Vangala RamVangala Ram, a veteran Senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer, has joined IWP’s faculty and will teach IWP’s online course on Public Diplomacy (IWPO 637) this spring.
Prof. Ram served in nine consecutive overseas diplomatic postings at Embassies and Consulates in five of the six Regional Bureaus at the U.S. Department of State as a Senior Foreign Service Officer (S/FSO). He spent multiple tours as a Public Diplomacy-coned officer in postings around the world.
He has served tours as Press Attaché in Amman, Jordan and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well as Director of the Amerika Haus in Cologne, Germany. Prof. Ram served as both the Deputy Cultural Attaché and then, on a separate tour later, as the Senior Cultural Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Other assignments include tours as Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) in West Africa and as Senior Civilian Representative (SCR) in Afghanistan.
Having seen the importance of public diplomacy in his professional work, Prof. Ram commented: “Public diplomacy is the lost diplomatic ‘soft power’ tool that needs to be rediscovered and employed in the 21st Century as an essential component of statecraft.”
The Public Diplomacy course examines the history, theories, and methodologies of public diplomacy and strategic influence since the end of World War II. The objective of the course is to help prepare the student to integrate public diplomacy and strategic influence with other tools – traditional diplomacy, foreign aid, intelligence collection and covert operations, and military and economic foreign policy – and to condition the student to approach the issue with confidence.