soft power
Halfway through an otherwise coherent conversation with a Georgian lawyer last week—the topics included judges, the court system, the police—I was startled by a comment he made about his country’s former government, led by ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili. “They were LGBT,” he said, conspiratorially.
Frameworks for cultural diplomacy in the U.S. are often too narrow and too broad.
Frameworks for cultural diplomacy in the U.S. are often too narrow and too broad. On the one hand, self-identified practitioners of cultural diplomacy – within and outside government – tend to identify, if somewhat generically, specific exportable forms of expressive culture (think: music, theater, literature, dance, murals, or film).
First lady, Michelle Obama is currently visiting China with her daughters, Sasha and Malia and her mother, Marian Robinson. The trip marks the first ever made by a first lady to China without her husband in tow. Mrs. Obama is there to promote educational exchanges between the U.S. and China but she has also subtly been addressing the issue of freedom of expression.
The third volume of the Global Health Diplomacy Series, 21st Century Global Health Diplomacy edited by Thomas E Novotony, Ilona Kickbusch, and
The Sochi Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games have ended. The opening ceremony for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games is still more than six years away. As the Tokyo Organizing Committee is forming, this seems like an appropriate moment to think about Tokyo in terms of the recent Sochi experience.
In a speech to Peking University students yesterday, US first lady Michelle Obama defended freedom of expression and other "universal rights" - sensitive concepts that mainland university professors were banned from teaching a year ago. The remarks - the closest the first lady has so far come to discussing politics during her China visit - came during an otherwise soft speech in which she encouraged students to study abroad and cited her own success as a testament to hard work.
Michelle Obama has embarked on a weeklong trip to China, together with her mother, Marian Robinson, and daughters, Malia and Sasha. Critics of the trip point out that the Robinson-Obama visits to Beijing (Great Wall), Xi’an (terra-cotta army), and Chengdu (pandas), will do nothing to illuminate or alleviate tensions in U.S.-China relations.