The Empowering Women and Girls through Sports Initiative aims to increase the number of women and girls involved in sports. From June 17- 27, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) will bring ten teenage field hockey players and two female coaches from Pakistan to the United States for an international sports exchange. This program builds on the U.S. global commitment to advance the rights of women and girls around the world.

American Councils for International Education is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) program which is responsible for bringing over 22,000 international high school students to study in the U.S. American Councils is marking the occasion today by co-hosting a reception on Capitol Hill with Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Ann Stock from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

In recent years, diplomatic circles have been relying on the term “engagement” to describe various communication and public diplomacy activities with foreign publics. The term is used almost universally in government, the military, academia, corporations and think tanks to describe a range of practices designed to influence or persuade foreign audiences.

Public diplomacy humanizes the economic, cultural, and political relationships we are working to build. As Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, I work to extend avenues of opportunity to those affected by our policy. And that is the first point I’d like to make: that people – citizens – today are increasingly driving global events, and must therefore be front and center in formulating and executing policy. You need policy and public diplomacy.

US Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Tara Sonenshine will travel to Qatar to attend the annual US-Islamic World Forum, the State Department announced in a statement on Friday.

. Alternatively, the Obama administration could heed the recommendation of a recent Atlantic Council report by "[d]esignating a small number of US and private Iranian financial institutions as channels for payment for humanitarian, educational, and public diplomacy-related transactions carefully licensed by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control."

My thesis today is that public diplomacy is critical in extending civilian-military power. It combines soft and hard power to make the kind of “smart power” that is necessary to succeed. Public diplomacy is inextricably linked to key U.S. foreign policy goals of preventing deadly conflict, managing conflict when it occurs, and building civil societies out of the ashes of conflict