Public Diplomacy

Welcome to “U.S. Elections and the World”, an on-line collaboration of the Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, University of Southern California and the Foreign Policy Association.

In this page, we collect and analyze statements by U.S. Presidential candidates on world opinion, and world opinion on the U.S. elections. We are interested in how the candidates and their policies are viewed by the world’s publics and how the candidates are communicating – or planning to — with the world.

Those following these topics – even casually – know that one of the challenges facing the next U.S. President is to improve foreign public opinion of the United States and the U.S. Administration. This concerns both policies and how they are presented. In the course of the long U.S. election campaign, candidates will have many opportunities to articulate their views of how they would respond both in terms of policy formulation and presentation. Our bloggers on this page will be following these statements by the candidates and how the world responds.

Our bloggers include:

Desa Philadelphia
Desa Philadelphia is a Master of Public Diplomacy student at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and School of International Relations. She has worked as a journalist for more than a decade, in staff positions at The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Time Magazine, and as a contributor to CNN. She has also provided analysis on politics and entertainment for regional and national television and radio programs, on networks that include NPR, PBS and MSNBC. Desa’s study is focused on filmed entertainment as Cultural Diplomacy.

Mark Dillen
Mark Dillen heads Dillen Communications LLC, an international public affairs consultancy based in San Francisco and Croatia. A former Senior Foreign Service Officer with the US State Department, Mark managed political, media and cultural relations for US embassies in Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Sofia and Belgrade, then moved to the private sector. He has degrees from Columbia and Michigan and was a Diplomat-in-Residence at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins. Mark has also worked for USAID as a media and political advisor and twice served as election observer and organizer for OSCE in Eastern Europe.

Melinda Brouwer
Melinda Brouwer holds a Masters degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has worked on Capitol Hill, at the State Department, for Foreign Policy magazine and the American Academy of Diplomacy. She presently works for an internationally focused non-profit research organization in Washington, DC.

Anoush Rima Tatevossian
Anoush Rima Tatevossian is a Master of Public Diplomacy student at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and School of International Relations. She has field experience working with various non-profit organizations in Armenia, and most recently served as the Executive Director of the Armenian Volunteer Corps - an NGO based in Yerevan. Her interests within the realm of Public Diplomacy include nation-branding, and the benefits of new media and ICTs for global civil society.