While election campaigns in India traditionally focus on domestic issues above all, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) campaign for the 2024 general elections placed a strong emphasis on foreign policy. It emphasized how, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has strengthened its diplomatic role and achieved international economic success.

Japan’s public diplomacy (PD) profile rests almost exclusively on the promotion of its cultural soft power. Today, in the complex geopolitical setting of Asia, in which national rivalries are reviving competing wartime history narratives and territorial disputes, this approach is no longer sufficient to advance Japan’s own national interests and gain favorable opinion abroad. Under the Prime Minister Abe, Japan has begun to transform and upgrade its public diplomacy. However, the country is still facing a number of challenges.

Nationalism appears to be an important part of the growing frictions between China and Japan.

In Japan, the return to power of Shinzo Abe as prime minister, and the historic breakthrough of an extreme right-wing party onto the political scene reinforce the view that there has been a clear shift to the right. Public opinion is today also more realistic about direct security threats to Japan.

In March 2011, after a half-century of relative isolation and autocratic military rule, Myanmar took the world by surprise in announcing an unexpected political transition. Less than two years later the emergence of aggressive Buddhist nationalism grabbed the spotlight. The epidemic of violence against Muslims that began with pogroms in June 2012 in the Arakan region of southwest Myanmar has now spread across a large swath of the country and is a testimony to the seriousness of this phenomenon. In a country with a large Buddhist majority, the presence of Muslims is now considered a threat.