September 7

"Laboring through material for the public diplomacy exam tomorrow. I used to think diplomacy was interesting... until I took this class. about 16 hours ago from web"

--dschap, a twitterer; dschap image from her tweet

"reading for public diplomacy class... this book is so booooooring 11:43 AM Aug 16th from web"


--dschap; image from

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

Independent US Bloggers Beat Voice of America and Radio Liberty in Delivering Uncensored News to Russia - Ted Lipien, FreeMediaOnline.org: "Neither the Voice of America nor Radio Liberty, both US government-funded international broadcasters, provided Internet users and radio listeners with a Russian translation of an article about Vladimir Putin which sparked a major controversy over censorship both in Russia and in the US. Conde Nast, the publisher of 'GQ' magazine, reportedly banned the article from being printed in Russia because it is highly critical of Prime Minister Putin and suggests that Russian security services engaged in criminal activities to help him become an authoritarian ruler. ...

While the two radio stations funded by US taxpayers to broadcast news for audiences abroad largely ignored the story, independent bloggers in the US volunteered to translate the article into Russian in a grass-root effort to combat press censorship. A popular New York news site Gawker posted their translations under the Russian title: 'Вы можете прочитать запрещенную статью GQ про Путина здесь' ('Hey, you can read the forbidden GQ article about Putin here'). Image from article

Woo Indian students to Canada through education diplomacy: Expert – IANS, Thaindian News: "Ryan M. Touhey, a professor who has authored a study titled 'A new direction for the Canada-India relationship', says India is a huge education market for Canada and Ottawa should lose no time in wooing Indian students. … Being second only to China in sending the number of students abroad, he said India could be a huge education market for Canada which needs to combine its ‘education diplomacy’ with ‘public diplomacy’ to raise its profile in India."

Public Commission Meets in Tbilisi Amid controversies - Rusudan Shelia, Daily Georgian Times: "Alan Kasayev, RIA Novosti's CIS and Baltic States Department chief, took a flight to Yerevan and then Moscow on Sep 6 to wrap up a controversial and noisy visit to Georgia – the first by a Russian delegation since the August war.

Malkhaz Gulashvili, owner of The Georgian Times and organiser of the visit, thanked the Government for giving unprecedented - albeit bad - publicity to it. Gulashvili seems determined to continue holding dialogue with Russian public figures as he believes that 'public diplomacy can work better than political ping-pong diplomacy' to thaw relations between Russia and Georgia and that such dialogue remains necessary even after the bloody 5-day war last August." Gulashvili image from

Netanyahu 'unfreezes' settlement terminology - Gil Hoffman, Jerusalem Post: "Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu instructed his aides and Likud ministers over the weekend to stop referring to Israel's commitments in a deal with US President Barack Obama as a 'settlement freeze.' Instead of a freeze (hakpa'ah in Hebrew), it will be referred to as a suspension (hash'ayah), a waiting period (hamtana), or even a cutback (tzimtzum) of Jewish construction in the West Bank. … 'The fact that it actually is a suspension and not a freeze has helped,' said Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein, the only Likud minister who lives in a settlement (Alon Shvut)."

Ed’s Pledge: when Ministers go it alone - Simon Dickson, puffbox blog: "One of the few international set-pieces between now and the next general election is the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in mid-December. And the UK's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is trying to drum up support among the population for - er, well, let's not dwell on details. 'A deal' of some kind. … Of course it's obvious why Labour should be trying to maximise the political potential of Copenhagen. And likewise, it sits perfectly within FCO's wider public diplomacy remit." Image from

The Changing Nature of Public Diplomacy – Open Source, The Interagent: "[At link] are my rough and unofficial notes from a July 23, 2009 event at George Washington University that commemorated the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate. Two sessions formed the panel. The first focused on the kitchen debate and public diplomacy efforts in the previous century, while the second panel looked at the changing face of public diplomacy in the world of Web 2.0. The notes below are from the second panel, which is more consequential to the InterAgent as they look at on-line tools today and their applicability to public diplomacy."

SAP Diplomasi - Pilihan Gaya Hidup dan Pikiranmu: "Diplomacy (Semester III)
Session 7 : Public Diplomacy
- Problem, background, context
- Purpose and Motivation
- Learning from Past Success
- Implication and Concluding Observations
Source : Wolf, Charles and Rosen, Brian, 2004, Public Diplomacy : How to Think About and Improve It, RAND Corporation, California, pp. 1-20
Session 8 : Middle Test
Session 9 : Cultural Diplomacy
- Definition, concept and purposes of Cultural Diplomacy
- Cultural Diplomacy : Development States Perspectives
Source: Warsito, Tulus and Kartikasari, Wahyuni, 2007, Diplomasi Kebudayaan : Konsep dan Relevansi Bagi Negara Berkembang, Studi Kasus Indonesia, Ombak, Yogyakarta, pp. 2-29; 57-73"

Kund Florian - A Kund Florian Research Blog: "I was trained as an Arabist (BA, MA) with a specialization in International Relations (BSc). After graduation, I moved on to the field of ICT for Development (ICT4D) and worked as a researcher and consultant in various positions in Geneva, Cairo, and Kuala Lumpur. My inter-disciplinary interest in the potential of ICT in public diplomacy and development brought me back to university. Currently, I am a postgraduate Research Scholar at the National University of Singapore where I am working on my thesis on nation branding in post-conflict societies." Florian image from article.

For Mr. Elwood Blues – John, In Other News. . .: "I don't like czars under any administration, because all they do is help obfuscate that which should be perfectly transparent. If there were czars under Bush, that's just as bad as czars under Obama. … I could remember Hughes and Rove--who could forget? … Hughes, Karen. Served multiple roles in the Bush White House, but in the position described by 'Mr. Blues' above, she was actually in a Senate-confirmed position as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. So even a 'gimme' for the czar list turned out to be a non-starter in this argument."

RELATED ITEMS

Charity: U.S. troops stormed through Afghan hospital - AP, USA Today: A Swedish charity accused American troops Monday of storming through a hospital in central Afghanistan, breaking down doors and tying up staff in a search for militants. The U.S. military said it was investigating.

Assessing Afghanistan's Present and Future – Letters to the Editor, Washington Post: Letters from M. Ashraf Haidari, Political Counselor, Embassy of Afghanistan; and Russ Feingold, U.S. Senator (D-Wis.), Washington.

Obama's Summit Flop - Jackson Diehl, Washington Post: Obama may yet find an opportunity for talks with Chávez or Assad, if not Kim or Khamenei.

But what seems pretty clear is that the most notable foreign policy idea Obama offered during his campaign has fallen flat during his first months in office. It might not have occurred to him that American enemies also don't see much benefit in "direct diplomacy." Image from

An Egyptian for Unesco - Roger Cohen, New York Times: Farouk Hosny, a 71-year-old painter who has served as President Hosni Mubarak’s cultural guru for more than two decades, has got the Arab League, the African Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference behind him in his bid to succeed Koichiro Matsuura, a Japanese diplomat, as Unesco director general when voting begins on Sept. 17. Hosny -- who when questioned in Parliament last year about the presence of Israeli books in the Alexandria Library, replied: “Let’s burn these books. If there are any, I will burn them myself before you” -- stands at the crux of the cultural challenges confronting us. Let’s get him inside the tent rather than stoke the old anti-Western, anti-imperialist flames — reminiscent of what led the United States to abandon Unesco between 1984 and 2002 — by rejecting him.

Iran's Vahidi says he has beaten Israeli propaganda - AFP: Iran's new defence minister, who is wanted by Argentina in connection with the deadly bombing of a Jewish centre, repeated on Sunday that his appointment to the post was a blow to Israeli propaganda.

Walt & El Grupo - Ren's Micro Diplomacy: "Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make the free screen of Walt & El Grupo at USC, but I hope to catch it during the limited Los Angeles release over the September 11 weekend.

The director will be available for Q & A after two showings at the Landmark Regent Theater. The film documents Walt Disney’s group during their 1941 trip to Latin America. The purpose was to research ideas for WWII propaganda films." Image from article

Propaganda – Kandon Anderson: "As I study the Great War, I dwell continuously on the impact of propaganda in the war. It kept men in certain political/military positions far longer then they should have been there and helped prolong a war that was incredibly unpropitious and destructive."

AMERICANA

"[T]he success of 'Inglourious Basterds'

suggests that most Americans, no matter how they feel about waterboarding, gay marriage or health-care reform, pine in their secret hearts for a lost world in which everyone can agree on at least one thing: Nazis are no damn good."

--Terry Teachout, "The War That Never Ends: What World War II movies tell us about America's only cultural consensus," Wall Street Journal; image from