Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian emperor who ruled the country for more than 50 years, has been both a celebrity and a controversial figure. He made more official missions abroad than any other leaders in Ethiopia. Consequently, the country and the person became very well-known throughout the world because of that. This paper argues that though the statesmanship and royalty of the Emperor have been amply written about, there is limited coverage of his official missions conducted during his reign. This paper attempts at filling that gap as it reports the various travels Emperor Haile Selassie made from 1916 to 1974. The paper uses secondary sources, both published and unpublished, largely from the internet to document most of his travels. The paper believes that these missions provided him with tremendous opportunities for soft power or public/personal diplomacy. The study examines the national, regional (symbolic/psychological), and personal gains of his travel diplomacy at the end of the discussion of each period. However, it should be noted that the study is far from exhaustive as not all the records of his missions are available on the Internet. The paper therefore is based only on the available literature on the world wide web. Despite this limitation, the ones available here will pave the way for deeper and comprehensive research.

Keywords: Haile Selassie, Ethiopia, official missions, soft power diplomacy, statesmanship