by Jeffry R. Halverson Apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking about the diplomatic potential of Muslim hip-hop when I posted a blog about it for COMOPS Journal back in September of 2009. Recently we heard from Tyson Amir, one of the Muslim artists that I featured in the blog, and he had some interesting [...]

by Steven R. Corman A new “strategic framework” for U.S. Public Diplomacy has at long last been released. Oddly, it is a slide show rather than a paper, but perhaps that’s because it is to be the basis for a briefing today. My colleague Phil Seib has already expressed disappointment in the new proposal: It is [...]

by Jeff Halverson In the war of ideas for the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world, cultural diplomacy can go a long way. The US government may not be very popular abroad, but our cultural products certainly are. Many Muslims hate our policies, but they still love our movies, listen to our pop music, [...]

by Steven R. Corman A debate has once again re-ignited over the relative meaning of Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, sparked this time by a keynote by Bruce Gregory at GWU on October 5.  It was rejoined by Amb. William Rugh in an email exchange with Bruce, both of whose comments were posted and re-rejoined [...]

by Steven R. Corman Yesterday Walter Pincus at WaPo published an article entitled Clinton’s Goals Detailed that contains the first news I’ve seen about how the Obama administration intends to fix U.S. public diplomacy.  The second paragraph says: In the battle of ideas, she said, the United States would go on the offensive implementing President-elect [...]

by Dawn R. Gilpin Israel’s deployment of social media, including a Twitter news conference over the Gaza situation, has been in the news lately. As an example of media response to these efforts in the U.S., the New York Times cited MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow as having “mocked” and “marveled” at the attempt to use such [...]

by Steven R. Corman With news that the Hillary Clinton pick for Secretary of State is final, I thought it might be useful to summarize what she had to say one year ago in her essay for Foreign Affairs (subscription link).  Of course, these were her priorities as an erstwhile president, and the Secretary of [...]

by Nicholas Brody This is the fourth part of a five part series on about the one-year anniversary of the State Department’s Dipnote blog. In Part 1 we focused on reviewing DipNote management and processes. In Part 2 we looked at what the State Department bloggers were writing about. In Part 3 we conducted an [...]

by ZS Justus A recent audio recording from al-Qaeda #2 Zawahiri sends a series of “messages” to President-elect Barack Obama. News outlets have quickly grabbed one of the more provocative excerpts from the recording, Zawahiri’s labeling of Obama as a “house negro.” Several blogs have followed suit including hotair, gateway pundit, commentary magazine, the moderate [...]

by Bud Goodall The headlines from WatchAmerica show worldwide optimism and support for President-Elect Obama.  Yet, despite this large and welcoming window of public diplomacy opportunity, there are still 10 weeks to go before President Obama is sworn in and can officially represent America.  In the meantime, we have a world waiting to see if [...]