The Aftermath of Another Affront
by Chris Lundry (with R. Bennett Furlow) It did not take long for the images of the US Marines urinating on corpses of Taliban fighters to go viral. A moment of lapsed judgment will circulate as long as anyone is interested in seeing it, certainly long after short...
Islamism and Dissent vs. Identity in the Voting Booth
by Jeffry R. Halverson* "If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honor has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity." ...
NATO Q&A Highlights Strategic Comm Challenges
by Scott W. Ruston* In December, COMOPS was invited to participate in a question and answer forum with General Stéphane Abrial, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, hosted by Atlantic-Community.org. Atlantic-Community is a leading European online think tank...
US PD Advisory Commission is no more
by Steven R. Corman In an apparent budget cutting move, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy was cut from the recently passed budget, and has ceased to exist. The move eliminates an organization over 60 years old. The Commission was established under the...
Public Diplomacy: Books, Articles, Websites #59
by Bruce Gregory Asia Foundation, Afghanistan in 2011: A Survey of the Afghan People, November 15, 2011. While nearly half (46%) of Afghans say their country is moving in the right direction, more respondents (35%) than at any time since the Foundation began polling...
Contesting New Media: Indonesia vs. the Muslim World League
By Mark Woodward and Inayah Rohmaniyah* Earlier this month (December 13-15) we were privileged to participate in a “The 2nd International Conference on Islamic Media” sponsored by the Saudi sponsored Muslim World League (MWL, Rabita al-Alam al-Islami) and the...
Ridiculing AQ’s Irrelevance in the Arab Spring
by Steven R. Corman A few weeks ago I did a keynote speech at a public meeting of the U.S. Advisory Commission in Public Diplomacy. Later in the meeting I heard a presentation by Ambassador Richard LeBaron, Coordinator of the State Department's Center for Strategic...
Obama’s Trip to Indonesia, Australia
by Chris Lundry President Obama has now made his second trip in office to the land where he spent four years of his youth, Indonesia, while on a trip to Asia and Australia. Although Obama's time in Indonesia was brief, he was welcomed relatively warmly by most...
New Volume on Countering Violent Extremism
by Steven R. Corman NSI has just released a new edited volume (PDF here) that should be of interest to COMOPS Journal readers. Entitled Countering Violent Extremism: Scientific Methods and Strategies, it contains the latest thinking on the subject, including a...
New Book on Behavioral Conflict
by Steven R. Corman Friend-of-CSC Steve Tatham has co-authored a new book with Major General Andrew Mackay entitled Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and their Motivations Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict. I have not yet seen the book, but it will...
Putting the Islamist “win” in Tunisia in Context
by Jeffry R. Halverson Put him in power and see how wise he is. - Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms I have spent an inordinate amount of time studying Islamist ideologues and their ideas during my relatively short lifetime. I've never read War and Peace, but I have...
Another Bombing in Indonesia, Another Struggle over Framing
by Chris Lundry On Sunday, September 25, a lone suicide bomber detonated a bomb at a Protestant Church in Surakarta (Solo), Central Java, as services were letting out. Along with the bomber, one congregant was killed and several wounded from the shrapnel composed of...
Public Diplomacy: Books, Articles, Websites #58
by Bruce Gregory* Manan Ahmed, Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination, (Just World Publishing, 2011). The author of "Chapati Mystery" blog and a historian of Islam in South Asia (Freie Universitate Berlin) gathers his commentaries on US...
U.S. Domestic Politics and Public Diplomacy in Asia
by Steven R. Corman As Congress is once again behaving badly, I thought I would post a brief note about some interactions I have had while visiting Asia. Comments here show that what many of us regard as "inside baseball" matters a lot to foreign publics, and it has...
Yes, Extremists are Paying Attention
by Chris Lundry Last year, my colleagues Steven Corman, Jeffrey Halverson and I wrote a series of blog posts exploring Islamist reactions to anti-Islam and anti-Muslim events in the US, including the debate over the Park51 Islamic Center and an American pastor's...
Extremists Stoking Religious Violence in Indonesia
by Chris Lundry Violence between Muslims and Christians broke out in the city of Ambon, Maluku Province, Indonesia on Sunday, September 11. Official sources state that an ojek (motorcycle taxi) driver named Darmis Saiman was killed in an accident on September 10. But...
Ten Years Later, Our Narrative Remains Murky to Afghans
by Steven R. Corman Last Friday the always-excellent PBS Newshour ran a story that left me floored. It featured interviews with several ordinary Afghans who were handed pictures of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. Of a dozen or so people asked, only one man (a...
Indonesia Events Show Increasing Extremist Influence
by Chris Lundry The past couple of weeks have been interesting in Indonesia, especially for those concerned with religion and conflict in the world’s most populous Muslim country. Ahmadiyya sentences. On February 6 in Banten, West Java, some 1000 villagers attacked a...
Has al-Qaeda Become a Toxic Brand?
by Steven R. Corman In business marketing, branding means creating demand for a product by creating an image that is appealing to potential consumers. This probably brings to mind successful brands like Coca-Cola, Disney, and Nike. But brands can also become...
Seeing the Syrian Conflict through Narrative
By Jeffry R. Halverson Unlike the protests of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, the campaigns underway against the Assad regime in Syria have a distinctly sectarian character. The Assad regime is dominated by the Alawites, a little-known esoteric Shi‘ite sect....
