Football authorities, from Fifa to the FA, are keen to argue that the sport is a benign force, an agent of positive social transformation even. They portray football as the universal game for a global world, an instrument of soft power and peaceful diplomacy and a device for overcoming social divisions.

He also said that Taiwan was willing to increase the number of scholarships for outstanding students from allied nations hoping to complete their university education in Taiwan in either Mandarin Chinese or English. Meanwhile, President Ma Ying-jeou said Wednesday that soft power is the key to winning respect from other nations.

External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna is starting a three-day official visit to Nepal from 20 April 2011. His visit comes at a time when Nepal is passing through political and economic uncertainties. The deadline for the drafting of the constitution is drawing nearer and the exercise has to be completed within the next forty days.

In a sense, the surprise question in such a situation, and perhaps into the future, is whether France has stolen a march over the United States, perhaps in terms of public diplomacy, in trying to pull Japan out of its civil nuclear emergency.

On January 11, at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s annual new year press conference with the foreign media in Jerusalem, Oren Helman was introduced to the foreign press corps as the Government Press Office’s new head, taking over from Danny Seaman, who had a rather torrid 10-year relationship with the foreign press.

Indian bureaucracy needs to take some lessons on public diplomacy from their Western counterparts, and the same is the case with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Office. With corruption becoming a key rallying point, the extra-sensitive PMO mandarins ensured that the electronic media was booted out of the onboard media from the PM's recent trip to China

Joseph Nye is as gifted at branding as he is at thinking, teaching, and serving the public. He turned "soft power" (essential to "smart power") into a golden brand. In Washington, you know something has reached gold when the secretary of state wraps a "strategy" around it...

Can a poor country be a great power? Three examples from recent history suggest it can. These parallels would have weighed on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's mind as he flew to the southern resort city of Sanya in China's Hainan province for the BRICS (a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit.