public diplomacy

A copy of ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare’ with a favourite passage from ‘Julius Caesar’ that Nelson Mandela inscribed with his signature will be displayed at the British Museum next month. The book is in fact a a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare that former Robben Island prisoner Sonny Venkatrathnam kept in his cell. Venkatrathnam disguised its cover with Diwali cards to prevent its seizure by prison authorities. He eventually passed it to 33 of his friends and fellow South African political prisoners, asking them to sign a passage that meant a lot to them.

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.

This United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit happening now is a reminder of how little has been achieved since 1992, the last time diplomats gathered there to focus on global environmental perils. The final segment of the Rio+20 meeting opened yesterday with no coherent agenda and is likely to close tomorrow with few practical outcomes.

As a nation, we invest in and deploy SEAL teams to do very specialized, very difficult counterterrorism work. We need to adopt the same approach to the people we ask to carry out very specialized and very difficult PD functions.

As America’s relationship with Pakistan has unraveled over the past 18 months, an important debate has been going on within the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad over the proper scope of CIA covert actions and their effect on diplomatic interests.

The Walk a Mile campaign combines two causes that Michelle Kwan is passionate about - promoting healthy living and cultural understanding into one global platform for good.

His Royal highness Prince Faisal bin Al Hussein said that it is more than twenty two years since the fall of Berlin wall that marked the end of the cold war, and raised the hopes for a better, safe and secure future for our people.

A Bite of China, a hit documentary focused on Chinese cuisine, is reaching out across the ocean and attracting fans in Japan.

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