The Public Diplomacy Forum

Our second forum concentrated on Public Diplomacy and this is not new to us. As a CDA student, we’ve been exposed to this topic and I shall first give a description of Public Diplomacy.

According to the Planning Group for Integration of USIA into the Dept. of State:

"Public Diplomacy seeks to promote the national interest of the country through understanding, informing and influencing foreign audiences. It also describes the conduct of foreign policy by engagement with foreign publics.”

During the forum, they invited 3 speakers but unfortunately due to some reasons, only one speaker came. He is a representative from the Department of Tourism. He first talked about the recent Hostage Taking Fiasco that occurred and how this unexpected event affected our Tourism. He said that we should support our country and have a positive approach about it because it is the only way we could gain the trust of the foreigners. It could also attract many investors in our country. In order for our tourism to boom, they promote our country using the internet. It is the easiest way to attract foreigners so that they would know how beautiful our country is. We also had an open forum and there were some who expressed their sentiments and even questioned how did the Department of Tourism deal with the Hostage Taking. Although he said aggression doesn’t really help yet we could still do things that could have our Tourism improve again.