Given China’s decisive influence on the global economy, and its increasing ability to project military power, understanding the sources of Chinese conduct has become a central issue in international relations.

At the beginning of the year, few would have predicted that Britain and the United States would be involved in another military intervention. Britain, the United States and European nations were – and still are- cutting their defence budgets.

Smart bombs, clandestine special forces operations, high-profile defections and, now, the arrival in London of a high-ranking Libyan envoy sent by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son, to negotiate the possibility of the family fleeing into exile.

Japan is increasingly turning to other countries for help as it struggles to stabilize its tsunami-stricken nuclear plant and stop radiation leaks that are complicating efforts to recover the bodies of some of the thousands swept away by the towering wave.

Jan Melissen, Head of the Diplomatic Studies Program at the Clingendael Institute of International Relations and Sook Jong Lee, President of the East Asia Institute, have just released a new volume, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power in East Asia by Palgrave Macmillan in the series on Global Public Diplomacy.

Today's London meeting on Libya showed the "soft power" side of the international operation. Arab, European, and US leaders offered a raft of humanitarian arguments and a collective suasion to push for Muammar Qaddafi's ouster.

Last week I chaired a meeting on Turkey’s role in the Middle East. There seems to be a never-ending interest, in Brussels at least, to discuss and debate Turkish foreign policy.Therefore, and needless to say, the discussion went far beyond recent events in the Middle East and North Africa...

The uprising in Libya and the subsequent foreign military intervention there are providing a significant test for Turkey's stated desire to create a foreign policy that combines realism with idealism, while also highlighting the difficulty Ankara is facing in balancing its aspirations to become a more independent regional leader in the Middle East...