• Pages

  • About us
  • Articles & publications
  • Contact
  • Reading List

• Authors

  • Alex Evans
  • Charlie Edwards
  • Daniel Korski
  • David Steven
  • Elizabeth Sellwood
  • Jules Evans
  • Mark Weston
  • Richard Gowan

• Topics

  • Africa (25)
  • Asia (52)
  • Asia Pacific (4)
  • Cities (15)
  • Climate Change (105)
  • Communication (79)
  • Conflict and security (114)
  • Cooperation and coherence (57)
  • Development (57)
  • Europe (62)
  • Food prices (50)
  • Global economy (73)
  • Influence (106)
  • Leadership (64)
  • Middle East (90)
  • Networks (54)
  • News (169)
  • Off topic (11)
  • Public diplomacy (41)
  • Religion in politics (18)
  • Resilience (56)
  • Scarcity (79)
  • Technology (28)
  • Terrorism (60)
  • UK politics (75)
  • US politics (118)
• 
  

• Archives

  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007

• Reading List

  • Military analysts named in Times exposé appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast nets, cables, NPR
  • Things younger than John McCain
  • Connecting with Consumers Using Deep Metaphors — HBS Working Knowledge
  • Bird flu pandemic risk just as real and probably growing
  • After the boomers, meet the children dubbed 'baby losers' | World news | The Observer
  • 13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers
  • Kimmage fired: resource tradeoffs and the war on ideas
  • Obama's Consolidation of the Party
  • Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments
  • Who Participates And What People Are Doing Online

• Links

  • Afghanistanica
  • Center on International Cooperation
  • Cooperation Commons
  • Dan Drezner
  • Dani Rodrik
  • Democracy in America
  • ECFR
  • Fistful of Euros
  • Foreign Policy Watch
  • ForeignPolicy.com blog
  • Gideon Rachman
  • Global Guerrillas
  • i on Global Trends
  • Institute for the Future
  • Kevin Drum
  • Many to Many
  • Mapping Strategy
  • Network Weaving
  • New Security Beat
  • Schneier on Security
  • Small Wars Journal
  • The Carpetbagger Report
  • The Interpreter
  • The Politics of Wellbeing
  • The Strategist
  • William Lind
  • Yorkshire Ranter

• Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

One more post on last week’s Transformational Public Diplomacy symposium (see the others here and here), where the most incisive presentation was given by Sir Peter Marshall, the UK’s perm rep to the office of the UN in the 1980s, and now on the staff of the Diplomatic Academy of London. Sir Peter argued that:
Whereas [...]

It’s utter hypocrisy time in the Balkans.  With Serbia’s elections less than a fortnight away, everyone feels obliged to be nice to Belgrade in the hope that this persuades the voters to back the pro-EU liberals rather than the anti-EU nationalists.  But sensing that victory is in their grasp, even the hardliners are having to make [...]

Yesterday, I gave a couple of talks at a Diplomatic Academy of London conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (pdf – and read an earlier post here).
One talk drew heavily on my Wilton Park speech on evaluation (read it here), but I also spoke about technology’s impact on diplomacy. The full text is after the jump [...]

I am at the Diplomatic Academy of London for a conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (programme- pdf).
As the title suggests, the launch pad for the conference is US one - the agenda Condoleezza Rice first set out in a speech at Georgetown University in 2006:
I would define the objective of transformational diplomacy this way: to [...]

David Miliband writes:
My visit this week to Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq was punctuated with people describing their links to Britain. One conversation particularly sticks in the memory.
I was told by someone that they had great affection for British education. “I studied at Eton, Oxford, Nottingham and London universities”. I congratulated him and said [...]

And now for the latest instalment of “how not to do public diplomacy”.  Last time, readers will recall, we observed with interest as Chinese government sources called the Dalai Lama a terrorist and implied that he might be a Nazi.  Later, of course, it transpired that these comments were merely a prelude, a limbering up [...]

The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks.  It has a great piece on how marines  in Iraq turned to a blogger in New Jersey to track the patterns of insurgent attacks - as well as a thoughtful dismissal of  indie documentaries on the war.  [...]

While China is blocking websites in the hope of preventing news of security force brutality from seeping out, Xinhua is busy denouncing the Dalai Lama as a “master terror maker”. In fact,
The Dalai Lama and his clique have never for a day refrained from violence and terror. His childhood teacher, an Austrian, was a Nazi…
You have to be [...]

I am sure Alex and/or David will post something about Miliband’s speech to the FCO leadership conference which happened yesterday. My advice - don’t get too carried away with the speech - it’s good and runs through a familiar set of themes, instead watch the video embedded into the speech.
Two things stand out. Miliband’s plea [...]

Over the past few years, the New Yorker’s George Packer has provided some outstanding reporting from Iraq. (He was also the author of one of the best articles on counter-insurgency we’ve come across, which introduced the State Department’s counter-insurgency boffin David Kilcullen to a bigger stage.) Now, in the current edition of World Affairs, he’s [...]

As Charlie noted here yesterday, lots of people are having a grand old time fulminating about the Gwyn Prins / Robert Salisbury article in the new RUSI Journal on risk, threat and security in the UK.  It’s not hard to see why their piece has aroused such passions:

The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, [...]

The BBC and Globescan have just published another of their epic, 34 country opinion polls, this time looking at perceptions of economic globalisation.  They found that majorities (of an average of 64%) in 27 out of 34 countries agreed that the benefits and burdens of “the economic developments of the last few years” have not [...]

Rowan Williams has just been on The World At One to say that in his view, sharia law will become inevitable in parts of the UK.  The interview is in advance of a speech he’s giving this evening, in which he’ll call for Muslims to be able to choose, in some circumstances (such as divorce [...]

David and I will be working with Demos on a new project over the spring, called The New Public Diplomacy.  Here’s the project outline:
Public diplomacy – diplomacy directed at people rather than other diplomats – is a subject of growing fascination for governments. While some in the foreign policy elite hanker for a time when [...]

For a oil-glutted, stagnant dictatorship, Russian politics has more twists and turns than a bad Jackie Collins novel. When it looked like Putin was going to make himself prime minister and some old crony the president, as of today it looks very likely that his young deputy prime-minister, Dmitri Medvedev, will be handed the heavy burden of the presidency. Attached is an exclusive interview that Medvedev gave to me and a few other hundred journalists last year, and my impressions of the man about to stride onto the world stage.

In another bold demonstration of their innovative approach to public diplomacy,  senior lawyer for the US government has announced - in a British court, no less - that it considers itself to have the right to “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the US.  The Sunday Times has more:
 A senior lawyer [...]

Moises Naim is ruminating in this month’s Foreign Policy that “It’s fair to say that the Chinese government probably had no idea what it was getting into when it applied to host the Olympics in 2000. The world—and China’s place in it—have changed substantially since then, making the challenge for an authoritarian regime hosting the [...]

Just spotted this Avaaz.org video from July, entitled ‘Stop the Clash’ [of civilisations].  It won this year’s Progressive Source award for best awareness-raising video.  The soundtrack’s by DJ Spooky.  It’s very good.

David Miliband can say what he likes about a ‘new diplomacy’, but he’s got a long way to go to catch up with his German and French counterparts, Frank-Walter Stenmeier and Bernard Kouchner: they’ve recorded an R&B track together. 

Via Bruce Schneier’s security blog, this sad tale from the US:
The train is a half hour west of New Haven when the conductor, having finished her original rounds, reappears. She moves down the aisle, looks, stops between our seats, faces the person taking pictures. “Sir, in the interest of national security, we do not allow [...]

keep looking »