Turkey has stepped up its use of soft power by attempting to influence the political processes of nations which have recently undergone “Arab Spring” revolutions, namely Tunisia and Egypt...Erdogan has found a window of opportunity in the Arab Spring to restore Turkey to regional hegemony at a time when it only serves to help his party's standing at home.

We have to accept that inevitably Europe will account for a smaller proportion of world output, as the balance shifts to the emerging world. But it can and still will be able to deliver an enviable lifestyle for its people. And insofar as it projects power to the world, it will be soft power, through admiration for its cultural and technical achievements.

In many ways, Al Jazeera is a victim of its own success. Since the beginning of the Arab Spring...Al Jazeera played a vital role in spreading news about the uprisings throughout the region. Once the revolutions started, the network featured more than just traditional newsgathering...made a point of aggregating social media content...to its TV viewers.

The United States Department of State has Foreign Press Centers in Washington, D.C. and New York that help foreign media cover the U.S. Their goal is to promote the depth, accuracy, and balance of foreign reporting for the U.S., by providing direct access to authoritative American information sources.

Public diplomacy practitioners, students and scholars are aware that one of the critical obstacles for public diplomacy is resource deficiency, which includes the lack of funding and personnel. In other words, the scope of influence is a problem. Both Biden and Locke successfully attracted Chinese attention, with which any diplomatic approaches can be magnified.

The American companies get a peek into the high-walled Chinese playground; China gets an injection of Hollywood storytelling pep, marketing savvy and global distribution that might help its film industry kick on. Despite the endless barrage of coverage declaring the 21st century Beijing-owned, Chinese cinema isn't flourishing.

The pontifical council for the promotion of the new evangelisation represents a significant benchmark to measure the Vatican's capability to regain some influence in what was once "its" Europe...It has to fight against what the Vatican perceives as "the supremacy of the fragments": a cultural approach which tends to isolate and disperse western societies, and by consequence also Catholics: a sort of "grassroots relativism".

APDS Blogger: Di Wu