Expressing political opinions as a diplomat is against the diplomatic status. In this case, it wasn't about a press conference, but about a leaked document. Why now, why this? Here we have to focus and try to read more with or without key.
Showing posts with label creative diplomacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative diplomacy. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
Dept. of State Taps eDiplomacy to Spread Obama's Message Through Cairo
President Obama called for a new relationship between the United States and Muslims around the world during his speech in Cairo, Egypt on Thursday, June 4, 2009, and the State Department went to high- tech lengths to make sure that the mesage resonated to as many citizens of the Muslim world as possible. The U.S. Department of State utilized text messaging as a global communications tool, initiating an eDiplomacy program where people from around the world could sign up to receive SMS and text messages with highlights from Pres. Obama's speech. The updates were not available to U.S. citizens since the State Department paid for the text messaging and has a policy of only using funds to address foreign audiences. The text message highlights were available in 13 languages and sent out to more than 200 countries. By completing an online registration form on America.gov, available in English, Arabic, Urdu and Persian, enrolled participants were able to receive the speech highlights and invited to send in their comments. The New York Times reported that the State Department has had difficulty reaching those located in remote areas to inform them that the text messages were available and considers this first eDiplomacy text blast a pilot program. Duncan MacInnes, a State Department spokesman, told the NYT, "It won't be perfect. It is an area we will spend a lot of time thinking about." The White House has a full transcript of the speech posted in 15 different languages and released a short video soon after Obama's speech featuring featuring three Muslim Americans who work for the federal government. Photos of Obama giving the speech are posted on flickr.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Facebook Diplomacy
Washington wants to use the Web 2.0 to win hearts and minds. Trouble is, the tyrants got there first.
Barack Obama came to the White House on a wave of Internet support, so it makes sense that he plans to use the same vehicle as a tool of diplomacy. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said as much earlier this month. "There is no doubt in my mind that we've barely scratched the surface as to what we can use to communicate with people around the world," she said at a Feb. 4 meeting in Washington, D.C. "We are, in my view, wasting time, wasting money, wasting opportunities, because we are not prepared to communicate effectively with what is out there in the business world and the private world."
Clinton is right to be enthusiastic about Web 2.0 tools. They offer the promise of promoting democracy in countries that currently give the United States big geopolitical headaches—particularly Iran, China and Russia. But it's not going to be easy. Tehran, Beijing and Moscow already have a presence on the Internet and in recent months have stepped up their campaigns to manipulate public opinion at home.
The kind of outreach that Clinton is emphasizing can have a significant payoff. At the height of the war in Gaza, Israel's Immigrant Absorption Ministry waged a campaign to recruit an "army of bloggers" made up of polyglot Israelis who could counter anti-Israel sentiment on English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and French sites. According to reports in Haaretz, after having registered with the ministry, the volunteers were directed to sites that authorities found "problematic." Volunteers could even sign up for automated alerts urging collective action in reaction to specific articles and polls.
If the U.S. government takes a similar path, it's only logical to assume that the nations it targets will take steps to counter the intervention. American leaders may think that the millions of Russians, Chinese and Iranians who have been heading online in recent years are seeking Western points of view, but their governments are by now well practiced at turning this tendency to their advantage.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said that his administration is not going to censor the Internet, but that may be because it has found something more effective: spinning it. The Kremlin uses a private firm, New Media Stars, founded by Konstantyn Rykov, a 29-year-old Duma deputy. Rykov's new media empire includes online news sites, a site for supporters of Vladimir Putin (zaputina.ru—"For Putin!"), online games and an Internet TV channel with a pro-Kremlin bent. Navigating these mazes of propaganda and trying to plant effective pro-American messages would be difficult even for a Web-savvy State Department.
In China, both national and local authorities have begun to encourage loose networks of ordinary Netizens to promote government ideology by identifying and countering dissenting opinions on the Web. The practice is so widespread that government-supported commentators are referred to as the "50 cent party" (for the tiny payments some of them receive for their work). Hong Kong's Apple Daily puts the membership of the 50 cent party at 280,000. Under particular pressure are popular Internet portals and news Web sites. According to David Bandurski, a media researcher at the University of Hong Kong, the most important of them are also required to hire their own in-house commentators to counter antigovernment comments that citizens append to articles.
Iran's clerics have also climbed the cyber-learning curve. When the Internet began to catch on earlier this decade, religious teachers tried to supervise the online activities of their young students and promote the use of the Internet mainly for religious study. As access became widespread, this method became untenable. More recently, Iranian cyberspace has begun to mirror the complexity of contemporary Iranian politics, with different factions—religious, paramilitary and secular—competing for influence. To keep up, government and religious institutions have employed armies of bloggers to push their points of view. (The most recent chapter in these information wars is a decision by one of the units of the infamous Iranian Revolutionary Guards to launch 10,000 blogs to counter both secular and competing Shia voices.) The result is a cacophony of warring religious factions. John Kelly, an expert in the Iranian blogosphere at Harvard's Berkman Center, has found that in the last year, the proportion of religious sites among the top 5,000 most-linked Iranian blogs has grown from 16 percent to 31 percent.
What does this mean to the future of Diplomacy 2.0? That so many governments manipulate the Internet to their advantage—all the while still practicing old-fashioned tactics like throwing bloggers in jail—suggests that those who hoped to use cyberspace to promote democracy and American ideals on the cheap may be in for a tough fight. If anything, the Internet may make their jobs harder.
See also:
Ha'aretz - The Army of blogging, word for word
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Sundance films shine spotlight on global struggles
Reuters
PARK CITY, Utah - A charismatic U.N. diplomat and a determined international prosecutor were profiled at the Sundance Film Festival this week in films highlighting their struggles for justice and nation building.
"Sergio" tells of U.N. official Sergio Vieira de Mello, who helped create an independent East Timor before he was killed in Iraq. "The Reckoning" follows International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and his team as they fight to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
Both films, which are in the U.S. documentary competition of the independent film festival, also show their protagonists fighting international bureaucracy.
"The best advocates for human rights have to be congenital optimists," said Pamela Yates, who directed "The Reckoning."
"They have to be willing to take the blows and get up the next day to go to work -- (Moreno-Ocampo) is definitely one of those people."
The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002 and Moreno-Ocampo was elected chief prosecutor the following year. The court now has 108 member states.
"I thought, isn't it amazing that we have an International Criminal Court that can try a sitting head of state for genocide," Yates said in an interview. "That's the extreme, but actually in the course of making the film the extreme came to pass."
In July 2008 the court indicted Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accusing his state apparatus of killing at least 35,000 people in the Darfur region and being responsible for the deaths of another 100,000 through hunger and disease.
HARD TO ENFORCE
However, the ICC cannot arrest people even after they are indicted, Yates said. "The ICC has no police force so they have to rely on the member states to effect the arrests."
Sudan is not a member state, and Al-Bashir has said he will not cooperate with the court, which has also targeted rebel leaders in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Yates began filming three years ago and said she aimed to encourage a global debate about international justice while also boosting the court.
Greg Barker, director of "Sergio," said that Vieira de Mello, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was an extraordinary man who recognized the U.N.'s flaws but still believed it represented the best hope for people in distress around the world.
"Something about Sergio and his nuanced approach to seeing the world and dealing with complicated problems in a very sophisticated way just appealed to me," Barker said of the Brazilian, who died in Iraq in a truck bomb attack in 2003 aged 55. Had he lived, he might have been a future U.N. Secretary-General.
"On just pure story level it was too good to pass up, just the drama of the day (he died) plus this guy as the main character -- he's just so compelling, he's like a natural movie star, he jumps off the screen," Barker said.
Barker mixes an account of Vieira de Mello's death with scenes from his career, which included working in countries such as Mozambique, Cyprus, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and the former Yugoslavia.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Lessons from the Armenian-Turkish dialogue
Today's editorial from the Lebanese Daily Star is quite interesting, drawing a parallel between the possible settlement of the conflict between Turkey and Armenia and the situation from Middle East. In foreign affairs, comparisons could be quite risky. You have to take into account the historical, international, geographical, cultural, internal contexts, tremendously different from a case to another.
But, a similarity, at least from the technical point of view, it is not completely out of sight. The complicate framework of dialogue between Turkey and Armenia was made possible, among others, by constant and stubborn efforts of Track II diplomacy. If Track I is referring to the usual work of the diplomats from the embassies, Track II have to deal with the informal side of the diplomacy, in which non-officials engage in dialogue for confidence building and conflict resolution. It could involve, for example, meetings between journalists, joint contests of children, concerts etc. The main idea is to make possible knowing the other - a conflictual one - through what it is human, natural and easy to understand. From this slowly and timely built, trust- oriented basis you arrive little by little to the institutional and political levels. This quiet basis in itself could exert a noticeable pressure for change on the institutions and political leaders.
As for the Middle East, such an approach is welcomed. But it have to be filled creatively with the proper content, tailored on the measure and scale of the conflict. And maybe wait for another generation.
See more:
Nagorno-Karabakh, history of the conflict
Middle East Institute, Washington DC, links on Lebanon and current evolutions in the Middle East
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