There is good reason to think that, whatever happens as a part of these expressive or performative opportunities, cultural diplomacy as display and for the creation of an audience is in fact not the best route to intercultural dialogue.

Big studios are trying to push further into China, where box office receipts rose more than a third last year to $2 billion. China represents one of the most attractive growth opportunities for the U.S. movie industry, which is facing declining North American theater revenue and slumping DVD sales.

For the students of diplomacy, the photographs detailing the early years of Asean are objects of nostalgia and politics. Established on August 8, 1967, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) was composed of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

This post continues my preliminary discussion of the results of a survey I recently conducted, designed to invite practitioners of cultural diplomacy to reflect upon their own practice. Additional discussion of this survey can be found in my February 15th post.

Ambassador Herbie Hancock believes what the world needs is a little jazz diplomacy. "This is really about the international diplomatic aspect of jazz and how it has throughout a major part of its history been a major force in bringing people of various countries and cultures together."

And the ambitions go further: to use Scottish Water’s land for wind-power generation, to export water technology (it already does so, to Canada) and what it grandly calls “water diplomacy”. At one level this seems to mean Scottish Water’s support for the international charity WaterAid, helping with water projects in Africa and other poor parts of the world.

The framework does have an interesting reference on closer coordination and collaboration between State and Defense: ”where DOD runs public-facing websites, we have developed closer coordination with State on editorial oversight and content selection.” This may mean State, likely the regional bureaus to be specific, has input to Defense-run sites.

The report from the Inspector General’s office says that’s because the State Department’s programs are poorly run. It says some programs need to be restructured and another federal agency — the Labor Department — may need to take over others.