cutting-edge artists - and through them, a dynamic Singapore brand - the world over.

It clarifies Cuba in America's official narrative not as a security threat but a country in transition, which is more in line both with Cuba's own self-image and how Latin American and European countries see it. Such a description undermines any rationality for the embargo and lends itself to a U.S. policy that emphasizes engagement and people to people contacts.

The Jamaican passport is ranked as one of the least valuable travel documents in the Caribbean based on the number of countries which allow its holders visa free travel through their ports of entry. [...] While agreeing that the power of the Jamaican passport is weak opposition spokesperson on foreign affairs, Edmund Bartlett, said the low ranking is a reflection of a myriad of problems facing the country’s international image.

Despite the futuristic billboard, there’s something retro about Israel’s agricultural pitch to the family of nations. Israel has long swapped its communal agrarian identity for a capitalist society that is one of the most unequal among Western nations. The kibbutz movement is a shadow of what it once was, and nearly all of the farm labor in Israel is performed by foreign workers. But organizers say that Israeli agriculture heritage, as much as its identity as a “start up nation,” is a selling point.