At the hub of public diplomacy in the western United States, here at CPD we were very busy last week. We started off with a workshop on Mexican Public Diplomacy and ended with a conference on International Broadcasting in the Social Media Era. Now you may be wondering what is the common thread, aside from public diplomacy, that links these two bookends of a week together.

Salman Rushdie was recently asked for his opinion on contemporary Indian fiction. The celebrated novelist surveyed the landscape for his interviewer, offering nods of approval to what is now a well established range of Indian writing in English. But it wasn’t as attractive as what was happening across the border. “I actually think,” Rushdie said, “that the Pakistani stuff is more interesting.”

The United States is working to counter violent extremism in Africa by providing an "alternative narrative" and "alternative scenarios," according to Under Secretary of State Tara Sonenshine.

The book is not a technical manual, or a list of what to do and not to do. It is rather a collection of information, anecdotes, and experiences. It recounts episodes involving foreign ministers and ambassadors, as well as their ways of interacting with the tool and exploring its great potential.

The United States entered Afghanistan and Iraq knowing what it wanted to eliminate – Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary and Saddam Hussein’s regime – but with only a vague conception of a desired strategic end state. In Iraq, the lack of a post-conflict strategy was not an oversight, but deliberate. In neither case was there a grasp of the political, social and cultural forces in those countries that would shape the eventual outcomes.

The newly released budget has not only protected but has actually increased India's foreign assistance, or development partnerships as the government prefers to call it. It has done so despite fiscal pressures to decrease spending, as well as pre-election year pressures to increase funding only for programmes that will gain votes.

Seventeen women from six Arab countries discussed challenges and new trends in diplomacy during a weeklong seminar organized by the Italian Foreign Affairs Ministry in association with leading research center The Italian Society for International Organization (SIOI).

The “earthquake diplomacy” that sprang out of the ruins of the Istanbul and Athens earthquakes in 1999 was perfect proof for the effectiveness of public diplomacy... Since then, Greece and Turkey have enjoyed the longest period of peace in their history, having developed multiple channels of communication outside the continuing political dystopia.