In the current preoccupation with public diplomacy, stimulated by the post-11 September security environment, there is a real danger of confusing its varying manifestations. To a degree, this confusion reflects a misunderstanding of what soft power is – and how it relates to other modes of power. Public diplomacy in its state-based ‘strategic’ guise is a more sophisticated variant of a well-established idea – namely that ‘publics’ matter to governments as tools of national foreign policy. In this sense, public diplomacy is hardly a new paradigm of international politics but a strategy located within a hierarchical image of how those politics are configured and the information flows underpinning them. At the same time, however, governments are reworking their public diplomacy strategies in a changing milieu of world politics, within which access to modes of communication with publics around the world have become of prime importance to all categories of international actor. This is redrawing the environment in which much contemporary diplomacy is now conducted, bringing the diplomat’s traditional skills to the management of complex policy networks. In short, public diplomacy is now part of the fabric of world politics wherein NGOs and other non-state actors seek to project their message in the pursuit of policy goals. Image creation and management is a key resource and one where non-state actors may have an advantage, helping to explain why the more traditional, hierarchical concept of strategic public diplomacy often fails to achieve its goals.