In 2025, Netflix’s animated film K-Pop Demon Hunters emerged as a global cultural phenomenon, illustrating the expanding influence of Korean popular culture in transnational media markets. Can that influence be measured?

Jonathan Prosser explores Child Centred Nations, which consider children at the crux of their foreign policy to see positive outcomes for the children of other countries.

China’s World Heritage nomination strategy illustrates its ambition to gain narrative power and use culture to serve the BRI agenda. 

In tribute to Joseph Nye’s legacy of “soft power,” Najmedin Meshkati and Bright (Dokyeong) Lee argue that today’s global crises demand a new paradigm of Engineering Diplomacy—international cooperation on shared technical challenges that transcends power politics, balances technology with human wisdom, and offers a path forward in an era of rising hard-power tensions.

“Public Diplomacy in the News” is a CPD Blog series by Andrew Dubbins, featuring noteworthy recent stories in public diplomacy.

As we became better at navigating space because of access to advanced information and communication technologies, we lost something vital: the art of navigating people, cultures, and the human connections that shape our understanding, ideas, and value

Why trust, not attention, is the true currency of global diplomacy. How listening, credibility, reciprocity, and continuity shape public diplomacy that lasts.

Trade promotion quietly builds durable international cooperation by aligning policy, investment, and capacity as instruments of strategic diplomacy.