A study released this week named Afghanistan the most dangerous country for women, with Pakistan and India following closely behind. But while serious problems exist for women in these places, women’s rights activists say there is also an emerging public awareness in all three countries...

Tunisia has little to lose in a go-for-broke strategy to bring back visitors. Like Egypt, its bigger neighbour to the east, the Arab Spring has garnered it a lot of Western admirers but has frightened sight-seers and beach denizens.

Turkey is the topic of interest: meetings are being held to discuss it, and writers, journalists, bloggers and even tweeters write incessantly about the lessons the Turkish model holds for Egypt at this crucial juncture while the country readies for a democratic transformation following the great uprising...

It looks great on paper. But there is no transparency. There are no benchmarks and no opportunities for public input or oversight...The talks are used as a public relations exercise that allow the EU to isolate human rights issues from other top-level negotiations.

In March 2011 I wrote a piece for the CPD Blog entitled "Israeli Public Diplomacy’s Longstanding Blind Spot: Arab Publics,” in which I posited that historical attitudes reaching back to the dawn of the Zionist movement provide a context, if not a continuous mode of thought, lying behind Israel’s inability and unwillingness to construct a public diplomacy program that directly en

The problem facing the Administration is that international impatience with the stalled U.S. peace process has reached a point where more photo-op diplomacy won't suffice. The world wants to see progress on a two-state solution, and believes Israel has to be pressed on the matter.

The blistering farewell speech to NATO by U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates warning of a "dim, if not dismal" future for the Alliance drew the Western public's attention to a longstanding debate about the state of the transatlantic relationship, with prominent commenters voicing concern about much more than just a two-tiered defensive alliance.

It's becoming an area of spirited debate in government and financial circles - what is and isn't a BRIC country and how should they be classified? As the emerging world forges ahead and western economies hesitatingly recover from the financial crisis the call for inclusion in the BRIC block becomes louder.