turkey

The former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan once commented that the most difficult thing about politics was "events, dear boy, events." Events can be helpful or unhelpful coincidences for statesmen. [...] The West needs to engage seriously with Turkey. 

World map from Golden Age of Dutch cartography

Shaun Riordan's look at the state of geopolitics.

December 7, 2015

On Nov. 27, 2015, the Turkish Culture and Information Office and the Yunus Emre Institute in London gave a magnificent example of public diplomacy by jointly organizing a concert at the prestigious Cadogan Hall in London. Both the Turkish and British public, although the latter less significantly, were unaware of this exposition of Ottoman sultans’ western music. The concert, labelled as “Waltzes with Sultans,” therefore was not only educational but also ground-breaking.

Syrian-American diaspora diplomacy in Los Angeles.

The struggle against Islamic State in Iraq should be strategic and diplomatic in the true sense of the word: the creation and disruption of coalitions built on profound geopolitical analysis and accompanied by effective public diplomacy. 

Looking back curiously

Public diplomacy tools to combat the Islamic State, Part 2.

Muslim in Paris

PD tools the West needs to combat the Islamic State, Part 1.

The much-maligned U.S. State Department under Secretary John Kerry and his highly media-literate deputy, Richard Stengel (a former editor of Time magazine), is re-embracing public diplomacy as a major weapon in the West’s arsenal by dramatizing such issues, as in the Cold War. Europe would do well to follow suit.  For in the long run, ideas must do much of the work.

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