Some Baku residents probably did a double-take when the news broke recently: two members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutiun, a nationalist Armenian party fervently opposed to Azerbaijan’s claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, had arrived in the Azerbaijani capital on a surprise visit.

U.S. military bases continue to be a point of contact between American culture and that of the host country. That's not necessarily an argument for maintaining a global basing structure, but it is an underappreciated side-effect of having one.

It’s that time of year again. 12 October 2010 saw the publication of this year’s results for the Anholt Roper GfK Nation Brands Index. As has been the case in recent years, there are few surprises in this year’s result.

The question of soft power, when it comes to Iran, is contentious. Most analysts seem prepared to acknowledge that the Islamic Republic’s soft power in the Middle East rose significantly in the first several years of this decade.

US public diplomacy has morphed the Liu case out of the soft power human rights community into the hard power arena of economic warfare designed to pressure Beijing to devalue the Yuan and give Democrats badly needed credibility, votes and dollars in the run up to US midterm elections.

The Commonwealth Games has been an occasion for the capital to seduce visitors with the country's soft power. And in the process, Delhiites have joined the celebrations in large numbers, in stark contrast with the empty stadiums.

Imperial edicts in medieval China typically ended by exhorting lowly subjects to “tremble and obey”; from all available evidence, the edicts had just the desired effect.In the modern era, however, China’s muscular assertion of its recently acquired economic and political might to get the rest of the world to “tremble and obey” may have run its course and is beginning to face a global pushback.